The Last Final Girl

by Jones, Stephen Graham

  “On three,” Jamie says, and they haul Brittney in, deposit her as best they can.

  “You’re that reporter,” Brittney says, straightening her shirt, seemingly as unconcerned about what just happened as Izzy.

  “No, look,” Izzy says, touching the Billie Jean mask. “He’s next in line, the inheritor. This is the sequel.”

  “You here to slash us?” Brittney says. “We weren’t even kissing or anything, I mean.”

  “Want me to come back in a few?” Jamie says, making to step out, give them their privacy.

  “Show’s over,” Izzy says, standing with his help.

  “Jamie,” Jamie says, introducing himself, switching the mask to his other hand so he can pass them a business card. “I’m with the Telegraph, working the—well, this story.”

  He sweeps the mask around to encompass the police tape. That weekend.

  “Seriously?” Izzy says, looking up at him in complete awe.

  “Well, somebody’s got to—” Jamie starts, but sees he’s on the wrong track, here.

  “What?” Brittney asks, peering over Izzy’s shoulder.

  Close on the business card: “Jamie Curtis, Telegraph,” and the usual email addresses and phone numbers and faxes, all the area codes obscured enough we can’t really guess at a state.

  “Tell me your middle name’s Lee,” she says to him, tucking the card into her bra so that most of the card’s still out in the open.

  “And my brother’s Michael, yeah,” Jamie says, stepping around them to look down at the fall.

  “Your parents were into horror?” Brittney says. “She had other roles, you know?”

  “They were, what? Die-hard True Lies fans?” Brittney asks.

  “Trading Places,” Izzy corrects.

  “I’m just glad they weren’t all into Barbarella,” Jamie says, coming back to them.

  “Or Xena: Warrior Princess,” Izzy smiles.

  “I could have been one of Charlie’s angels, right?” Jamie says.

  “Except they didn’t actually kill,” Izzy says, about the head Jamie’s still holding.

  He holds the mask up in one hand, lifts the camera from his chest with the other.

  “Figured it’d be more dramatic out here,” he says. “But, since I’m here, and you’re—you’re such quotable classmates . . . ”

  “Masters isn’t letting you have access, is he?” Brittney says.

  “We hardly knew her,” Izzy says, leapfrogging ahead.

  “But you grew up with her.”

  “Her, yeah,” Izzy says, about Brittney. “I’m still new girl on the block, in high school years.”

  “So?” Jamie says to Brittney, and Brittney looks to Izzy for help.

  “So nothing,” Izzy says. “Listen, she wouldn’t have—she wouldn’t have got to be a final girl if she weren’t pure, chaste, bookish, all that.”

  “She even had an issue to overcome,” Brittney chimes in, telling us this is a conversation they’ve already been having. “‘My horse killed my dad, I’ll never ride again, but riding’s what I love, especially since I never spread my legs for any of the boys at school.’”

  “Not even for that—her boyfriend, the quarterback?” Jamie says, pen cocked.

  “This matters for your article?” Izzy says, then shrugs. “Listen, if you’re looking to bring her down, we’re not the ones to be—”

  “Just the opposite,” Jamie says, writing.

  Izzy glares at the top of his head.

  Jamie feels the silence, looks up.

  “Heroic terms are the only ones you can use for a victim who survives against the odds,” he says, “especially one who survives what she almost didn’t. What she shouldn’t have.”

  “So you believe her little princess act?” Izzy says.

  “It’s not an act, is it?” Jamie says, flipping his notebook closed. “And it doesn’t matter if I believe it or not. All that matters is what I write, and what my editor won’t delete. Now, what about that other student you were talking about?”

  Izzy moves Crystal’s folder to her other hand, to protect it.

  “None of your concern,” she says.

  Stare-off, stare-off.

  What matters, though, is that Izzy, she’s stood up for Lindsay, then for Crystal. Completely not in keeping with what we know about her.

  She’s more than just combat boots and purple hair, evidently.

