The Final Girl Support Group

by Grady Hendrix

  Under Armour zipper tactical boots, and fire sparks inside my head.

  “Skye?” I say.

  Where’s Stephanie? Is she helping him? Is he helping her? Is she dead? Was I wrong and she’s one more final girl notched into his belt?

  His breath rasps through his gas mask. Then he says something, and the mask muffles it, but all my strength leaves my body because I still hear the words.

  “You’ll die alone and no one cares,” he says.

  My mom presses a screaming Gilly to the side of her neck. You have to protect your Sisters. And I couldn’t even do that. I’m sorry, Gilly. I’m sorry, Dr. Carol. I’m sorry, Mom and Dad. I’m sorry, Mike and Liz. I’m sorry, Fine. I’m sorry, everyone.

  I’m sorry I can’t fight anymore.

  Skye adjusts his grip on his weapon.

  I’m sorry, Adrienne.

  He points his gun at my face and its muzzle is a yawning black hole big enough to swallow the world.

  And Heather is on him, streaking in from out of nowhere, the heavy white porcelain lid of the toilet tank in her hands, and she brings it down on the back of his neck and follows through on her swing. The porcelain lid explodes on impact into a thousand razor shards that pepper my face. Skye’s body bends in one direction, his head bends in another, and he falls forward, catching his face on the edge of the tub as he goes down. He doesn’t get up.

  For a moment, there’s no sound but the two of us breathing.

  “Where’s everyone else?” I finally manage.

  “Back in the cabin,” Heather says. “Locked in.”

  It doesn’t make any sense.

  “But how did you get here?” I ask.

  Heather’s panting but manages something close to a grin.

  “Like I said, I’m into some higher-level shit that you could never understand.”

  After what I saw in her room at Chrissy’s museum, I don’t doubt it for a minute.

  I start picking myself up out of the Jacuzzi, and Heather leans down and starts unbuckling Skye’s helmet and gas mask.

  “Is he alive?” I ask.

  “Mostly,” Heather says, working at his chin strap, finally getting it free.

  “Don’t move him,” I say. “His neck might be broken.”

  She pushes back his helmet and peels off the gas mask and I see his face, dark circles painted around his eyes, hair soaked with sweat, eyelids fluttering. It really is Skye.

  He must have hated us all so much.

  Heather stands and delivers a hard kick to his balls. Her kick moves his body like a heavy sack of laundry.

  “We shouldn’t move him,” Heather says, punctuating her words with more kicks to his crotch. “Definitely not. Don’t want. To have. A spinal cord. Injury.”

  I take a step toward her and my head spins dangerously fast, feeling like it might float away. I put one hand on her shoulder to steady myself.

  “Stop,” I tell Heather. “Get his gun.”

  She bends over and picks it up, then centers it on his chest, looking down through its sights at the Monster sprawled on the floor in the wreckage of the eco-friendly bathroom.

  “Heather,” I say. “He’s her son.”

  She doesn’t acknowledge me. We stand like that for what feels like a very long time. Finally she lowers the gun, then tosses it into the tub with a loud clatter.

  “Fuck it, right?” she says.

  “Fuck it,” I say. “No one else dies today.”

  “Well, isn’t that a big ball of sunshine,” Stephanie says from the door.

  Heather starts to turn, but Stephanie has the shotgun against the back of her neck. Through Heather’s throat it’s pointed right at my face. Stephanie stands in the square stance, motionless, butt of the gun against her shoulder, cheek welded to the stock, ready to let her body take the recoil, her nonfiring hand directing the barrel. Heather’s back is to her, I’m on the other side of Heather, Skye’s body takes up half the bathroom, and there’s nowhere left to run.

  “That’s the second time you’ve saved yourself by playing possum,” Steph says. “How’d you do it?”

  “Plate in my head,” I say.

  “Goddamn,” she says softly. “To be honest, I barely skimmed your Wikipedia page. I’m not interested in roadkill. This skunky junkie, on the other hand, she’s big game.”

  “Fucking superfans,” Heather says.

