“Boop, boop, boop,” she says, pinching the windows shut with her fingers, some personal game we don’t know anything about.
It’s enough to steady her for a moment.
Inside the house, the phone rings and rings some more, but nobody’s there to answer it. Ben just rolls over, away from the sound, Slumber Party Massacre still flickering across the whole living room.
“Shit shit shit,” Izzy’s saying, staring over to where Billie Jean must be, the panic and truth of all this still hitting her, so that she has to sit down, hug her knees tight.
In her POV, a finger of that white sparkly glove twitches.
Not in her POV, a bloodshot, evil eye opens.
“It wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t your fault,” Izzy’s saying to herself now, rocking back and forth. Looking downstream, the scene of the crime slipping away.
“What was he doing down here, anyway? Trespassing? Sneaking up on scantily-clad young girls in the dark? On duty? While drinking?”
That reminds her.
She stands, finds her way to the oak, gets the bottle out and takes a long, necessary pull. And then another.
“You killed the sheriff, Izzy,” she says to herself, a little drunk already, and not just on the alcohol. She shushes a finger up over her lip, kind of stumbles to one knee.
“Billie Jean,” she whispers, “let’s, let’s tell them it was you, cool?
Not that I wouldn’t get some high school cred for taking down the local authority figure, but that’s more your thing, right? Anyway, you know, it won’t look good on my college apps . . . ”
Another long drink.
She holds the bottle out, letting the last swallow slosh in the moonlight.
“Thanks, Dad,” she says, about the bottle, and kills it. Then studies Billie Jean’s twisted body. His right knee trashed the worst, probably. Or, the one thing obviously wrong.
“I was just being a good Samaritan,” Izzy says to the world, unzipping the duffel. “I was—I just came down here to help a fellow
. . . a fellow horror fiend, right? The original horror fiend. I can’t in good conscience deny you aid just because you—well, because you are what you are.”
Close on Billie Jean’s bloodshot eye, blinking again.
Listening?
“Not much of a talker, are you?” Izzy says to him. “Strong, silent type, let your bodycount do the talking.”
No answer.
Izzy cracks the first-aid kit open, finds a penlight in there and clicks it on, the beam red.
She runs it up and down Billie Jean’s body, hovers on the leg again.
“You understand of course that doing all this, it gives me a pass on any future carnage, right?”
She pulls out some gauze, some scissors, tries to get them to focus. “That was a joke,” she says to Billie Jean.
Blink. Blink.
“But if you could leave my brat brother out of it too, I guess.” No answer.
“Do you want a burrito or something?” Izzy asks, and
→ we’re tight on a burrito in the microwave, bubbling in its paper.
Walking from the kitchen, muddy as she was last time she came through, Izzy stops, takes two steps back, flips a cabinet door open.
What her POV’s settled on in there, it’s the family pharmacopeia.
Xanax.
Izzy takes it, reads the back of it, looks down to where the creek must be.
“No way,” she says, and shoves the bottle back up, reaches over for a box of band-aids instead.
Then she gets a second box as well.
Again she’s on her knees, just out of reach of Billie Jean.
She lowers her arm slowly to his, to apply one of these band-aids, but his hand clamps onto hers.
She breaks away easily.
“I’m trying to help you,” she hisses. “Know what would have happened if you washed up at any of the other stupid houses along here?”
Still, he grabs ineffectually for her.
Izzy backs up, takes a bite of the burrito, easily moves away from his next lunge.
“You might not even be sequel material, really,” Izzy says. “Aren’t you supposed to heal yourself somehow? That how it works?”
But then he manages to actually grab her.
This time she doesn’t jerk away, but lets him hold on.
Slowly, one by one, she peels his fingers up, replaces her arm with the burrito.
He kills it, its guts oozing out.
But then some part of him recognizes it. Smells it maybe.
He pulls it to his face, smears it over his latex mouth.
“I’ll take good care of him, Mom,” Izzy says, leaning forward to roll the Michael Jackson mask up over Billie Jean’s mouth, and her eyes get soft and twelve-years-old for the next part: “Promise.”
A ct 2
It’s a new morning.
We’re up above the town establishing, taking stock.
There’s school busses, there’s men and women with briefcases balancing coffee, there’s birds chirping, there’s sprinklers, there’s the creek purling along, in no particular hurry.
Nothing to suggest the events of last night.
Except maybe the flags at the school. They’re still at half mast, and . . . trembling? Has a car bumped into it? Is it an earthquake?
No. It’s some long-armed guy monkeying up past the flag, the strap of a backpack clenched in his teeth.
Everybody below’s cheering him on.
Well, everybody except Stuart, swiveling his head around for a teacher, a coach, a cop, anybody.
There’s just his stupid screaming classmates, though.
“Go!” Izzy yells, instead of what we expect: for her to stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves.
It’s supposed to be what she’s about, right?
She’s back in a spare set of glasses, too, that look she manicures that’s all about not having a look, the strategic rips in her jeans saying she doesn’t care, the hoop in her eyebrow dull and bored with itself.
And then we go close on this guy climbing.
It’s Jake.
