Izzy looks down to her.
“You of anybody should know they always come back up,” Crystal says, about Billie Jean.
“That’s just in the movies,” Izzy says, and pulls the mask off Jamie’s head, uncatches his leg from the bench, sending him tumbling down the stands, spilling through the rails, splashing into the mud at Crystal’s feet.
Slowly and intentionally, and with relish, Crystal inserts her heel into Jamie’s eye anyway, and pushes in, her POV enjoying every inch of that gory close-up, finishing her story out at last, cutting us ahead to
→ the parking lot of the high school, thick with sirens again, Dante sitting in the back of an ambulance getting the bandage- headband treatment;
→ Crystal the absolute darling of every camera out there, the homecoming baton casual in her hand like it doesn’t even matter;
→ Lindsay out on the field, mostly alone, walking Wildfire back and forth, trying to calm him.
Behind her, sitting on the trunk of the Cadillac, Izzy is staring into the glow of her phone, at
→ a photo of Brittney. But then the phone rings in her hand. The display reads “Dad.”
Izzy pulls the phone to her ear, says, “Dad?”
Beat, beat.
“I saw the, the news,” he says. “Yeah,” Izzy says, “it was—”
“Just wanted to see if you were all right,” he says, and Izzy has to pull her wet eyes away, out to Lindsay, with Wildfire,
→ but it’s evidently too dark for her to see the Titan sword lying in the wet grass, a little evidence flag numbering it off.
Or: why be trying to look at it, right?
It’s a nice final image, anyway, and Izzy’s story feels done now, except, even closer on that sword, on the handle, a crusty hand is picking it up.
It takes us out on the field with Lindsay. She’s leading Wildfire by the bridle, whispering to him, her face tear-streaked one more time, but she’s not out in the parking lot soaking up the attention, either.
Her story’s winding down, too.
To prove it, the next time she looks up, the real Billie Jean is standing there in the light rain just ahead of her, the bright sword angling down from his hand, his white leg brace practically glowing in the dark.
Wildfire’s nostrils flare and he screams, rising up onto his back legs.
Lindsay falls away,
→ Izzy looking up to this commotion, then to the track, the stands, for anybody.
They’re alone out here.
She stands to see better,
→ but can’t hear Lindsay saying “No, no,” falling backwards into the muddy field.
Billie Jean walks steadily towards her out of the drizzle, is almost there when Wildfire skitters away, Lindsay still holding his bridle.
It swings her around, and for a second we’re sure she’s going under those stomping hooves, but then—this isn’t her first rodeo.
She slithers up onto the back somehow, her dress hiked way up so she can sit right.
“You’re dead!” she screams down at Billie Jean.
That doesn’t stop him walking towards her.
“No,” Izzy says, stepping down off the Cadillac, walking through the muck the track is now, so she’s standing in front of the stands, near where Jamie fell through.
In her POV, Billie Jean’s . . . reaching for Wildfire’s bridle?
“Brooks Baker,” Izzy says, impressed.
Wildfire tears away just like he must have before, though, rises on his haunches, slashing the air, one of those massive hooves con- necting, dropping Billie Jean to the ground like a bowling ball.
Wildfire prances away, Lindsay working his reins, her eyes hot on Billie Jean, who, who’s
→ the close up of his right hand, it still has the hilt of that sword, and the sword’s upright.
He slams the butt of the sword into the ground in anger, splashing, and what we think at first is that he’s planting it there, that this is going to be the pike that drives up into Wildfire’s chest, but
→ then he’s standing again. Breathing hard.
“Nooooo!” Lindsay screams down at him, and charges Wildfire into him, over him, and then comes back across him again, bouncing as hard as she can on the saddle to push Wildfire’s hooves even deeper,
→ Dante standing from the ambulance in the parking lot, narrowing his eyes at the back of the stands. At the field.
“Cop radar?” the woman paramedic says, maybe tending him overmuch, here.
“Shhh,” he says, angling his head over to listen
“Stay down, stay down,” Izzy’s saying, too terrified to step out onto the playing field.
But Billie Jean, who it would seem has to be dead here, he isn’t.
He stands again, slashing the air with his sword.
One of those cuts nicks Wildfire again, and Wildfire screams, rears back, almost spilling Lindsay.
She loses the reins, clamps onto the saddle horn, and Wildfire’s in a panic now, remembers this sword, these cuts.
He wheels around, slams his hooves into the mud and’s already streaking off to the left, Lindsay bouncing, just trying to hold on, the stirrups flapping.
Billie Jean lumbers off that same direction.
The night swallows them.
Dante rounds the corner, his pistol already out, his head bandaged, eyes intense.
Izzy’s just standing there, nearly hyperventilating.
Dante takes her by the shoulders, shakes her.
“What the hell happened?” he bellows down to her.
Izzy pushes away, falls to her knees, turns to the side to throw up.
Dante spins away, giving her space, and Izzy makes use of it: in the mud and vomit, her hand’s finding something.
A cell phone?
She palms it, climbs the fence back up.
“Her dad?” Dante says, walking in a circle practically but trying to contain his anger here. Trying not to yell at Izzy, anyway.
