The Last Final Girl

by Jones, Stephen Graham

  Is that water that’s slightly out of focus in the foreground about to go red?

  On the bank at the back of the frame, a turtle—the same one we saw earlier?—slips soundlessly into the water, and, just when we’re watching that part of the bank, thinking maybe that smart turtle slipped into the creek ahead of whatever’s coming, something shrikes down through the surface of the water fast and hard right in front of us, close enough that it’s just a dark shape, a violent cleaving, but

  → backing off a bit, it’s the thick blade of a long black sword. The water steams away from it like it knows this thing is pure evil, and the creek churns and eddies around it, trying to heal this wound.

  But the injury’s been done.

  “Take it! Take it!” a kid’s voice screams, and we

  → swirl out, up to the bridge where the sixth graders are, and something about our angle, about our limited view—it feels like an unclaimed POV. Like somebody’s watching.

  Down in the water Ben’s slinging his hand around, the oven mitt it’s in smoking, leaf boy and the hesitant kid standing back, out of the way, no longer as committed to this as they probably were moments ago.

  “Shit shit shit!” Ben’s saying, throwing the mitt away, sucking on his fingers.

  The sword’s just standing there in the current, and we can’t look away. Not because it’s pure and deadly and impossible and unlikely, but because . . . do we recognize it?

  It’s pretty much just a long slab of hammered metal with a folded- on-itself rebar hilt. Like something you’d cut out of cardboard, just, this time, the cardboard was metal.

  It’s that sword we glimpsed earlier, the one being forged in a cellar.

  It was Ben making it.

  “Isn’t this kind of like asking for it?” the hesitant kid says, studying the sword.

  “From Billie Jean or from his mom?” leaf boy says, circling the sword appreciatively, collecting the oven mitt from the water.

  “She’s spaced on Xanax half the time she’s in the basement anyway,” Ben says. “Like she’s going to notice one missing piece of metal?”

  “It’s not even sharp,” the hesitant kid says, splashing water up onto the sword.

  The handle hisses steam.

  “That’s what the grinder’s for, dill hole,” Ben says, and reaches over for the handheld grinder, its battery snugged into the handle, blinking green and ready.

  He hits the trigger, spinning that grinding wheel, and it’s so loud

  → and so close

  → that we look ahead, to the end of that awkward sharpening job: Ben’s in a dramatic shower of sparks in the middle of the creek, the other two using the mitt and a t-shirt to hold the blade in place, both edges shiny and dangerous now, Ben just finishing the point with flourish, ramping that grinding wheel up into the air, letting the sound die.

  “More like it,” Ben says, tossing the grinder up onto the bank, commandeering the sword, lightsabering it into the hesitant kid’s neck lightly, in slow motion, doing the sound effects himself, saying just for himself, “Will you come back more powerful than I could possibly imagine?”

  But the blade’s still hot from the grinding.

  The hesitant kid flinches back, goes under the water, comes up with a bloody neck and betrayed eyes.

  “Guess not,” Ben says.

  “Shit,” leaf boy says, looking to Ben.

  “It’s tasted human blood now,” Ben says, holding the sword flat to study it, to be in proper awe of it, and then a tall shadow ripples out across the surface of the water they’re standing in.

  Slowly, they all look up to it.

  “Oh,” Ben says, and we hear a car slurping by

  → and, inside a car, anyway—now, later, we don’t know—Izzy’s driving, Brittney in the passenger seat, which Brittney’s still in awe of.

  “Can’t believe she let you take it,” Brittney’s saying, touching the leather with her palms, luxuriating in it.

  “I’m her real daughter now,” Izzy says, dimming and brightening the headlights like a game, to show us it’s full dark. “Homecoming beauty, part two. The next generation.”

  Both of them have their seat belts on. No cigarettes. Boots on the floor mats.

  “What if it was your mom?” Brittney says, watching the trees glide by. “Billie Jean, I mean.”

  “My mom who we left in the house before walking down to see him, or some secret mom I don’t know about?”

