Final Girls

by Riley Sager

  “And do you like it?”

  “It doesn’t matter if I like it. It needs to be done.”

  “What if the guy killed several people?”

  “He still needs defending,” Jeff says.

  “What if it’s the guy who killed all those people at the Nightlight Inn? Or the guy who did all that shit at Pine Cottage?” Sam’s anger is palpable now—a heat pulsing across the table. Her voice picks up speed, each subsequent word getting harder, rougher. “Knowing all of that, would you still happily sit next to that motherfucker and try to keep him out of jail?”

  Jeff remains motionless, save for a slight working of his jaw. His eyes never leave Sam. He doesn’t even blink.

  “It must be convenient,” he says, “to have something to blame for everything that went wrong in your life.”

  “Jeff.” My throat is parched, my voice soft and easy to ignore. “Stop.”

  “Quinn could do that. God knows, she has every right to. But she doesn’t. Because she’s managed to put it behind her. She’s strong like that. She’s not some—”

  “Jeff, please.”

  “—helpless victim who skipped out on her family and friends instead of trying to move past something that happened more than a decade ago.”

  “Enough!”

  I leap from my seat, tipping my wineglass, its contents gushing over the table. I sop it up with my napkin. White fabric turning red.

  “Jeff. Bedroom. Now.”

  • • •

  We stand by the closed door, facing each other, our bodies a study in contrasts. Jeff is calm and loose, arms at his sides. Mine are a straightjacket across my chest, which lifts and falls in exasperation.

  “You didn’t need to be so harsh.”

  “After what she said to me? I think I did, Quinn.”

  “You have to admit, you kind of started it.”

  “By being curious?”

  “By being suspicious,” I say. “You were giving her the third degree out there. This isn’t court. She’s not one of your clients, Jeff!”

  My voice is too loud, ringing off the walls. Jeff and I both look to the door, pausing to find out if Sam heard us. I’m sure she did. Even if she has managed to miss my increasingly shrill tone, it’s obvious we’re again talking about her.

  “I was asking her pretty rational questions,” Jeff says, lowering his voice to make up for my volume. “Don’t you think she’s being evasive?”

  “She doesn’t want to talk about this stuff. I can’t blame her.”

  “That still gave her no right to talk to me like that. As if I’m the one who attacked her.”

  “She’s sensitive.”

  “Bullshit. She was egging me on.”

  “She was defending herself,” I say. “She’s not an enemy, Jeff. She’s a friend. Or at least she can be.”

  “Do you even want to be friends with her? Until yesterday, you seemed perfectly happy having nothing to do with this Final Girls stuff. So what’s changed?”

  “Other than Lisa Milner’s suicide?”

  A sigh from Jeff. “I understand how much it’s upset you. I know you’re sad and disappointed about what happened. But why this sudden interest in becoming friends with Sam? You don’t even know her, Quinn.”

  “I know her. She went through the same thing I did, Jeff. I know exactly who she is.”

  “I’m just worried that if you two get close, you’ll start dwelling on what happened to you. And you’ve moved past it.”

  Jeff means well. I know this. And living with me isn’t always easy. I know this too. But that doesn’t keep his comment from getting me riled up even more.

  “My friends were slaughtered, Jeff. That’s not something I’ll ever move past.”

  “You know I didn’t mean it like that.”

  I lift my chin, defiant in my anger. “Then what did you mean?”

  “That you’ve become more than a victim,” Jeff says. “That your life—our life—isn’t defined by that night. I don’t want that to change.”

  “My being nice to Sam isn’t going to change anything. And it’s not like I have a whole army of friends beating down the front door.”

  This isn’t something I plan to admit. My loneliness is something I generally keep from Jeff. I smile sunnily when he comes home from work and asks me how my day was. Fine, I always say, when in fact my days are often a lonely blur. Long afternoons spent baking in isolation, sometimes talking to the oven just to hear the sound of my voice.

  Instead of friends, I have acquaintances. Former classmates and coworkers. Ones with husbands and kids and office jobs that aren’t conducive to regular contact. Ones I purposefully kept at a distance until they became nothing more substantial than occasional text messages or emails.

  “I really need this, Jeff,” I say.

  Jeff grips my shoulders, kneading them. He looks into my eyes, seeing something out of place, something unspoken.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “I got an email,” I say.

  “From Sam?”

  “Lisa. She sent it an hour before she—”

  Offed herself, I want to say. Finished what Stephen Leibman didn’t get the chance to do. “Passed away.”

  “What did it say?”

  I recite the email word for word, the text etched into my memory.

  “Why would she do that?” Jeff says, as if I somehow have an answer.

  “I don’t know. I’ll never know. But for some reason she was thinking about me right before she died. And all I can think about is the fact that, if I had seen that email in time, I could have possibly saved her.”

  Tears form, hot in the corners of my eyes. I try to blink them back, to no avail. Jeff pulls me to him, my head against his chest, his arms tight across my back.

  “Jesus, Quinn. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “You had no way of knowing.”

  “But you can’t let yourself think you’re responsible for Lisa’s death.”

  “I don’t,” I say. “But I do think I missed my chance to help her. I don’t want to do the same thing with Sam. I know she’s rough around the edges. But I think she needs me.”

