Next to her PC sits a file rack holding a single manila folder. I flick it open and see a familiar face paper-clipped to the inside cover: Fugate, Stephanie, grinning the way she’ll never grin again. Something about that smile, so dorky and unguarded, flips a switch and I’m seeing Gillian’s smile, and I try not to think about Gillian anymore, I try to keep her out of my mind at all costs, because then I think about what happened to her, and then I have everything back exactly the way it was and I’m out of her office, locking the door, before I start crying again.
I sit in the gym looking at the wall across from me, trying not to think about Gillian and how I couldn’t save her, definitely not thinking about running away and leaving Julia behind on my floor. I think about this for a long, long time. I can’t make a move until tonight, and the time just evaporates when I start thinking about all the ways I’ve failed the people I know. When Pax bangs on my door and asks if I’m coming to dinner I ask him to tell his mom I’m going to bed early. Big day with the cops tomorrow.
* * *
—
I know we’re Dr. Carol’s business, but seeing those files makes me feel like I’m a collector’s item, a limited-edition action figure, a butterfly pinned to a board. I skimmed Fugate, Stephanie’s file before I put it back. She was at Red Lake because three years ago, when she was thirteen, her school tennis coach started poisoning his players, obsessed with his champion racquet slinger, and Fugate, Stephanie figured it out during a meeting in his office before he could give her a fatal dose. Red Lake wasn’t her first crisis, it was her sequel. She’s like us now. Poor kid. Another doll in Dr. Carol’s collection.
When my watch says 9:57 p.m., I creep out into the hall, go bag over my shoulders, fanny pack around my waist. I can hear Dr. Carol in the back of the house on her phone, talking to someone in clear, confident tones. Her voice fades as I make my way to the side door where Skye waits.
“Ready?” he whispers.
I look down. He’s wearing heavy black tactical boots, way too clunky and noisy for sneaking out of the house.
“Change shoes,” I whisper.
“They’re my Under Armours,” he whispers back. “They’re badass.”
I roll my eyes. Boys and their toys. He pops the side door and we both listen, but Dr. Carol’s voice keeps echoing through the kitchen uninterrupted. That’s a good sign. We slip into the garage. His boots make exactly as much noise as I expected.
“Hey!” a shrill voice says before I can close the kitchen door behind me. “Where’re you going?”
It’s Pax. I start closing the door in his face, but he grabs it.
“Are you sneaking out? Are you guys going on a date?”
“Zip it,” I whisper.
But I don’t know what to do after that. Hit him? Tie him up and gag him? I turn to his brother.
“Do not tell Mom,” Skye whispers at Pax.
The little creep’s eyes sharpen into two black pinpricks.
“What’s it worth to you?” he whispers.
At least he’s whispering now.
“You’d better give him something,” Skye tells me.
“What do you want?” I ask.
Pax bounces from toe to toe, turning his head around to check out the interior of his house, and then he turns back to me with a jack-o’-lantern grin.
“Buy my book,” he says, waving the comic book he tried to push on me earlier in the day.
“How’s five dollars?” I whisper, reaching into my wallet.
“How’s a hundred?” he says.
I give him a look but he’s serious. I look at Skye, who shrugs. Helpful. Held ransom by a little brother, I count out five twenty-dollar bills and remember what it felt like to have a little sister. It hurts deep inside my chest and that makes me hate this ankle-biter even more. He shoves the comic at me; I take it out of his hand and cram it into my bag.
“Sayonara, suckers!” He laughs.
“Let’s go before he changes his mind,” Skye says, and we walk out of Dr. Carol’s garage into the night.
—Screaming Virgins and Machete Monsters: The Making of the Slashers by Johnathan Stokes, 2008
THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP VII:
Son of the Final Girls
I’d really prefer it if you didn’t sit on the floor,” Skye says, shifting gears.
I’m folded into the leg well of the passenger seat, knees at my chin, back pressed against the door, the glove compartment shoving my head forward. There are eyes outside, looking for me. I’m not taking any chances.
“It’s not up for debate,” I say.
Skye sighs and keeps driving, headlights from oncoming cars stroking his long face from right to left. Right to left. Riding in cars always makes me sleepy, bouncing my head, making my eyelids heavy, filling my chest with sleep-smell.
He makes a right-hand turn and the door handle digs into my back. My go bag is on the seat, partially unzipped, and my hand rests inside holding my .22. The rough grip feels sweaty.
“What kind of stuff?” Skye asks.
“What?” I say.
“In my room you said you’d seen stuff that makes the stuff I was looking at look like Dora the Explorer,” he says. “Like what?”
That’s one of the warning signs, abnormal sexual interests. I’m not sleepy anymore. I make sure my grip is secure on my weapon.
“Sorry,” he says. “That sounded pervy.”
He flicks his eyes down to me and gives an embarrassed half smile. I remember how ashamed I felt of every single thing that came out of my mouth when I was only a little younger than he is now. I cut him a break.
“There’s a guy named Kenneth Hampson,” I say. “He worked Boy Scout camps outside Laredo under the name the Desert Reaper. He’s got a scam going in prison where he sells vials of his semen under the name Reaper Seed.”
