It looks down at a tray of surgery gear on a paper mat.
Then a wall of names, blinking like arrivals and departures.
Then away from a nurse, who recognizes whoever this is, is wowing her eyes out, stepping aside.
And looking away from the next nurse as well.
Step, step, until a big arrangement of flowers pushes open the door of one of these rooms, and we know shotguns fit so perfectly in roses, and the music’s low key enough we can hear that distinctive breathing, and there’s the occupant of the room, half his face bandaged, startling over to whoever this is, but
→ reversing, it’s only Lindsay, in her sling, barely able to manage these flowers.
“Are you all right?” she says ever so earnestly, settling the vase onto his food tray, and we go
→ close on the note strung around the neck of that classy vase: Jacob. With a heart and a smiley face.
“What are you doing here?” Jake asks, and the handwriting on that note we’re still close on blurs
→ shivers back as “Reason for Absence.”
As we watch, a feathered-up pen slashes through that blank, fills in stupid fucking people, and we flip around, to see who this is.
Izzy and Brittney, of course. Izzy with the pen.
The front counter of the main office of Danforth High.
Izzy jams the pen down for a period, the pink boa feather taped to it shuddering.
“Well,” Marty the secretary says, collecting the pen, flipping it slowly to study the impacted ball. Dabbing it on the pad of her finger to be sure.
“Want me to just go on in?” Izzy says, holding her hand open to Principal Masters’ office, the knob naked now. “Looks like he’s . . .how do you say it? Unoccupied, yeah.”
“It’s fifth period,” Marty says back primly, no eye contact, and Brittney pulls Izzy away again, this time to
→ the girls’ locker room. Of course.
All kinds of girls walking around in towels, never quite showing anything but all those near misses seemingly just bad luck, not choreography.
Izzy’s sitting there watching them through the steam, Brittney rummaging in a locker beside her.
“They’re all asking for it,” Izzy says, about the naked girls moving through the steam.
“You’re in here too,” Brittney says back.
“Misfit never dies until late,” Izzy recites, undoing the top strap of her knee brace. “Then they get to go out doing something heroic. Recuperate themselves right at the end. Makes you re-evaluate all those burners in the halls on Monday.”
“You want to be an Air Force Ranger, don’t you?”
“He won’t even remember,” Izzy says, looking up to Brittney. “About tomorrow night, I mean.”
“Got to admit, though,” Brittney says, peeling out of her shirt but we’re at face-level with Izzy, slouching on the bench, “it’s a great origin story. Think he’ll come back as . . . what? Butch- er Boy? Pig Face? Just, instead of camp counselors, he’s out for coaches. Each practice there’s another mysterious, sports-themed accident . . . ”
“And nobody recognizes him . . . ” Izzy fills in, playing along. “You can ask somebody else, you know?” Brittney says, coming down to Izzy’s level on the bench to tie her shoes but her bare back’s to us.
“I’m not even going to go,” Izzy says. “It was stupid. A little girl’s princess dream.”
“What about Crystal?”
Izzy looks over to Brittney. “What do you mean?”
“What if this is her secret dream, but under that tough girl exterior she’d never in a million years have the balls to glam up in front of a cheering crowd of public nacho eaters?”
“Never?”
“I mean, not without some other reject to stand up there with her. Hold her hand.”
“You suck.”
“That’s what they say.”
“Dante’s got her for something anyway.”
Brittney slithers into her gym tank top, stands again to pull it down.
“Nacho eaters?” Izzy says at last, finally getting the brace off.
“Public nacho eaters,” Brittney corrects. “I mean, we all do it in private, right?”
“I’ve got to get some new friends,” Izzy says, smiling with half her mouth.
“Hitting English today?” Brittney asks, ready to slope out to the floor, the gym, the track, whatever torture’s cued up for them. “We’re getting papers back, right?”
Izzy winces, shuts her eyes.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Ben and the leaf boy are playing some hooky. Strolling downhill behind the homestead, each of them trailing one of Jamie’s cigarettes, leaf boy watery-eyed and coughing from his.
They’re taking those long cartoon steps you do when on this steep a place.
Long and careless steps.
We go ahead of them, to where Billie Jean should be.
Nothing?
“I know she keeps one here somewhere,” Ben says. We can just see his face past his hand, his arm stabbed deep into the tree.
This is the vodka’s POV.
Ben brushes it, tips it . . .
→ pulls it up into the open air like a sacred golden statue.
Meaning this is that moment before that boulder starts rolling.
Ben sloshes the nothing in there, twists the top off, turns the bottle up all the same, just on principle.
“You hear something?” leaf boy’s asking, half-behind Ben, while half-behind him, there’s all this open space, each leaf crisp, because that’s where we’re already focusing.
And—is that background kind of shuffling? Are those leaves waking up?
“You should see it when her friend Britt comes over,” Ben says, turning the bottle upside down to show how it’s even more empty now.
“What do you mean?” leaf boy says, unaccountably nervous.
“She’s the one who works at the video store,” Ben says, stepping across exactly where Billie Jean should be—
Yes?
—and squatting down to the creek, tilting the bottle in, letting the water gurgle in.