  “I know, I know, but—she’s the surprise queen from yesterday, right? And now this new crop of girls is trying to replace her, make everybody forget her? What could be more perfect?”

  “Sea of Love,” Izzy says, clocking her rearview. “It’s my dad doing it all, since my brother’s, you know.”

  “Too obvious,” Brittney says. “It has to be the secretly-evil last person you’d ever expect, right? Not the obvious evil person.”

  “You?”

  “Am I that obvious?”

  “But maybe the expected’s gone full circle,” Izzy says, staring straight ahead. “Maybe it’s so obvious now that that’s the only thing that can be a surprise.”

  “I think you’re not looking under the mask because you’re scared.”

  Izzy looks over to Brittney about this.

  “That it’s going to be somebody you know,” Brittney fills in, “instead of somebody Lindsay knows.”

  “They found my brother,” Izzy says. “Nice family out waterskiing the next day. Very Sleepaway Camp. Closed casket. Nice way to gloom it up, though.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “You can’t look under the mask,” Izzy goes on. “If you look under the mask, that means the fun’s over. It’s not bullets or fire or telekinesis or lightning or sequels or the economy that kills a slasher, it’s being unmasked. Seen Kiss anywhere lately? Anyway, it’s her show, Lindsay. So it’s her dad.”

  “He’s an orthopedist, right?” Brittney says, pulling her burring phone up. “Don’t they fix knees and stuff?”

  “Physician, heal thyself,” Izzy answers, and, kind of to herself, grinning: “With burritos.”

  “Hey,” Brittney says, reading her phone. “You were right. There’s a party tonight. Bogey’s.”

  “You don’t have to be aware of the formula to fall victim to it,” Izzy shrugs, pulling up in front of the video store, her headlights glaring off the front glass. “Everybody’s a walking cliché.”

  “Except you, with your hair and your piercings and your attitude, that retro Q you got going on.”

  “Ever point that high-powered perception at yourself, Clarice?”

  “Just promise you won’t untie him without calling me first.”

  “So you can watch?”

  “So I can go to church,” Brittney smiles, commandeering the mirror to sloppy-bun her hair up, do her lips. “Maybe invent a revir- gining machine.”

  “Hymenator 2000,” Izzy says, liking it. “‘Guaranteed to make you invulnerable to slashers, endorsed by four out of five final girls.’ Let me know when you get it going?”

  They bump fists stupidly.

  “Sucks that Jake fell through,” Brittney says. “I know—you haven’t gotten any since moving here, right?”

  “Affairs of the heart or affairs of the backseat?”

  “Both. Either. All of the above. Unless you were, you know, serious about you and Crystal McCrazy Chick.”

  “Boys at this school don’t know what they’re missing,” Izzy says.

  Brittney reaches across and they hug, and,

  → close on Izzy’s face, she’s actually satisfied here.

  We go around behind her, though, for Brittney’s face, and it’s completely different. She’s not paying attention to this hug anymore at all.

  “You might not be the only one in a movie,” she says, pushing away, directing Izzy’s eyes through the windshield, and

  → their over-the-leather-dash POV has Jamie deep in the video shelves, trying to find just the right one.
<
br />   “You know he’s the stranger in town,” Izzy says, caution in her tone.

  “The good-looking stranger in town,” Brittney says, slithering her bra out her left sleeve, tossing it up on the dash. “Everybody’s got their Jake, right? Isn’t that some rule of the world?”

  “You’ve got protection anyway, right?”

  Brittney cracks her purse.

  Inset, it’s all condoms.

  Britt, mostly offscreen: “Thirty-one flavors.”

  “Was thinking more along the lines of,” Izzy says, opening the console, digging, digging.

  “Your dad’s pills?” Brittney says, opening her door, the dome light glowing on. “Haven’t you heard? I put the V in Viagra. I’m the non-pharmaceutical solution. I come to the pool, none of the boys get out of the water.”

  All Izzy finds is the rhinestone studded case for the stun gun, though. She holds it, remembering that arc of spark. Mad at herself.

  “Just be careful tonight,” Izzy says, shutting the console. “What time do you get off?”