“No!” Skye says. “Get out!”
“A guard sneaks it out in his thermos,” I say. “Then sells it online.”
“How do you know?” he asks.
“There’s a whole world out there,” I say. “Everyone wants a piece of these psychos. They call it murderabilia. Dirt from the graves of their victims. The prom dress Colleen van Deusen was wearing when the Knight in White Satin chopped off her head. That sold for eight thousand dollars.”
“How do people get away with it?” he asks.
“Her parents are the ones who sold the prom dress,” I say. “Sometimes you need the money more than you need to live with yourself.”
“Have you ever done that?” he asks.
It’s a fair question, but I’m angry. He’s stuck his finger in a wound. I count to five to calm down.
“No,” I lie.
“You like this stuff,” he says. It’s a statement, not a question, and there’s judgment in his voice, just like his mom.
The car’s taking a curve and then he’s twisting his shoulders around to watch traffic before he merges. Now we’re moving so fast that I have to shout to be heard over the engine.
“Tell me how I chose this,” I say. “Tell me how I picked this life. I was minding my own business and a monster came through my door. Not because I ignored the Keep Out signs and snuck into the old asylum, not because I built my house on top of an Indian burial mound. I didn’t ‘ask for it,’ this was done to me.”
“Yeah,” he says, loudly. “But you keep dwelling on it. I mean, Mom says this happened, like, a hundred years ago. You could move on.”
My back is killing me. The way I’m sitting crushes my left kidney, which hasn’t been in great shape ever since Ricky Walker stopped by. I fight the urge to haul myself up into the passenger seat.
“You’re right,” I say. “None of us have to be defined by the worst thing that ever happened to her. Unfortunately, those things have a bad habit of coming back and trying to kill us again. A
fter a while, you start to realize that your life isn’t the thing that happens between the monsters, your life is the monsters.”
“But you don’t have to look at a guy selling his jizz online,” he says, making a left. It takes some pressure off my poor kidney. I’m holding my pistol with my left arm and my shoulder burns.
“Do you read the newspaper?” I ask.
“No,” he says with contempt.
“Online news?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Why?” I say. “None of that stuff is going to happen to you. If you didn’t know about Deepwater Horizon you’d get through your day just fine. Why bother?”
“Because I want to know what’s going on in the world,” he says.
“Exactly,” I say.
He thinks about it, then shakes his head.
“It’s not the same thing,” he says. Before I can point out to him that it’s exactly the same thing, he says, “We’re coming to your street.”
He takes a right. Kidney pinch.
“Cruise by slow,” I say. “Look for any vans with TV station logos on the side or big antennas.”
He’s driving too slow, twisting his head from side to side too conspicuously, but he’s the only partner I’ve got. I just hope he doesn’t get spotted and blow it for both of us. I don’t want to die, and I don’t want Dr. Carol to find out I’ve dragged her kid into this mess.
“Three vans,” he says. “KTTV, KTLA, and one unmarked, but they’re all parked together.”
“Okay,” I say. “Now keep looking for any late-model four-door sedans with two men sitting inside doing nothing.”
We’re almost at the end of the block.
“There it is!” he whisper-shouts. “Gray Pontiac Bonneville. Two guys, one black, one white, drinking Red Bull.”
“Keep driving,” I say. “Take a right at the end of the block. Don’t speed up, don’t slow down. Just cruise through.”
He does what I tell him and I guide him to the parking lot of the apartments behind my building. I reach up and unlatch the door, then haul my aching bones out. The first thing I do is scan the lot to make sure we’re alone. Like I expected, no one thought to put anyone out back where the sole door can only be opened from the inside. I transfer my pistol to my fanny pack so it’s easier to reach.
“You had a gun in my car?” he asks in disbelief.
“In my bag,” I say.
“Was it pointed at me?”
“No,” I lie.
“You totally had it pointed at me!” he says.
The orange sodium streetlights turn his face into a pumpkin and his eyes into panda circles of shadow. I grab a Trader Joe’s bag out of his back seat.
“Man up,” I say. “Here’s what I need you to do. Take some crap from your car and fill this bag. Walk around the building and go in my front door. Here’s the keys. Don’t rubberneck, don’t pause, don’t look around. Walk like you belong there, sort of bored, sort of bossy. Take the elevator to two, then come down the back stairs and use this to open the fire door.”
I hunt around and find the paint scraper where I tossed it behind the building yesterday.
“You were going to shoot me,” he says.
“You want the rest of your money?” I ask.
I’ve only paid him two hundred dollars so far. He nods. I peel off the bills.
“Make sure you don’t press the alarm bar when you open the back door,” I say. “Repeat it back to me.”
He does, and then, bag crackling by his side, he walks around the building. His back is orange, then silhouetted, and then it’s gone. If his shorts were high and tight instead of low and baggy, if his hair were shaggy and long instead of styled and close, he’d be a ringer for Tommy.
Julia had a theory.