Izzy nods once, yes.
Dante spins away, holding the handle of his revolver to his bandaged forehead.
Izzy’s just staring out at the field, now.
“Where—did you see where they were going?” Dante says then. “Which direction?”
Izzy swallows, looks in all the directions available to her.
“Does she have her phone with her?” Dante says then, looking down to the one in Izzy’s hand.
Izzy looks down to it as well, breathes, looks back up to Dante and pulls her own out, its display so obviously cracked, the screen flickering like always.
“Mine—mine broke,” she says, then holds up the other phone: “I was, she was letting me use hers to call my dad.”
Not the answer Dante was looking for.
The rest of his troops round the corner then, and more besides. State police, it looks like. Firemen. Paramedics. The pitchfork and torch crowd, finally assembled.
“Where is she?” a woman yells, and she looks so much like Lindsay that she has to be her mom.
Somebody tries to calm her.
“Stratford?” Dante says to Izzy, his voice all the way in control now.
Izzy breathes, looking around to everybody, to the phone in her hand, and then she nods to herself, some decision made.
“You know how these kind of movies work,” she says to Dante. “They always go back to the scene of the crime, to end where they started. Mr. Pleasance, he, he says it’s structural, that it creates a circle, that—”
“Where,” Dante says.
“The river,” Izzy says, looking to her right, where it must be. “The cliff.”
Dante studies her, considering this, then turns, says it loud enough for all of Rivershead to hear: “Lookout Point, they’re going out to the point!”
Feet splash, motors start, a helicopter thumps alive and Izzy’s just standing there alone, her breath still hitching.
Dante comes back to her, says, “You say you were calling your dad?”
“He’ll
be here in two minutes,” Izzy recites, holding the phone up as some kind of proof.
“Straight home, now,” Dante says to her, and Izzy nods that she knows, she knows, then Dante turns, is gone.
Izzy just stands there in the rain, hugging herself.
Finally she looks left, where Lindsay and Billie Jean really went, and it’s all about her eyes. What she thinks. What she knows.
A half-breath later that showboat of a Cadillac is pulling up to a large dark house, a monstrous dark barn, the one we know from Lindsay’s famous ride. The Cadillac’s headlights are harsh yellow, then clicking off.
Sitting behind the wheel, the top down above her, is Izzy, soaking wet.
She steps up over the side and her combat boots splash down into the mud.
She pushes the side door of the barn open, lights her Zippo.
Standing there in the open space between the stalls is Wildfire, slathered in sweat, Lindsay exhausted on his back, looking up at Izzy through wet bangs.
“He here yet?” Izzy says.
“How’d you know?” Lindsay says back.
“‘A good horse will always go back to the barn at the end of the day,’” Izzy quotes, looking past her flame at this cavernous barn.
Instead of just being a ground-level under a hay loft, it’s got two levels above that, maybe, and some kind of chute-and-bucket shaft big enough for a car, going right up to the roof, a block and tackle system to feed it, ropes on pulleys trailing all down through it in the most complicated fashion.
There’s hay and tack everywhere, horse eyes glittering from the double row of stalls.
“This a barn or a mall?” Izzy says.
“Careful with that,” Lindsay says, about Izzy’s Zippo, and Izzy cuts her eyes at Lindsay.
“What are you saying?” she asks.
“Just that this is a barn full of hay and animals. Nothing about janitors, okay?”
“That wasn’t me.”
Lindsay shrugs, not pushing it. Not needing to push it.
Izzy follows her light to
→ a bank of light switches. She hits a few at random, lights the place up unevenly, pockets her lighter.
“So this is it, then?” she says, panning around. “The big final stand.”
“To be honest,” Lindsay says, sliding off Wildfire’s back. “I thought it would be at the dance.”
“Where everybody could see?”
Lindsay doesn’t dignify this.
“Aren’t you supposed to shoot them when they’re like that?” Izzy says, about Wildfire.
“Do you know horses or do you watch westerns?”
“You saying there’s a difference?”
“I love him. He saved my life.”
Izzy doesn’t pursue this.
“He’ll just be expecting you,” she says. “Not me. That’s our advantage.”
“You think he actually . . . ‘expects’ anymore?”
“You’re the one with the connections,” Izzy says. “What do you call him, Billie Jean or Daddy?”
“Fuck you.”
“Eww, profanity. I wouldn’t even be involved if you hadn’t roped me in, you know?”
“And I wouldn’t have even asked you to participate if your mother hadn’t politely suggested it,” Lindsay says back.
Izzy shakes her head. Turns her POV away, her hand pulling on one of the ropes in the silo of a chute. It’s on some counterweight, its large hook coming up a foot or two.
“Blair Witch,” she says, disgusted.
“What?”
“We’re fighting with each other instead of, you know. Teaming up. Fighting him. That’s how the horror always wins, yeah? Divide and conquer.”
“I know. I’ve read your cute little papers, remember?”
Izzy just stares at her. “I’m here to help you, you know,” she says.
“You’re here for revenge.”
“The Billie Jean who killed Brittney’s already dead. I’m done, wash my hands and walk away.”