  “Depends on Johnny Depp in there,” Brittney says.

  “If he’s not really Krug,” Izzy says. “We should really have a cur- few, think? We’re way too horny and stupid to stay alive without supervision.”

  “Speaking of,” Brittney says, checking her face in the visor mirror now, popping her lips like she does, “Going to the big party without me?”

  “Got to dig up a dress for tomorrow night,” Izzy says, hopelessly. “One that goes with these,” her combat boots.

  “I’ve got twenty,” Brittney says. “My dad thinks I’m a princess, and my mom babysits me with her MasterCard.”

  “So we’re really splitting up here,” Izzy says.

  “It’s not that kind of movie,” Brittney says, standing, undoing one more button on her blouse, arranging her chest like a Venus eyetrap. “Remember?”

  And then she’s gone.

  “Said the nubile co-ed,” Izzy tags on, and drops the car into Reverse

  → just to screech to an instant stop when somebody slams their hands down onto her trunk.

  Big in her rearview, it’s Billie Jean.

  “I’m walking here!” he quotes.

  Some football player in a Billie Jean mask, anyway.

  “Everybody wants to live forever,” Izzy says, and taps the gas pedal, chirping the tires, stabbing back at this football player, her bumper touching the knees of his jeans,

  → but, back in her rearview mirrored POV, a truly huge form takes shapes behind this Billie Jean.

  Izzy turns fast in her seat, and her through-the-back-window POV shows it’s not the real Billie Jean yet, but Dante.

  He lifts the football player by the mask until the mask slurps off, taking hair with it, and a fair amount of dignity.

  Outside the car, now, with them and this scene, Dante extends his hand out, uses his Morpheus fingers to invite the rest of the football players into his vicinity.

  They slouch in, groaning.

  “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” Dante says to them all, his tooth- pick red now. “Watching tapes, humping your pillow? Big game tomorrow, right? Might be the last time in your lives you get to save the day. Walk into the dance at eleven like goddamn heroes. You’ve got the rest of your lives to be this stupid, and I trust that you’re going to take full advantage no matter what I say. Right now, though, this school needs something to believe in. You can give that to them tomorrow night.”

  Lowered heads, a mumbled round of yessirs.

  Dante looks from face to face, nods, then cocks his pepper spray up, fills the mask with it.

  “Save it for tomorrow night, gentlemen,” Dante says, “and if I hear of anymore of this bullshit”—throwing the mask into the chest of this former Billie Jean—“then . . . let’s just say Billie Jean won’t be your own personal boogeyman anymore, yeah?”

  The boys shuffle away grumbling, the mask left behind.

  Izzy’s still twisted around to see through the back window so’s startled by the single knock on her window.

  It’s Dante, of course.

  “Thanks,” she says, hating to have to say it.

  “Just doing my job,” Dante says, tipping his stiff hat. “Here for a rental?”

  “No school tomorrow, day of mourning, all that.”

  “Stay up however late then, right?”

  “You’re doing it wrong, you know,” Izzy says, both hands on the wheel, brakes still flared.

  “What?” Dante says. “Keeping you all from killing yourselves?”

  Izzy nods yes, that.

  “You’re not supposed to believe us until it’s too late. You’re for cleanup, not prevention.”

  Dante laughs his bassoon laugh.

  “Don’t tell anybody I told you this, Stratford,” he says. “But you’re all right, you know? You keep it interesting.”

  “Glad to be of service,” Izzy says, only partially in this conversation anymore, her POV tracking Brittney, working her way down a shelf to Jamie, who is still unaware of her.

  Or, waiting like a spider.

  “Well, you better get this wreck home, then,” Dante says, patting the shiny roof, standing away from the side mirror.

  Izzy looks up to him, her eyes hot, and backs up about three feet.

  And stops, like she’s made a decision.

  “So who switched the gasoline in at the pep-rally?” she says through the window.

  Dante just stares at her.

  “You know I can’t speak about pending bullshit,” he says. “Especially bullshit just about anybody in that goddamn school could have done. For any of a thousand piss-ant reasons, not the least of which is plain stupidity.”