  “What were y’all doing out here, anyway?” Jamie says. “I mean, kind of a gruesome spot to kick back.”

  “Memorial service is going on right about now, isn’t it?” Izzy says, and like that

  → we’re there, swooping over the stadium. It’s wreathed in tasteful lights, the stands are packed, and, at the center of it all is Lindsay, sobbing at the microphone. Everybody’s hats are off, over their chests. Roses all over the field, the football players in their jerseys. Mascara smearing everywhere.

  “Our kind don’t do that,” Izzy voices over, “we—

  → “—grieve in our own way, you could say,” she finishes. “Anyway,” Brittney says, looking to Izzy for confirmation, “we’re in the lull, right? In the saddle between the two peaks of violence.”

  “Between installments of this particular franchise,” Izzy explains to Jamie. “Right now the killer’s off—”

  “You mean her dad didn’t die?” Jamie asks, looking off the edge again, dislodging another slip of shale.

  “Or whoever’s going to, you know,” Izzy says, about the mask Jamie’s clutching, “pick up the mantle. They’re out there planning right now, watching their calendar for some meaningful day, doing their cardio, making their hate list, getting their big speech together for the reveal, all that. Right now, we’re golden, couldn’t get hurt if we fell into a bathtub of dirty needles.”

  “Jigsaw . . . ” Brittney says, fist-bumping Izzy.

  Jamie considers this, considers this.

  “You seem to know a lot about this particular genre we’re in,” he says.

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Izzy says, amused by his ignorance. “This isn’t a genre. This is, I don’t know, if it were almost prom, we could have a little romantic comedy between slashers, you know? A break for laughs and love, maybe even a happy ending, with zero irony. As is, this is just an afterschool special. ‘Don’t drink, kids.’”

  “Or litter,” Brittney adds.

  “Else you’ll get accosted by the press,” Izzy throws in, making hot eyes across at Jamie.

  Jamie nods, digesting all this.

  “And she told you it was her dad?” Izzy says, conspiratorial now.

  “Read the article tomorrow,” Jamie says, holding the mask up, trying to get it far enough away for his camera.

  Izzy and Brittney catch each other’s eyes about Jamie, Brittney dancing her eyebrows up like Maybe?, Izzy miming for Brittney to disarrange her shirt again.

  “Here,” Izzy says, taking the mask in frustration, holding it up over the big drop.

  Snap, snap, snap.

  Until her phone rings in her pocket.

  She crabs it out, flips it open, has to flip it open three times to get it to work.

  It’s all cracked up, half-painted with fingernail polish, the screen flickering, barely holding onto any kind of signal.

  “Seriously?” Izzy’s saying into it. “I’m at the memorial.”

  She pirouettes to Jamie and Brittney on memorial.

  Brittney starts fake crying, and Jamie fakes a coughing fit until it becomes real. He almost throws up, ends up with his hands on his knees.

  Izzy hangs up smiling.

  “What?” Brittney says.

  “Got to watch the runt,” Izzy says like it’s nothing new. “You know, can’t have any babysitter murders without some real live babysitting going on, right?”

  “It’s the lull, though,” Jamie says.

  “A girl can hope,” Brittney says.

  “Bad thing is,” Izzy adds, looking across to where the lights of town are f
lickering on, “it’s—she thinks I’m up at the school. Like, five minutes away.”

  “I can give you a ride,” Jamie says.

  Brittney hot-eyes across to Izzy again. Telling her no.

  “Here,” Izzy says, tossing Brittney the phone, then peeling her shirt off—Jamie shielding his eyes but definitely looking—so she’s just standing there in her black bra and jeans, kicking out of her boots.

  “No . . . ” Brittney says, shaking her head but taking the clothes all the same, and then the file as well.

  “Got a faster way?” Izzy says, then looks back to the biggest tree close to them, goes to it and, like she’s getting her steps straight for bowling, she paces once, twice, to a certain point, and lines up along her arm with some landmark across the way.

  “Got a smoke?” she says to Jamie.