Behind him, nothing in a mask rises.
But we’re waiting.
“Ms. Glynnis going to notice we’re not there, you think?” leaf boy says.
Ben stands, caps the bottle, steps across those leaves again to get back to the tree.
“I’ll say my sister knew some of those dead kids,” Ben shrugs, cramming the bottle back in its place. “And, if you know me, then you kind of know her too, right? And then you know them as well, are in mourning.” He shrugs, looking around, taking his cigarette from behind his ear. “We’re at the cemetery or somewhere right now,” he shrugs. “Don’t worry. We’re gone, man, evaporated.”
As illustration, he poofs the ash up from his cigarette, which
→ we stay with, still listening to them, down below somewhere.
“Speaking of,” leaf boy says. “Who ate all your burritos?”
While we’re smiling from that, our defenses down, that poof of ash blurs into
→ a chalkboard, somebody erasing up there.
Reversing onto the classroom, it’s just high school kids grimacing about graded papers, but of course we single out Brittney at her desk, texting.
The books on the desk tell us this is English.
The empty desk in front of Brittney tells us that Izzy’s
→ in the hall with the English teacher, who looks like he should be at a bar, or on WKRP in Cincinnati, the unreformed stoner.
“But Mr. Pleasance,” Izzy’s saying, one shoulder cocked up on the wall, her eyes darting from locker to locker to janitor, the paper she just got back clenched by her thigh.
“It’s not the quality of the writing or the level of thought involved, Izzy, it’s, it’s—”
“How can it be poor taste if I turned it in before they traipsed off into the woods with targets on their backs?”
“I’m just saying. You need something for
your college portfolio. And so far all you’ve got are meditations on different aspects of horror movies. Kill ratios don’t get you into the Ivy League, you know that, right? And breast count, that’s been done. Though your hypothesis about how older-model ignition circuits must have been baked into the side windows of certain cars, that’s inventive, no doubt, but you want to lead with your best foot.”
They both look down to her ragged combat boots.
“Let me put it another way,” Mr. Pleasance says, crossing his arms because he’s shifting up to ‘serious’ and ‘helpful’ now. “Do you want to get out of here?”
“You can’t imagine.”
“Then make Jane Austen your friend.”
“Frankenstein?”
“Dickens.”
“God. Prick me, do I not bleed?”
“Good, good, more like that.”
“I saw it in a Ron Jeremy movie,” Izzy says, still watching that janitor, who seems to be mopping just the same place over and over. Listening in? “Something about virgins, I think.”
From inside the classroom, then, a scream like somebody just woke from a nightmare.
“Speaking of,” Izzy says, pulling the door open,
→ Brittney practically hovering in her plastic seat.
“Brittney?” Mr. Pleasance says, adopting his casual stance against the desk.
“Sorry, sorry,” she says, stuffing her phone under her thigh, the rest of her still perky and misdirecting. “I just, I never got a B before!”
“You earned a C,” Mr. Pleasance says, his tone all about defeat. “Again.”
“I bet she’d go a D . . . ” a wannabe Jake says from the back of the classroom. “Couple of them.”
“Mr. Davis,” Mr. Pleasance says, disappointed, and angles his head at the door.
Davis stands, collects his books, says, “It was worth it,” then, in passing, to Brittney: “Tomorrow night?”
“That would be homecoming,” Brittney says.
“She’s spoken for,” Izzy says, daring Davis to call her on this.
“I see,” he says, waggling his eyebrows about Izzy and Brittney.
“You wish,” Izzy says.
“People,” Mr. Pleasance says.
“More like we all know,” Davis says back, shooting them both with imaginary sex pistols.
“And that matters how?” Brittney throws in.
“People, people,” Mr. Pleasance is still saying.
It finally works.
The door closes behind Davis and Izzy slides into her desk, slouched back far enough to whisper to Brittney, “You screamed?”
“My knight in torn pantyhose,” Brittney says.
“Don’t forget the metal armor,” Izzy smiles back, waggling her studded tongue.
“Ladies,” Mr. Pleasance is saying now, breathing deep for the king of all massive sighs.
“Right you are,” Izzy says, fingershooting him now.
“Cell, cell,” Brittney hisses, her eyes hot from all the attention.
Izzy slides lower in her seat, works her phone up from her boot. Has to shake it to get it to flicker on.
“Stupid horror movie phones,” she says to herself, and we see Britt’s message pop on its shattered screen, but instead of reading it with Izzy, we swing around for her response.
This class has just gone from the usual bull session to deadly serious.
Izzy looks back to Brittney to be sure.
Brittney bites her lip, nods once, as if fearful of Izzy’s response.
“Izzy?” Mr. Pleasance asks, his sigh infecting his eyes, now. His face.
“I, um, is Jane Austen in the library?” Izzy says politely, standing with her bag and waiting expectantly.
Mr. Pleasance stares at her. And stares at her.
“And, you have a sudden interest in the literature of manners as well, Brittney?” he says.
“Which way is the library?” Brittney says back, wheeling her eyes all around the school, and
→ we’re there, Van Santing smoothly and silently up the deserted halls, as if moving towards some big thing, some event:
It’s Izzy and Brittney, in the girl’s bathroom again, passing a cigarette back and forth at high velocity, their eyes furtive, fingers nervous.