  Jeff sighs a long exhalation of defeat.

  “I’ll play nice,” he says. “I promise.”

  We kiss and make up, tears salty on my lips. I wipe them away while Jeff lets go of me, jiggling his arms to release the tension. I give my shirt a tug and smooth out the tear-stained spot I left on his. Then we’re out of the bedroom, moving down the hall with hands entwined. A unified front.

  In the dining room, we find the table unoccupied, Sam’s chair pushed away from it. She’s not in the kitchen either. Or the living room. In the foyer, the spot by the door where her knapsack sat is now an empty patch of floor.

  Once again, Samantha Boyd has vanished.

  9.

  My phone rings at three a.m., yanking me from a nightmare of running through a forest. Running from Him. Tripping and screaming, tree branches reaching out to circle my wrists. I’m still running even after I wake, my legs thrashing beneath the covers. The phone keeps ringing—an urgent beep slicing the silence of the room. Jeff, the heaviest of sleepers, trained only to wake to the Pavlovian bell of his alarm clock, doesn’t stir. To keep it that way, I cover the screen when I grab the phone, blocking its glow. I peek through my fingers in search of the caller’s identity.

  Unknown.

  “Hello?” I whisper as I slide out of bed and rush to the door.

  “Quincy?”

  It’s Sam, her voice hard to hear over the din surrounding her. There’s chatter and yelling and the harried clack of fingers on keyboards.

  “Sam?” I’m in the hallway now, eyes bleary in the darkness, brain swimming in a soup of confusion. “Where did you disappear to? Why a
re you calling me so late?”

  “I’m sorry. I really am. But something’s happened.”

  I think she’s going to say something about Him. Most likely because of the nightmare, which lingers sticky on my skin like drying perspiration. I brace myself to hear her tell me that He’s resurfaced, as I always knew He would. It doesn’t matter that He’s dead. That I gladly watched Him die.

  Instead, Sam says, “I need your help.”

  “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  “I was sort of arrested.”

  “What?”

  The word echoes down the hallway, waking Jeff. From the bedroom, I hear the squeak of the mattress as he bolts upright and calls my name.

  On the phone, Sam says, “Please come get me. Central Park Precinct. Bring Jeff.”

  She hangs up before I get the chance to ask her how she knew my phone number.

  • • •

  Jeff and I take a cab to the precinct, which is situated just south of the reservoir. I’ve jogged past it dozens of times, always slightly confused by its mix of old and new. It consists of low-slung brick buildings, around since the park’s birth, bisected by a modern atrium that glows from within. Every time I see it, I think of a snow globe. A Dickensian village encased in glass.

  Inside, I ask to see Samantha Boyd. The desk sergeant on duty is a ruddy-faced Irishman with love handles jiggling under his uniform. He checks the computer and says, “We haven’t brought in anyone by that name, miss.”

  “But she told me she was here.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Twenty minutes,” I say as I adjust the half-tucked blouse bunched at my waist. Jeff and I had dressed in a hurry, with me throwing on the same clothes I had worn that afternoon. Jeff slipped into jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, his hair jutting off his head in wild thatches.

  Officer Love Handles frowns at the computer. “I’ve got nothing.”

  “Maybe she’s already been released,” Jeff says, all but announcing his wishful thinking. “Is that a possibility?”

  “She’d still be in the system. Maybe she gave you the wrong precinct. Or maybe you misheard her.”

  “It was this one,” I tell him. “I’m sure of it.”

  I scan the open expanse of the precinct. High-ceilinged and bright, it looks more like a modern train depot than a police station. There’s a sleek staircase, state-of-the-art lighting, the staccato click of footsteps on the polished floors.

  “Have any women been brought in recently?” Jeff asks.

  “One,” the desk sergeant says, still studying the computer. “Thirty-five minutes ago.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “I’m afraid that’s confidential.”

  I look to Jeff, hopeful. “It could be her.” I then look to the desk sergeant, pleading. “Can we see her?”

  “That’s not really allowed.”

  Jeff pulls out his wallet and flashes his work ID. He explains, in his unfailingly polite way, that he’s a public defender, that we’re not here to cause trouble, that a friend of ours claimed to be in police custody at this precinct.

  “Please?” I say to the desk sergeant. “I’m worried about her.”

  He relents and passes us into the care of another officer, this one bigger, stronger, devoid of love handles. He guides us into the heart of the precinct. The room gives off a jittery, caffeinated vibe. All that institutional lighting brightening what’s technically the dead of night. Sam is there after all, cuffed to a booking desk.

  “That’s her,” I tell our escort. He grabs my arm when I try to surge forward, keeping me in place. I call her name. “Sam!”

  The cop at the booking desk stands, asks her a question. I can read his lips. Do you know that woman? When Sam nods, the cop holding me back gently walks me to her, his hand like a vise on my arm. He lets go once I’m within arm’s length of Sam’s booking officer.

  “Sam?” I say. “What happened?”

  Her cop gives her another look, forehead creasing. “Are you sure you know this woman?”