  He pats his shirt, remembers: no.

  “It’s just for the drama anyway,” Izzy says, staring out over the cliff’s edge. “Now you two lovebirds don’t do anything I wouldn’t,” she says in goodbye, and corrects it down to a smiley “Anything I wouldn’t want to do anyway,” and then, her legs stiff and pointed like a gymnast, like she’s really had that training, she runs to the edge of the cliff, absolutely vaults off into completely empty space.

  Jamie falls back, terrified, his camera forgotten, but Brittney just shakes her head, tracks Izzy as much as she can without actually having to move.

  “It’s part of your initiation if you live around here,” she says. “If you do it right, there’s a deep part out there.”

  “If you do it right?” Jamie says, just as

  → Izzy slams down into the water, a human cannonball, and instead of tracking her descent like we did with Billie Jean, her splash is match-cut with

  → a long piece of red-hot metal in a dark basement with an evil furnace, somebody working it with a hammer, massaging it into the cruel shape of a longsword.

  That hammer slams into the metal again, sparks splashing off once, twice, and on the third one

  → we’re at the memorial service again. At the stadium with all the mourners, and swooping far enough overhead that we only know for sure that Lindsay’s there. Meaning it could be just about anybody working that forge, making that sword.

  And then all the lights go off at once, so the only glow is from those tasteful vine lights wrapped around the railings.

  Out of the darkness, Lindsay steps forward with a candle, lights a football player’s candle, and his flame goes to two people, then four, and in a few moments the whole crowd is holding a flickering handful of light.

  Back to Lindsay, all that flame soft on her face.

  She licks her lips, tightens her cheeks, her eyes glistening, and smiles as if seeing

  → Izzy finally surfacing, gasping for breath.

  At first it seems she’s in danger, fighting for life, but then she’s just riding this out like a hundred times before, shaking her head from the exhilaration.

  And it’s nighttime, now.

  The first one we’ve seen since the killings that started all this.

  Izzy looks up into it, and we

  → come back down from it in front of Brittney’s house.

  Jamie is dropping her off, his car the kind of beat up that belongs in the parking lot of the Double Deuce.

  “So did you, you know, initiate yourself like that, too?” he asks, leaning across her seat after she’s stood.

  She comes back to window level, giving him a clean shot down her shirt.

  “I had to drink half a bottle to get the nerve,” she says. “When you’re an only kid, you feel all responsible, you know. For your parents’ happiness.”

  “If you—if you hadn’t made it, you mean?”

  “More like their sadness, I guess.”

  “Your friend, though?”

  “She’s got a brother,” Brittney says.

  “Amazing,” Jamie says, probably not about her jump, or Izzy’s brother.

  “Every few years, though, somebody . . . misses,” Brittney shrugs.

  “Why don’t they just shut it down?”

  “They put this iron fence up when I was in fifth grade, but the seniors that year painted handprints on it, for where to push off.”

  “And if they fill in that one place where it’s deep enough . . . ” Jamie says, grimacing just from the thought.

  Brittney looks over to her porch light glowing on, a dour shape there behind the gauzy curtain.

  “Speaking of parents,” she says.

  “And happiness,” Jamie adds.

  “I’ll look for your article,” Brittney says, and pushes the door shut, traipses across her lawn, almost skipping.

  Pulling away, Jamie rights himself in the seat, and we see what he’d been leaning over, covering, getting Brittney to leave behind: Crystal’s file.

  Leaking from it is one of those newspaper photocopies: the only part readable is the byline.

  J. CURTIS.

  An establishing, contemplative shot of the bridge those sixth-grade boys were at, and the angle on it—we know something’s about to happen.

  On cue, a shadow clambers up one side, looks both ways, then stands, crosses, steps off the other side.

  It’s Izzy.

  She lowers herself to float with the current and we swirl downstream with her for about a hundred yards, until the lights of a nice house glow through the trees. The house is about thirty yards up from water, swirly metal sculptures rising all around it.