“We’re just the high school quarterback, talking about the touchdown pass he threw in ’72,” she said. “High school was everyone’s glory days. For us, high school is all tangled up in memories of our trauma. We have the same normal nostalgic inclinations as other people, but when we walk back in our minds to this supposedly wonderful time we have people trying to kill us. For us, nostalgia and violence are inextricably linked.”
I think about her in the ICU, face bruised, a machine breathing for her, spine probably shattered again. I try not to feel like it’s my fault.
Something fumbles at the other side of the door, metal scrapes across metal, and then the door clicks open and light spills into the parking lot. Moths hurl their bodies through the crack in the doorway as I slip through.
“Did they see you?” I ask.
“I totally strolled right past them,” Tommy says. I mean, Skye. That’s what Skye says.
“Let’s go,” I say, hitting the stairs.
“We’re not going to take the elevator?” he asks from behind me, still standing on the first floor of the stairwell, looking up at my ass.
“Are you kidding?” I say. “It’s only three floors.”
He grumbles but after a second I hear his sneakers scuffing up the stairs behind me. I wait for him to catch up with me on three, then carefully crack the fire door. My hall is clear, and I move down it fast. I don’t want someone peering out their peephole and spotting me. Skye ambles along like he doesn’t care.
Three strips of yellow police tape cover my door and there’s a paper Burbank PD seal over my lock. There’s also a padlock hanging from a newly installed hasp.
“Shit,” Skye says. “I guess that’s that.”
I dig into my go bag and pull out a small Velcro pouch. From it, I pull an Allen wrench I ground down, and I insert it in the padlock’s keyhole, put some downward pressure on it, then use a hacksaw I filed into a lockpick and in about twenty seconds I pop the lock.
“Wow.” Skye whistles.
“Hush,” I say proudly.
I slice the seal and push inside. My cage hangs open. They must have taken sledgehammers to it. The hinges are torqued and the door is almost bent in two. The room is flooded with orange from the streetlights. My curtains lie in tatters on the floor. Through the broken windows I can hear a couple walking by talking about where they parked and the girl laughs. Everything in my apartment is gone. It’s empty.
“You got ripped off,” Skye says, crowding in behind me. “That sucks.”
“It’s evidence,” I say.
I do a walkthrough, making sure Skye stays by the front door. A book lies open in the middle of the living room floor with a boot print stamped across the pages right next to brown drag marks—Julia’s blood. In the bathroom, a lonely bra hangs over the shower rod. All four of my safes have been drilled, and they all gape open, empty.
In the living room, Skye crouches in the corner looking at something.
“They trashed your plant,” he says.
I shove him aside.
Fine! I think at him, relieved he’s safe.
I get nothing from him but icy silence. He’s lying on his side in the corner, a forlorn little twist of garbage. His roots cling to a ball of dirt. I find a soup pot in the kitchen and scoop up as much of his soil as I can and put him in. It’s too big. I water him in the sink.
“Is that what you came back for?” Skye asks from the kitchen door.
“No,” I say. “But there’s no point in killing my plant.”
Or running away and leaving him behind to die, Fine adds in my mind.
I’m sorry, I tell him, but he’s gone back to the silent treatment.
I carry Fine into the living room. The treadmill is still there and so is my desk. I put Fine on the treadmill, then squat in front of my desk.
It’s clear of monitors; there’s no keyboard, no mouse, even my printer is gone. They took the CPU that sat on the floor beneath my desk, but I press a panel I chopped in the drywall behind a tangle of wires, and it pops open to
reveal my actual CPU. The one they took is a dummy. One is none, and two is one.
“I want to get into that,” I tell Skye, hauling it out.
“Sure, we can bring it back to my mom’s,” he says.
“Can you do it here?”
“I’ve got a busted-out laptop in my trunk,” he says. “It can double for your monitor and keyboard.”
“Go get it,” I say. “Go out the back way and leave the door propped open.”
While he’s gone I head into the kitchen and open the cabinet under the sink. A board on the bottom of the cabinet comes up, and I brush aside bottles of cleaner until I can stick my arm into the space between the cabinet and the floor. My fingers snag slick plastic.
I drag out the big Ziploc freezer bag. Inside is three thousand dollars in twenties wrapped in three fat, heavy rolls. I slip them into my go bag.
Twenty minutes pass before Skye comes sauntering back, whistling, a laptop and cables under one arm. The younger generation really needs to learn what “hustle” means.
“What?” he asks as I give him a look. “You said to act natural.”
It’s another few minutes before he has his laptop hooked up to my CPU. We sit on the floor next to each other. It takes all my willpower to hold still. Three news vans downstairs, one unmarked cop car, it’s only a matter of time before someone comes upstairs to check out the crime scene. All my senses are on high alert for the sound of the elevator doors opening or footsteps in the hall. I’m worried they’ll see the missing padlock and come inside. Or someone on the street will see the laptop light on the ceiling. Or our knees might touch. I tell Skye to work fast.
“It would help if I knew what I was looking for,” he says.
“Something I may have downloaded, or that would have installed itself,” I say. “Some way that someone could have taken a file off my computer without me knowing.”
Skye taps around in the unadorned code for less than a minute, briskly sifting the punctuation mark soup that actually powers my computer.
The Final Girl Support Group Page 8