“And we can’t use our own phones,” Izzy’s saying, stepping away to look around.
“Excuse me? I was talking about Jake, you know? Jake-Jake? Dreamboat Jake? ‘Yeah, you’-Jake?”
“We can’t use our own phones to place this particular call,” Izzy says, holding up the voice-changer. “And I think Marty at the front desk’ll notice if we, you know, use a Darth Vader voice at the phone by her desk.”
Brittney shrugs, takes the voice-changer, and, pulling her V’d fingers sideways across her eyes, gives us a little “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life, life, life.”
Izzy gives her a humorless look.
“We can’t save her if we can’t call,” Izzy says, thinking aloud. “And, and we can’t call without Dante knowing it’s us. Shit. I hate the internet age. How are you supposed to get anything done? What about the days when you had to call the operator to see who was calling, and she had to look it up for like twenty minutes?”
“Oh, you mean those days before you were born?” Izzy glares at her.
“Dearly beloved,” Brittney says right directly to her, through the rig again, trying to get that explicit creak down just right.
Izzy takes the voice-changer away from her.
“Think,” she says. “What phone is there here at Slaughter High that’s clean enough to call the cops?”
“ . . . ain’t gonna let the elevator break, us, down,” Brittney answers, changing her own voice now.
“You’re not helping.”
Brittney shrugs, pops her gum, studies this courtyard they’re in, her POV settling on that janitor Izzy was watching earlier, guiding his mop bucket through some double doors, into the school.
“Teacher’s lounge?” Brittney tries, walking the halls with Izzy. “Cafeteria? Master Bates there”—the janitor—“he probably finds a few phones mixed in with the tampons and condoms.”
“He’s not a Chester, I don’t think. I think he’s like a, a Cropsy in waiting, just add fire.”
“You love him a little, don’t you? It’s the sweater, isn’t it?”
Izzy flashes her eyes across at Brittney like Brittney’s touched a nerve. “Cropsy’s the underdog. They all are. Just getting back what’s theirs. With interest. In blood. Have I taught you nothing?”
“Shh, shh,” Brittney says to all the children not in attendance around Izzy. “Randy’s about to go off.”
“It’s what Billie Jean’s doing too.”
“Watch your tenses there, missy. What’d they do to him to deserve all that killage, then?”
“I don’t know. But unicorn girl does.”
“ . . . Lindsay? Thought she rode a horse or something? Or is this phallic again? Everything’s phallic, right?” As they pass a locker with a large penis carved in it. “Especially high school.”
“Unicorn as in ‘pure.’ It’s something I wrote for Donald Pleasance—”
“He hates it when you call him that.”
“—it’s how golden age slashers were all basically marching orders for would-be princesses. ‘Be good,’ ‘stay chaste,’ ‘study hard.’ Or die the ugliest death Tom Savini can dream up. I used to think that’s why my dad was making me watch them all. Because he didn’t know how to talk to a girl, but still had hopes, you know?”
“And?”
“I paid attention to all the wrong parts, I guess,” Izzy smiles, taking them
→ around a corner, right into one of the twin coaches, splashing his coffee up into the air. Athletic dude that this coach is, he slithers away from the mess.
Still: oops.
This coach appraises them individually, not stepping aside yet.
“You didn’t have to do that to Jake’s face,” Izzy says. “It was kind of overkill, don’t you think?”
“He had a gun, Mrs. Spiccoli.”
“Oh, you’re funny too? Full package, right? Of double-mint?” She lets that settle. “It wasn’t his gun.”
“I didn’t look for a nametag, I just reacted.”
“Flying pork attack, three o’clock,” Brittney chimes in.
“It’s not as bad as it looked, either,” the coach says, stretching his neck a bit to look behind them at something very very interesting. Neither of them fall for it. “You gave your statements already?” he says.
“‘It was police brutality, Officer,’” Izzy recites.
“Coach brutality, Coach,” Brittney adds, kind of taking the punch out of it.
“He’ll be back sooner than you think,” the coach says, making motions to get out of this little tribunal.
“Happening a lot around here,” Izzy says, and the coach eyeballs her about this but doesn’t ask, just steps aside.
A few steps past, Brittney turns halfway around, waving: “Mr. Wrigley, Mr. Wrigley!”
The coach stops, absorbing this blow, and says, without turning around, “It’s Winkle.”
“When will he back?” Izzy says.
“Sooner than we think, right?” Brittney answers, her voice so cheery.
The coach is already walking away again, balancing his coffee high.
“Twins,” Izzy spits, coming back around to their walking talk.