Of course Izzy’s yelling.
An instant later, Jake’s big hand grips around that brass ball at the top of the flagpole. He spits the backpack into his other hand, hangs it up on the ball and slides down like a fireman, everybody laughing.
“Jake,” Izzy says.
On the ground again, Jake holds his hands up in victory, runs a stupid, self-congratulatory ‘I won’ Rocky circle, and then, completely out of the blue, he gets clocked in the head by the backpack, sliding down the pole.
Stuart steps forward to claim his bag.
Now Jake’s lost face, though.
“Uh-uh,” he says, faking a smile, his eyes hot with trouble, and loops an arm through a backpack strap, launches himself the other direction.
Except the other backpack strap’s still looped around the pole.
Jake flattens out in the air, comes down hard on his back.
“You really know how to pick them,” Brittney says, suddenly standing behind Izzy. “Surprised he’s not already in college, I mean.”
Izzy looks away.
“As a student, I mean,” Brittney adds, handing Izzy her cracked phone, her main glasses. “Not a subject.”
Izzy switches glasses, scrolls through her phone: shaky and flickering, there’s no calls, about twenty texts. Her fingernail black, a tiny skull decal grinning up through the clearcoat.
She stretches her waist to slide the phone into her pocket, doesn’t seem to care about the texts.
“Sorry about last night,” she says. “Ditching you with loverboy. How’d that turn out, anyway?”
“You don’t know yet, do you?” Brittney says, unable to contain her smile.
“You went home with Clark Kent, didn’t you? Was it ‘super?’ Did he take you to his Fortress, show you his—”
“Come with me,” Brittney says, pulling Izzy by the hand, into
the
→ school. The crush of bodies, lockers, posters, black crepe paper hanging from the ceiling tile.
“What don’t I know?” Izzy’s saying, trying to pull away but not really.
“That you’re a grade-A bitch,” Brittney smiles meaningfully, depositing Izzy at a central bulletin board by the main office.
The School Bus Bounce, hand-sized letters just rainbow out “homecoming,” though.
“Yeah, official unplanned pregnancy night, but why—?”
“American Pie . . . ” Brittney says, waiting for Izzy to follow.
“One two, three, or the reunion?” Izzy asks back, squinting. “I mean Beauty. You’re the one who made me watch it.”
Izzy mouths it, tasting it—American Beauty, American Beauty—and finally wows her eyes out, tag-lines it for Brittney: “Look closer . . . ”
Brittney bites her bottom lip in, nods too fast, too eager. Izzy goes back to the homecoming court list, and we go
→ down it name by name with her, in her POV:
Lindsay Baker, check.
Crystal Blake, okay.
Mandy Kane has the “Mandy” crossed out, replaced with a scratched-in Kandy.
And . . . April Ripley.
And . . . for that last name we already half-suspect, we go
→ tight on Izzy’s eyes. The terror there.
It’s a Hitchcock moment, a Marnie shot, zooming in on her, her background falling away. She opens her mouth, can’t speak, can only fall back farther
→ all the way to the loud wooden stands of the old gym, the lights off. Class evidently going on already, but not for them.
“Breathe, breathe,” Brittney’s saying to her.
“It’s a joke,” Izzy says. “I’m not the right material, I’m—they might put me at zombie prom, I mean, or let me be sweetheart of the woodshop if I give them enough cigarettes, or burn me in effigy at assembly, but—”
“They let her pick her own court,” Brittney says, looking away because this part isn’t going to go over well. “Since, you know. Last weekend.”
“Because of pity?”
“Because they all died, Izzy. The whole original court. As in really really dead, not coming back after the credits, April Fool’s. The empty seats and single roses at graduation kind of dead, yeah? The get-their-own-page-of-the-yearbook kind of dead. Their parents are all going to divorce and have affairs and wreck their cars now kind of dead. They’re not there anymore. And there’s not time any more for bids.”
“I’m not going to do it,” Izzy says. “You didn’t think I was, did you?”
Brittney doesn’t answer.
“Oh no. No no no,” Izzy says, pushing away, the benches slick, pure terror in her eyes.
“Think of what it would do to her if you won.”
“It’s a set-up, can’t you see? She picked girls who—we’ve . . . girls who worship at the nicotine altar. Girls who don’t have just one hair color. Girls who are suspiciously ethnic. Girls who, girls who poke holes in their faces, girls who aren’t worried what they’re going to look like when they’re twenty-five.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“I mean . . . what if she just wants to give everybody a chance, right? What if she’s feeling guilty for last weekend?”
“It was Billie Jean who went after her,” Izzy says. “Not a fairy godmother.”
“You’ve said it yourself. Slashers make final girls come into their own. Let their inner lights shine.”
“I said it like that?”
“You used to believe.”
“In horror.”
“But everything’s horror, isn’t it? Sometimes you just can’t see the blood.”
Izzy swallows, stares high up into the darkness.
“You wish she’d picked you, don’t you?” she says to Brittney.
“No, I—” Brittney says, digging in her purse for something.
A cigarette.
“Every girl’s dream, right?” Izzy says, leaning forward, elbows on knees.