  “Whatever, grandma,” Stephanie says. “My man and I have been running you for weeks like rats in a maze, and now we’re gunning you down like fish in a barrel. You stupid old bags don’t have a lot to be proud of. This was about as challenging as a wet fart.”

  What sticks with me is “my man.”

  “Skye . . .” I begin.

  “We met online,” she says. “No one’s going to remember you losers after this. Skye and I will be heroes. People will be talking about the statement we made here for years to come. You’re just pointless nostalgia and we’re here to sweep you into the trash. Everyone needs to stop clinging to the past.”

  “Pull the trigger or shut the fuck up,” Heather says, but I can see her face and it’s only her voice that’s brave. “You’re as boring as my last boyfriend.”

  Stephanie smiles.

  “Okay,” she says.

  I have to keep her talking.

  “You did all this to be famous?” I say. “You killed all these people to be on TV?”

  “What else is there?” Stephanie asks.

  I remember the file in Dr. Carol’s house, the one with Stephanie’s picture on it. I realize how Skye found her.

  “He reached out to you first, didn’t he?” I ask.

  “You don’t have time for our dating history,” Stephanie says.

  “He groomed you,” I say. “He told you how evil we are because he hates his mom and then he groomed you.”

  “Not even close,” she says, but I can tell she doesn’t like being an object rather than the subject.

  “This isn’t girl power,” I say, panic-talking now. “You’re Skye’s puppet. In court your lawyer’s going to claim emotional coercion. You weren’t responsible for your actions. The man was in charge all the way. You’ll be just another victim of a powerful, manipulative male.”

  “Don’t try to run a game on me, Lynnette,” Stephanie says. “We’re equals. That how love works these days.”

  “You think it’s about you and Skye?” I ask. “This is about him and his mommy. You’re the sad daughter-in-law to his psycho obsession, a footnote in his case file. We’ll get the memorials, we’ll be the heroes, he’ll be embraced by a bunch of sad little boys on the Internet, but you don’t fit in anywhere. You’ll be forgotten because all you ever did was say ‘yes, sir,’ ‘no, sir,’ and pulled the trigger when Daddy said.”

  “Fuck you,” she says.

  “You know I’m right,” I say. “Unless you kill him, too.” I give it a brief pause. “He’s still alive.”

  Heather is darting her eyes from left to right, shaking them “no,” and her mouth is mouthing no and she knows what I’m doing and I ignore her.

  “He’s pretty banged up,” I say, looking down and to my right. “I bet you could finish him by hand. That would make a statement.”

  I’m committed now. For the first time in years, I’m not scared.

  Stephanie’s eyes narrow and they flick down to Skye and that’s all I’m going to get. I pray for speed.

  Everything happens at once. I drop low and shoulder past Heather, leaping up and forward, ignoring the iron bands clamped around my skull, and one arm is going up and out and thrusting the barrel of the shotgun away like I saw Dani do earlier. The air in the bathroom explodes and my hand is on fire, palm searing, sticking to the barrel, and my shoulder breaks and the room fills with gritty gray gunsmoke. Somewhere beside me, Heather is falling
into the tub.

  My feet don’t touch the ground and I’m tackling Stephanie. My head clips the doorframe as I take her down and it throbs so hard I almost black out, but not enough to make me forget to land on her body. I hear all the air whoosh out of her lungs when we hit the concrete floor with my full weight on top, the burning-hot shotgun trapped between our chests.

  We’re lying half-in and half-out of the hydrotherapy door and I’m too weak to hit her, or cut her, or shoot her, so I just wrap my arms and legs around her and hold on tight.

  She bucks and squirms and screams and fights, trying to worm her finger into the trigger guard, but she’s just a kid after all, and I keep her on the ground, pressed to the tile; my arms keep her from getting any leverage, my legs wrap around her calves to keep them from pushing up. I use my battered chin to force her skull down until I’m pinning her head to the ground, and our faces are close enough to kiss.