“Can’t let go, though, can you?” Lindsay says, smiling conspiratorially. “Want to see him in real life just one more time, right?”
“I told Dante and them to go back out to where it started.”
“The Point.”
Izzy nods.
“Good,” Lindsay says, working her phone up from her bra, be- cause homecoming dresses don’t have pockets.
“Not for you, but because it has to be you,” Izzy says. “If they pop him, he’ll just keep coming back. You know this as well as I do. Don’t lie.”
Lindsay, unsaddling Wildfire, shrugs.
“I had mono in sixth grade,” she says. “My brother brought me all his old movies. It was fun for a month, but, you know, I got better.”
“I don’t think so. You got infected.”
“They’re not movies,” Lindsay says, more serious now, “they’re survival guides. Do this, you live. Do that, you don’t. How do you think I made it through last time? Luck? Pilates?”
“You stayed a virgin all this time just so you could be a final girl?”
Lindsay smiles, says, “Well, the movies didn’t get every little part of the formula right.”
“You’re not even real, then. Not even a real final girl.”
Lindsay turns on Izzy now. “There are no real final girls. Get that through your dyed hair if you can. That day is long over.”
“That’s what everybody still wants, though. All Golden Age, right?”
“So that’s what you give them. Just never let them behind the curtain.”
“Like I am now.”
“And your word’s so believable in this town. Sluts always want to bring the good girls down to their level.”
“And so what if I am?”
“You’ve got a whole section of the video store to spread out in,” Lindsay shrugs, hanging Wildfire’s bridle on a brass hook. “Or sometimes it’s a room, like. With a curtain for a door, right?”
“If I were going to do porn, I would be a star,” Izzy says. “You got that right at least.”
“‘If,” Lindsay says. “Good, pretend.”
“I can’t believe I used to want to be like you.”
“You and the rest.”
“I hope he kills you.”
“Don’t you worry about that. I’ve got something ready for him.”
Izzy looks around, looks around, her POV cataloging the pitchforks, the pint-sized tractor, the display of hay hooks on one post.
“You thought it was going to be at the dance, though,” she says.
“Final girls are like girl scouts,” Lindsay says, pulling a long, thin cable down from a shelf. “We’re always prepared. Now, help or go home, okay? It’s do or die time, here. And you might just learn something.”
When Izzy doesn’t leave, Lindsay tosses a loop of cable across to her, leads her
→ to the row of stables.
They’re immaculate, are maple or mahogany or something sweet and hardwood, kept at a deep luster, six to a side, just one stall empty.
The horses stamp and blow.
“We’re not going to use the big obvious hook over there?” Izzy asks. “The tractor? All those blade things?”
“This your show or mine?” Lindsay says back, threading the hooped end of her side of the cable through a flange on the first stable’s latch.
Izzy watches, doesn’t get it.
“Just do the same over there,” Lindsay says, “you’ll see.”
Izzy shakes her head but does it, until they meet at the other end.
“This is the genius part, now,” Lindsay says, and crosses to some kind of rich-person farrier booth, almost like a shoe-shine station, just for horses.
Lindsay reaches into a bucket, comes out with a funny looking, flat-headed nail. Then another.
She tosses one to Izzy, takes her own to the hooped end of the cable and threads it through the hoop, pulling the cable tight behind it and not letting that tension off, or else the nail will fall,
the cable slipping back through.
“Over there,” Lindsay says, directing Izzy, and Izzy does the same on her side, walking the tension past each latch until her and Lindsay’s hands meet where the cable does.
Lindsay steps her hand over Izzy’s, has all the tension now but isn’t pulling too hard.
“I always wanted to try both sides at once,” she says. “Thanks. Now, that door you came in. Lock it. Except for the big doors, there’s just the one from the back,” she says, nodding through the stalls to the obvious door down at the end of their hall. “And that’s the one he likes.”
Izzy
→ goes back, sets the lock on the door she came in through.
Her eyes are wrong, though.
She’s thinking too much, lost in something. She runs her palm along Wildfire’s side then
→ ducks under the tight cables, steps out into the space between the stalls, her back to Lindsay, her jaw working in thought.
“You don’t want to be there,” Lindsay says. “Take Wildfire’s stall, it’s empty. Wait, no, I know. Get a little of that hay, put it on the floor there.”
Izzy looks to the cement floor she’s standing on.
“‘Come with me if you want to live,’” Lindsay quotes, smiling, and Izzy
→ has done it, put a little armful of hay there in a tight pile.
“Now light it,” Lindsay whispers. “Use your school spirit, girl. I know you’ve got it.”
Izzy glares at Lindsay and stands to leave.
“You want him dead this time, don’t you?” Lindsay says. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“I’m not burning your barn down. Like you said, who’s going to believe me when I say you told me to?”
“It won’t—” Lindsay smiles, still pulling back on the cables, “their feet will put it out, and there’s just dirt where they’re going anyway. It won’t spread. Are you not AP anything?”
“I don’t know why—”
“You can’t handle the truth,” Lindsay says, laughing at herself, her references coming nervously fast now.
The Last Final Girl Page 18