  Izzy latches onto a branch she seems to know and swings easily onto the bank, then just watches the house.

  “Mom, Dad, I’m home,” she singsongs.

  The yellow windows just stare back at her coldly.

  She shakes her hair, checks to be sure her rings and toe rings and naval ring are all there, looks in her bra to be sure any metal in there’s still in place—“God, I look like Tatum”—then takes two neat steps to a burly oak, reaches her hand into some secret crevice, comes out with another bottle, this one with pirate crossbones drawn on the glass with marker.

  “Cheers,” she says to the house, and drinks deep, screws the cap back on, wipes her mouth on her forearm, and what we can see from all this is how much she’s stalling, here. How much she’s having to steel herself to finally go home.

  It’s time, though.

  She stuffs the bottle back in its hidey hole, looks back to a suspicious splash in the river

  → a turtle we see, somehow, like it matters

  → and then she steps forward, only the music is screeching up hard: a sparkly white hand has her by the bare ankle.

  Izzy steps easily away, kicks free.

  She looks to the house to see if this is a joke of some kind.

  “Ben?” she says to the glove, surely connected to an arm that has

  to be connected to a body, but it’s all so dark.

  No response. No laughter.

  And, so we can know who she’s not talking to:

  → we’re upstairs suddenly, over the shoulder of a twelve-year- old boy standing at the window, looking down at the river, a big distressed-wood letter B on the wall beside him.

  Izzy maybe sees him almost seeing her, too. Or, she’s coming back from having looked up to the house again, anyway.

  “Not Ben,” she says, as if checking off possibilities.

  She straightens her arm to shove her hand into her wet pocket, comes up with her trusty zippo.

  She shakes the water out of it, eases it open, blows on the wheel a few times, her eyes not leaving that white glove anymore.

  She rolls the wheel back once, twice—sparks, sparks—and on the third time it catches.

  Izzy lowers it and her face down, the fingertips of her other hand mushing into the soft earth.

  The glove is connected to an arm, one in a blue sleeve that looks like it’s from a uniform, like it belongs at a lube shop, a gas station.

  Izzy follows it up, follows it up, to . . . Michael Jackson’s pale, latex smil
e.

  “Billie Jean!” Izzy gasps, falling back, splatting into the mud.

  She fumbles the lighter away too, has to slap frantically around for it.

  When she gets it going again—everything caked with mud, now—Billie Jean’s still just staring up at her through his mask’s eyeholes.

  “Shit,” Izzy says.

  Billie Jean blinks once, slowly. As if saying please.

  “Shit shit shit shit shit!” Izzy says, her eyes wet now—the girl who could never cry, she’s about to.

  She looks up to the house again.

  “Can I keep him, Mom?” she says, and, of all the songs in the world that could cue up here, it’s Michael Martin Murphy’s “Wildfire,” way in the background, already up to the happy lines: She ran calling Wi-ildfire, she ran calling Wi-i-i-ildfi-ire . . .

  We’re looking at a utility-room door when it opens.

  It’s Izzy, in tight jeans and black bra, dripping wet, purple-streaked hair plastered to the side of her face.

  Behind her, the rumble of the garage door coming down, the whole house shaking.

  Izzy

  → strides into the kitchen, her eyes flat.

  She beelines the refrigerator, crams a stray glass under the cold water spigot, then, from the other room: “ . . . no, no, I could tell what it was right when I first saw it, of course, I’m just saying . . . ”

  It’s a male voice, evidently out of place in Izzy’s house—we can tell by how Izzy cocks her head over to be sure she’s hearing who she’s hearing.

  “You mean people line up to buy it?” the voice goes on, trailing off into a swallowed chuckle, and that’s our cue to go

  → tight on a beer cap, twisting off in a pair of burly hands.

  Coming up from that, over a breakfast table, it’s the sheriff’s hands.

  He raises the beer to catch the froth but gets stopped halfway:

  In his POV, it’s Izzy, framed in the doorway. Dressed like she’s dressed. Or, mostly undressed. Hair still trailing water.