  She spits and screams and howls, but she’s not going anywhere, and after a while she knows it. She starts to scream in my ear, so loud my brain goes white.

  Eventually I make out what she’s saying.

  “Kill me!” she’s screaming, over and over again. “Kill me! Kill me! Kill me!”

  They pull me off eventually, and by then they have flexi-cuffs on Skye, and Marilyn and Heather put a pair on Stephanie. As they drag her to the other side of the room she keeps her eyes on me.

  “You should have killed me, you fucking skank,” she spits.

  I’m tired. I hurt everywhere. Fresh pain creeps into every inch of my body.

  “You’ll go to trial,” I say, exhausted. “You’ll go to prison.”

  “Fuck you!” she screeches. “I’ll fucking escape!”

  I’m so tired of all this hurting and killing and these threats and this endless litany of fear that has been my life.

  “No, you won’t,” I say. “You’re not that smart.”

  Let her live. Let her and Skye live. Let them live and see just how small and meaningless their murders were. She’s killed so many people and you know what? The world, just as uncooperative and stubborn as always, keeps spinning along.

  Dying isn’t the important thing. It’s nothing more than the punctuation mark on the end of your life. It’s everything that came before that matters. Punctuation marks, most people skip right over them. They don’t even have a sound.

  —email from Stephanie Fugate to Skye Elliott, Prosecution Exhibit 137-A

  THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP XXIV:

  A New Beginning

  A chrome dolphin leaps from ultraviolet waves.

  Three lumpy pink elephants link arms and form a kickline, shouting, Happy Visiting Day!

  Sometimes the biggest journeys begin with the smallest steps, proclaim a pair of legs in scuffed sneakers.

  That one’s for me. Right now, all I can take are small steps.

  When they processed me through the metal detector, the new plate in my skull didn’t beep because it’s surgical-quality polymer, but they spent a long time x-raying my cane and confiscated my Tylenol 3, which is bad because I feel a headache coming on. They patted me down and felt me up. By the time they allowed me into the Central California Correctional Facility, I felt ninety years old.

  Getting shot in the head turned out to be the miracle cure for panic attacks. When I woke up in the hospital, Julia told me I’d been unconscious for three days while they let the swelling in my brain subside. I waited for my lungs to cramp or my throat to close but all that happened was a slight elevation in my heart rate. I guess my body figured if there was anyone else in Stephanie and Skye’s conspiracy they would have taken their shot already. I still don’t feel safe, but for the first time since I was sixteen I’m not scared all the time either.

  “Is everyone okay?” I asked Julia the next time I woke up, and she started saying something with too many words and I passed out again.

  The TV was always on in my room and people drifted in and out telling me things I couldn’t understand as I slipped into unconsciousness and back out again, floating on big waves of painkillers.

  In my lucid moments I watched Skye’s lawyer. He held daily press conferences where he read extensively from his client’s manifestos. Turns out he’s a big men’s rights activist and their plan is to claim that Skye was the victim of an out-of-control feminist conspiracy. Skye’s venom is getting amplified and re-amplified all over the Internet. It would have been easier for Dr. Carol if I’d let Heather shoot him.

  We all got famous again. So famous, in fact, that when I finally got out of the hospital Marilyn sent a car and two security goons to pick me up. We had a very nice conversation in their car about the hold one of them had used to take me down in Marilyn’s backyard. When I’m able to walk unassisted again he’s going to teach it to me.

  My apartment was still evidence, and my landlord was suing me for tens of thousands in damages. I had nowhere to go, no life to get back to, I had nothing except an endless parade of people who wanted to put me on the news to “tell my story.” They all want to know how I “feel.”

  No one’s asking me how I feel as I sit in the visitor’s area of the CCCF looking at the stock-art inspirational posters and the amateur-hour murals on the walls. If they did I’d tell them that my jaw aches, the scalp around my new plate itches, and an ugly brown headache throbs behind my eyes. And I’m beginning to think I’ve made a mistake coming here.