It’s still high-stakes land, yeah.
“I should have told him my dad used to know the sheriff,” Brittney says, exhaling in the general direction of stall two, even though the window’s not open there.
“Dante would have thought you did it then,” Izzy says, gripping each side of the sink, staring into the mirror. “Cops love to trip you up like that.”
“Crystal was right there when they found him, though. Like, poking him with a stick or something.”
“Which is exactly what you do when you’re guilty of murder. That bridge is between her house and here. She just saw him, probably thought he was a blow-up doll or something.”
“A really blown-up doll,” Brittney says, trying not to smile, trying not to release all this tension.
We already know what they’re talking all around, though: Crystal Blake’s up for the sheriff’s death. And Izzy’s feeling the weight of that, the guilt of that.
“Ladies love a man in uniform,” she says, angling over to the stall, knocking them lightly open one by one. “I don’t think her file’s going to help her either,” she says.
“Oh, the file—” Brittney says, trying to look back in time. Not seeing anything, evidently.
“Another mark against her, then,” Izzy says, as if this is really no surprise. “They’ll say she took it because it was too incriminating. Meaning they’ll have to go off whatever Mrs. Graves can remember from it. And that’s going to be worse than what’s really there. Shit.”
She slams the last door shut.
It bounces back slowly, the hinges creaking.
“But what if she did do it?” Brittney asks, waving the smoke away from her face.
“She didn’t.”
“She could have. Not like she doesn’t have an issue or two to work through.”
“It wasn’t her.”
“He just fell in by himself?”
“He was drinking when he came by our place,” Izzy says, stepping into stall two to cock the window open.
“Why do you care?” Brittney says, their cigarette very Parisian and casual in her hand suddenly, like a pose she’s practicing, leaning up against the sink, her cowboy boots crossed.
“Because it could be me down there, going through that legal meat grinder.”
“If you’re innocent, then why not, right? More exciting than this place. She’s probably milking it, I mean. Crossing her legs like a superstar.”
Izzy doesn’t answer this. She’s reading the graffiti Crystal left:
Inset, Crystal’s slashers that aren’t? has been answered in pencil:
Glenn Close
T-1000
Alien
“Hunh,” Izzy says, touching the penciled names, as if for communion. “You do this?”
“I never use that one,” Brittney says. “That’s a step, not a toilet. Why?”
“Somebody got it right,” Izzy says. “There’s another horror fan roaming these halls . . . ”
→ and again, we’re swooping and diving slowly along the lockers, finally crashing towards the front doors, so that
→ “Jailbreak,” feels right, when Izzy says it.
“What?” Brittney says, doing her lips in the mirror now, fumbling her lipstick to the floor.
“We need to bust her out. Crystal.”
“Oh, that,” Lindsay says, picking up her now-grody lipstick. “You Thin Lizzy, or me? And does ‘thin’ mean that athletic kind of slender, or’s it more like ‘oh this meth is good do you have some more’ kind of skinny?”
“It’s the internet age,” Izzy says, pushing decisively away from the sink.
Brittney runs her lipstick under the tap but finally just gives up, drops it in the sink, all that red swirling th
e drain, which we get but are tired of already.
“Don’t wait for me!” Brittney calls after Izzy, then stops to pop her lips in the mirror before stepping away, to
→Izzy’s upper-level locker.
“Seriously?” Izzy says, stepping aside so Brittney can see the dated school photo of her taped to the locker, framed in a magnetic princess tiara.
No, a homecoming crown.
“One day left to vote . . . ” Brittney sing-songs.
Izzy shakes her head, swings the locker open and it’s a pack rat nest, that nasty knee brace threatening to spill out onto them. Izzy closes her eyes to shove her hand in, dig, dig—“Remember when we were doing this?” she says, baring her teeth with strain—and finally gives birth to the microphone part of an old CB, just . . . without the spirally cord?
Except that doesn’t go with the look of success on Izzy’s face.
She raises it ominously to her mouth, says, “And then there were none” through it. It’s a voice changer, a good one, makes her male and creepy, not herself at all.
“You still have yours?” Brittney says, excited that these are still in the world.
“She didn’t do it, Deputy,” Izzy adds, disregarding Brittney. “I did. And this is just the beginning . . . ”
“Dante’ll never buy it.”
“Crystal’s dad’s a lawyer, right?” Izzy says, then holds the voice- changer up: “Submitted for your approval. Reasonable doubt 101.”
“You seriously suck with metaphors, girl.”
Izzy shuts her locker and
→ they’re already standing at the payphone in the courtyard, Brittney holding the frayed metal cord out as if trying to understand how this fits with their plans.
It doesn’t.
“Oh, oh yeah,” Brittney says, eeking her mouth out in pre- apology, holding the frayed cord up as evidence. “Jake was talking on the talking part in Calculus the other day. He was trying to see if Mr. Grant would take it up, put it in the contraband drawer. I was wondering where he got it, like, the antique store, right? I forget about this, though. Weird.”
The Last Final Girl Page 8