  Izzy smiles. Somebody’s finally being honest with her.

  “The gasoline,” she says, in trade, “it wasn’t for Carl.”

  “The janitor?”

  “April was supposed to be the one to die.”

  To show what she means, she traces an X over her own face. Just like the one on April’s locker.

  “She was up on stage, though,” Izzy goes on. “Easy to forget, she’s been Titan for so long. Or maybe she was supposed to be this time, even, but decided not to at the last moment.”

  “And how would you know all this?” Dante says, stepping closer again.

  “Did my homework,” Izzy says, throwing her eyes over the hood, to the bright, blinking video store. “And it’s not over yet either,” she adds, unwrapping a piece of her mother’s nicotine gum now, depositing it into her mouth, squinting from that rancid taste.

  Dante just stares at her.

  “Who?” he finally says.

  “Billie Jean would be my guess,” Izzy says, looking both ways, “or somebody who looks just like him,” and, when the coast is clear, she scribbles something on the inside of the gum wrapper. “You on all night?” she says to Dante.

  “Until this is over or I am,” Dante growls.

  “I’d rather chew a menthol,” Izzy says, tossing the balled-up gum wrapper out so it hits Dante’s left boot.

  Dante just stares at her.

  “Just keeping it interesting,” she says, and backs away

  → leaving us with Dante.

  When she’s gone he steps over to collect the mask, and, while he’s down there, pinches that gum wrapper up from the asphalt as well, is about to lob it ahead of him into the trashcan but stops right at the release point.

  He unballs it instead.

  Close-up, framed by his massive hands, it’s “party @ Bo G’s.”

  Dante smiles up at Izzy’s retreating taillights, balls that gum wrapper back up smaller than it was, leaves it on top of the Billie Jean mask, grinning up from the trashcan.

  Back in the video store after a contemplative beat, it’s all harsh lights and customers pretending not to pay attention to what other customers are browsing .

  Brittney’s straightening the horror and thriller shelves all the way down to Jamie, who she’s surprised is there. He
r rapid blinking tells him so.

  “Shouldn’t you be at the local high school, I mean, barbecue?” she says.

  Jamie flips the DVD he’s got over to study the back.

  It’s Intruder.

  “Too soon?” Brittney says, taking the DVD case, holding it down in front of her cleavage to scan it for him.

  “What do you recommend?” Jamie asks, reaching across to pluck it back. She keeps it away, pulling his hand in dangerously close.

  “Well what would you say you’re looking for?” she asks, dropping Intruder into her apron.

  “Up for anything,” Jamie says, picking his words carefully. “Some comedy, some romance . . . ”

  “Melanie Griffith as a porn star?” Brittney asks, selecting Body Double, fake-reading from the back cover: “Supposed to be a sure ten on the peter meter.”

  “How old are you?” Jamie asks, guiding Body Double back.

  “It was almost Jamie Lee Curtis,” Brittney shrugs, about Body Double.

  “What about zombies,” Jamie says, reaching down for the obvious Zombi, one of three copies.

  “Not really into the undead.”

  “But the way you were talking the other day.”

  “Oh but there’s subgenres of subgenres in horror,” Brittney says, pointing directly behind Jamie, where he just was. “Me, I’m more into the slasherific part of the shelf,” she shrugs like a dare, brushing past him to put Intruder back in its place, which, lo and behold,

  → and close enough to see it but backed-off enough to take it all in, is an actual slasher section of the shelves, from A Cat in the Brain import and Alone in the Dark down to When a Stranger Calls and Wrong Turn, with VHSs of X-Ray and You Better Watch Out slipped in at the end. Back

  → up top—though no surprise, given how Brittney’s directing Jamie that way—is a store tag reading “courtesy Brittney,” with a hand-drawn knife penetrating her name.

  “No Z’s?” Jamie says, still holding onto his Zombi.

  “Rob Zombie got Halloween.”

  “Zebra Massacre? Zorro the, the Bloody Blade? Zoo something?’