  Marilyn arrives before I can change my mind and leave. Allowable jewelry is limited to a single necklace and one ring, strapless dresses are forbidden, and you can’t wear orange, beige, blue denim, or forest green, but they do allow sun hats and she’s carrying an enormous white one in her hand.

  I get a kiss on each cheek.

  “Have you heard from Dr. Carol?” I ask, wiping her lipstick away.

  “I wrote her a note,” Marilyn says. “I think we’re going to have to accept that she’ll be out of circulation for some time.”

  I spent the first two days after I got out of the hospital trying to reach Dr. Carol, but I could never get through. She read one public statement and that footage got aired over and over again. Dr. Carol looking down at a piece of paper shaking so hard in her hands she had to place it on the table. She recited a series of short, stiff sentences asking for everyone to please respect her privacy in this difficult time. It didn’t do any good. They hounded her until she disappeared. None of us could get her on the phone, none of us could reach her by email. I wanted to help her. I wanted to tell her it’s okay. She’d done so much for me. But I didn’t get the chance.

  “Dani’s not with you?” Marilyn asks.

  After I got out of the hospital, Marilyn offered me her guest house but I wanted to be somewhere quiet. I asked Dani if I could stay on her ranch. She didn’t say no, so I took that as a yes. I like it out there. I can see anyone who’s coming from a long way away. All her horses came back, and I like spending time with them. I like the way they smell, how they move, the wary way they check out the world. I think again that Gillian loved horses, and she never got to ride. I’m building up to it. Maybe.

  “She’s at PT,” I tell Marilyn. “She’s getting a ride with Julia.”

  They’re going to have to rebuild Dani’s left leg, her left hip, and both knees. For the first two days, she refused to get out of her hospital bed. On the third day, Julia rolled into her room and clapped briskly.

  “This pity party is hereby canceled,” she said as a nurse rolled in an empty wheelchair. “It’s time you got out of that comfy coffin and started living again.”

  Julia loves knowing more about something than someone else, and she definitely knows more about wheelchairs than Dani. She came out to the ranch and the three of us spent a week making it accessible, the two of them in chairs, me with my cane, just three broken-down final girls and a couple of contractors from town. Dani’s gotten so goo
d that she bought one of those Freedom Chairs and disappears into the desert for days at a time.

  The first time she vanished overnight I freaked out. When I saw her returning through the scrub in back of the house the next day around dusk, sawing away at her push levers, bumping hard over the dirt, I ran out and gave her hell. She waited until I ran out of steam.

  “I like sleeping under the stars,” she said. “I watched the hawks, I watched coyotes. Michelle came and sat with me for a while. She didn’t say much but she listened. I’ll probably go out and see her pretty regular now.”

  She levered past me toward the house, then stopped and said:

  “I liked you better when you didn’t talk so much.”

  “Do you hate me?” I ask Marilyn, as we wait together in the empty CCCF visiting room.

  Plastic tables are bolted to the linoleum floor, there are no windows, there’s a play space in the corner with dancing cartoon animals painted on the walls. It looks like the saddest grade-school cafeteria in the world.

  “Do I hate you?” Marilyn asks.

  I nod. I’m thinking about my letters, thinking about the book, thinking about how I called her a spoiled alcoholic, thinking about all the mistakes I made.

  “Let me show you something,” she says, putting her big straw purse on her lap and pulling out her enormous phone. She swipes her thumb down and down and down and then taps her screen and holds it out.

  At first I don’t understand what I’m looking at and then I don’t know how I missed him.

  “Fine!” I say out loud.

  She’s transferred him from his pot into one of the soft, loamy flower beds surrounding the guest cottage. He’s grown since I abandoned him, unfolding new leaves, tiny green peppers blooming from his buds, spreading his roots wide, unfurling new fronds.

  It feels like a touch of mercy I don’t deserve.

  “I hope it’s okay,” Marilyn says.

  “Fine,” I say, and it’s embarrassing that I’m talking to not even a plant but a picture of a plant on someone else’s phone, but I can’t help myself. “Look at you. You’re growing up. And you’re surrounded by so many sexy ferns.”