  “Yes,” I say, answering for her. “Her name is Samantha Boyd and I’m sure whatever happened is simply a misunderstanding.”

  “That’s not the name she gave the arresting officer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The cop coughs while shuffling through paperwork. “Says here that her name’s Tina Stone.”

  I look to Sam. The late hour has made her cheeks puffy and red. Her eyeliner is smudged in spots—streaks of blackness that bleed into the circles beneath her eyes.

  “Is this true?”

  “Yeah,” she says with a shrug. “I changed my name a while back.”

  “So your name is really Tina Stone?”

  “Now it is. Legally. You know, just because.”

  I do know. I thought about doing the same thing a year after Pine Cottage, for the same reasons Sam has no need to articulate. Because I was tired of strangers vaguely recognizing it when I was introduced to them. Because I hated the way their features froze, if only for a second, when their memories clicked. Because it made me sick knowing my name and His will forever be associated.

  Coop ultimately talked me out of it. He said I should hold on to my name as a stubborn point of pride. Changing it wouldn’t separate the name Quincy Carpenter from the horrors of Pine Cottage. Keeping it could, if I moved on and made something of myself. Something beyond being the lucky one who lived when so many others had not.

  “Now that we’ve got the name thing cleared up,” Jeff says, “can someone tell me what she’s been accused of?”

  “Are you her attorney?” the cop asks.

  Jeff sighs. “I guess.”

  “Miss Stone,” the cop says, “faces charges of third-degree assault on a police officer and resisting arrest.”

  • • •

  The details come in pieces, from both Sam and the booking officer. Jeff, calm and collected, asks the questions. I struggle to keep up, head pivoting between the three of them, my brain buzzing from lack of sleep. From what I’m able to gather, Sam, now also known as Tina Stone, went to a bar on the Upper West Side after leaving my apartment. After a few drinks, she went outside for a smoke, encountering a husband and wife in mid-argument. It was heated, according to Sam. Things got physical. When the man shoved the woman, she stepped in.

  “I was breaking up a fight,” she tells us.

  “You attacked him,” the cop counters.

  Both agree on one thing—that Sam ultimately punched the man. He called the police while Sam asked the woman if she was okay, if fights like this were a regular thing, if the man had ever hit her. When a pair of cops arrived, Sam bolted across Central Park West, vanishing into the park itself.

  The cops followed, caught up, brought out the cuffs. That’s when Sam resisted.

  “They were arresting me for no goddamn reason,” she says.

  “You hit a man,” the cop says.

  She sniffs. “I was trying to help. He looked like he was about to beat the shit out of that woman. He probably would have too, if I hadn’t done something about it.”

  Frustrated by the injustice of it all—Sam’s words, not mine—she took a swing at one of the cops, knocking off his hat and prompting her arrest.

  “It was only his hat, for God’s sake,” she mutters in conclusion. “It’s not like I hurt him or anything.”

  “It appeared to him like you wanted to,” the booking officer says. “That harm certainly seemed to be your intent.”

  “Let’s talk this through,” Jeff says. “She’s only being charged with what happened in the park, correct?”

  The cop nods. “The man she punched declined to press charges.”

  “Then clearly we can work something out.”

  Jeff pulls the cop aside. They confer by the wall
, their voices low but still loud enough for me to hear. I stand next to Sam, my hand on her shoulder, fingers digging into the soft leather of her jacket. She doesn’t bother trying to listen in. She simply stares straight ahead, grinding her teeth.

  “This all sounds to me like a big misunderstanding,” Jeff tells the cop.

  “Not to me,” the cop replies.

  “It’s clear she shouldn’t have done what she did. But she was trying to help that woman and emotions were high and she got a little wild.”

  “You’re saying the charges should be dropped?”

  The booking officer looks our way. I give him a smile, hoping it will somehow persuade him. As if seeing perky, harmless me at Sam’s side will tip the scales in her favor.

  “I’m saying she shouldn’t have been charged in the first place,” Jeff says. “If you knew what she’s been through, you’d understand why she acted that way.”

  The cop’s face is a blank. “Then tell me what happened to her.”

  Jeff whispers something to him that I can’t fully make out. I catch only random words. One of them is “Nightlight.” Another is “murders.” The booking officer turns to look at Sam again. This time, his eyes contain a potent mix of curiosity and pity. I’ve seen that look a thousand times before. It’s the look of someone realizing he’s facing a Final Girl.

  He whispers something to Jeff. Jeff whispers back. This continues a few more seconds until they shake hands and Jeff walks briskly toward us.

  “Grab your things,” he tells Sam. “You’re free to go.”

  Outside, the three of us idle in the courtyard just beyond the precinct’s glass front wall, the Irish desk sergeant watching us from his post. A chilly breeze courses through the park, nipping at my ears and nose. I was in too much of a hurry when we left to think of bringing a sweater and now hug myself for warmth.

  Sam zips her leather jacket all the way to her chin, the collar popped. The knapsack is strapped to her back. Its weight makes her list sideways as she says, “Thank you for helping me in there. After the shit I said tonight, I wouldn’t have blamed you for letting me rot in a holding cell.”

  “You’re welcome,” Jeff says. “I’m not such a bad guy now, am I?”