Brittney’s trying to light her cigarette now, failing.
Izzy takes the cigarette, the lighter, breathes it alive. Passes it back.
“I’ve got a dress you could, you could—if you want,” Brittney says, and exhales a mean-girl line of smoke.
Izzy grins a tolerant grin, shakes her head no. Not so much in resistance as in wonder.
“I told you,” she says. “Social order’s crap this month. Fisherman pulled too many fish out at once. We’re all lost in the pond, now. Bumping into each other like, like bumper cars. Trying to figure out who goes where except somebody turned the lights out.”
Brittney chuckles.
“What?”
“I thought you were going to keep your metaphors straight this time.”
“Do they ask you questions, to win?”
“Questions?”
“Beauty pageant bullshit. ‘Do I like starving kids, if I had two wishes, what about the space travel, my stance on masturbation,’ all that?”
“Stance?”
“You know what I mean.”
“You get to go out at halftime, at the football game,” Brittney says, taking another drag. “In front of everybody.”
“In front of everybody,” Izzy repeats, taking the cigarette from her, getting thoughtful with it. Her fingers are trembling. But there’s the ghost of a grin at the corners of her mouth, now.
“So what’d you do last night?” Brittney says.
“Later,” Izzy says, kind of laughing about that particular story. “Who’d you do?”
“Slut.”
“Whore.”
“Got to get it while you can,” Izzy shrugs, breathing out smoke, and then jerks her head over to the
→ absolute crash of the gym door slamming back, hard enough that its handle powders some of the lacquered brick wall up, lets it hang in that spill of light then rush every direction as
→ Jake spills through the doorway, has to touch the ground with his lead hand to stay balanced.
In his other hand, that damn backpack.
“You get to have an escort, you know,” Brittney says as Jake flashes past, seeing them at the last moment, turning sideways to kind of eek his mouth out like he doesn’t know what’s happening here.
However,
→ doing a cartoon turnaround at the still-open gym door is a male coach, that Ken-doll looking one from before, in the hall. And another just like him, right behind. They’ve each got whistles cocked up in their mouths, hats pulled low, sunglasses pressed back to their corneas so they’re Agent Smiths, pretty much. Except in polyester shorts.
Izzy crushes the cigarette out by her boot, says to Brittney, “Play along here,” and then, before Brittney can even register it, Izzy stands, takes a long step out like to flag these coaches down, the bleachers not locked into place because nobody’s supposed to be in here.
The bench she puts her foot on, it slides with her foot.
Izzy yelps and throws herself forward, spills out onto the floor right in front of the two huffing coaches, and, just to sell it, she bites down on her lip hard enough to trail a line of blood out, even if she has to spit a couple of times to get the cut primed.
The first coach jumps her neatly and the second slides to an almost-stop, hugging her to keep from crushing her.
When he lets her go, she’s holding her knee.
“I think it’s, I think it’s,” she’s trying to get out, and we case these coaches, see that, of all things, they’re twins.
“She’s hurt,” Brittney says, swallowing her smile, crashing down to ‘help’ Izzy. Once there she flashes her eyes through the horizontal empty spaces between the benches, where they fold into each other.
In her POV, there’s somebody there, under the stands, watching, reaching forward with a finger to mash out the cherry of the cigarette Izzy didn’t quite kill.
It’s Jake, the smoke trailing up around his finger. But
he holds it there.
Go, Brittney says to him with just her lips, and Izzy convulses under her, in something a lot like pain, except, well, it’s really love.
Slow pan on that longsword in the trophy case, kind of catching it from all angles.
Dim in the glass reflection—sunlight all behind, so it’s as much shadow as reflection—is a body to attach this POV to, neither male nor female, and so faceless it might as well be wearing a fencing mask, or liquor-store pantyhose.
Still, we get it: somebody’s eyeballing that sword.
Thinking certain things.
In an empty hallway, that pigtailed girl who stuck her head in Izzy and Brittney’s bathroom earlier, she’s walking along with an armful of tests or copies or something. Not particularly happy, not sad, just going from one place to another.
What she can’t see behind her, in slow and dramatic motion, is Jake sliding around the corner, pushing off a wall of lockers, running hell for leather up behind her.
“Shit shit shit,” he’s saying.
Back to that corner he just rounded: those twin coaches, implacable, resolute, not out of breath at all.
One of them—they’re running too—hooks his hand on the corner somehow then extends his hand for his brother, who takes his hand rollerball-style, by the wrist, and gets swung around so fast, gaining fifteen feet in a heartbeat, easy.
The anchor twin nods about this and backs away. To cut Jake off from another hall, evidently, Jake who’s
→ slamming into Pigtails when she unaccountably turns right at the worst possible moment, her papers exploding into the air.
From that mess, Jake slides out, that coach’s fingers inches from the back of his shirt now.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he yells behind him, and, close on his face, we can see that this has gone beyond a prank, now. This is life or death for him. Unlike
→ the ho-humness of two combat boots swinging off the edge of a paper-sheeted bed.
It’s Izzy, in the nurse’s office.
The Last Final Girl Page 6