“Always ganging up on you,” Brittney agrees. “I mean, present
company excluded.”
“I don’t think you’re a twin anymore if your brother’s dead.”
“Maybe we can call from his phone,” Brittney says, turning around to make sure the coach isn’t right there, but
→ in her POV, he is!
Except it’s not him. His brother.
We can tell by the clipboard he’s managing.
“Coach, coach,” Izzy and Brittney say, doing a double take, barely containing themselves until he’s gone.
“You think he heard?”
“It wouldn’t be fair to use their phone,” Izzy says. “Even if they do deserve it.”
“What, calling from their office would be a low blow?”
“Dante’s coming for whoever he connects the call to. Where would that put us in the karmic cycle, then?”
“Oh, Miss Boy Scout.” Knock-knocking on Izzy’s head, speaking up into her ear. “Excuse me, is Evil Izzy still in there?”
“It’s not about that,” Izzy says, brushing Brittney off. “It’s about survival. You do something cheap like that in a slasher, you pay for it in blood in the third reel.”
“And this is so a slasher, right? Thought that part was over already.”
“Slashers are never over. That’s just what they want you to think.”
“Then what were you telling Jamie last night?”
“You already just call him ‘Jamie?’ Does he know that?”
“What about Pleasance, then? His phone, it’s always right there. He gave me a C.”
“Does this matter to you at all?” Izzy asks.
“It’s Crystal,” Brittney shrugs. “For all we know, she did it, I mean. I don’t think anybody’d put it past her.”
“Not her style,” Izzy interrupts, their walk having taken them full-circle enough that they’re seeing the janitor again.
He looks up as if aware she’s watching him.
They pass, pass, Brittney holding onto Izzy’s arm, kind of skirting this janitor now.
“This isn’t a slasher,” Brittney says to Izzy, now. “You have to have dead teens everywhere for that. Not one old dead sheriff drowned in three feet of water. Anyway, Lindsay’s not ready for round two yet. She hasn’t had enough time to get some new issues.”
“Good point. Next installment’s college, likely. Whole new group of sacrifices, change of location, up the ante . . . unless the hook this time, for us, is that Billie Jean didn’t really die, right? Then pretend the credits never even rolled. Halloween II. Immediate continuation.”
“Other way, other way,” Brittney says, guiding Izzy through a random door when her POV catches Mr. Pleasance on the approach, reading a student paper as he walks, looking up a sliver of
a moment too late for his POV to be sure that’s Izzy or Brittney.
However, where Brittney’s escaped them to, that door she picked because it was closest, it opens onto the library.
“Shh,” the librarian says from her station.
Brittney and Izzy look around at this brave new world, then nod to Mr. Pleasance, passing by: we’re here like we said.
“Go on, say it,” Brittney says. “I saved our fine asses.”
“I’ve been here . . . ” Izzy says, nodding to herself, cataloging the shelves, the carrels, the tables. “Linda the Barbarian,” she says, about the librarian, “and,” pointing with her finger to the unmanned reference desk, “and . . . ”
Brittney shivers, looking at all these shelves, all these books.
“Stuart,” Izzy says then. “Stuart works here.”
“Worked,” Brittney corrects. “Maybe there’s a book here about tenses, think?”
“That’s it,” Izzy says, clutching Brittney into the closest empty aisle. “Dante’s already got him, so it couldn’t be him calling.”
“Shh,” the librarian says, somehow standing in the aisle with them now.
Izzy and Brittney startle into each other, push away slowly. “What, is she a ninja?” Brittney whispers.
“I told you, barbarian,” Izzy says, and pulls Brittney into a study carrel, walking backwards with her finger across her lips for the librarian.
“Stuart,” Izzy says again, her face close to Brittney’s.
Brittney’s popping her head up, meerkatting around for the librarian.
Izzy pulls her back down.
“And Stuart, he’s actually guilty,” Izzy adds, so excited by this.
“I know, I know!” Brittney fakes. “He almost shot the whole school up, right? We were so close to being famous . . .”
“Shh,” Izzy says, pulling her chin closer to the table top. “I’m saying we use his phone to spring Crystal.”
“That would be perfect, yes,” Brittney says. “I mean, can we Bill & Ted back in time, borrow it from him, or should I warm up the DeLorean?”
“Think I can do better than that,” Izzy says, standing, scanning, scanning
→ her POV settling on that pigtailed girl we’ve been seeing. She’s important after all.
“Hey, April,” Izzy calls, forgetting where she is for a moment.
“Shh,” everybody says to her.
Izzy and Brittney crash April’s private little study party. There’s still tissue shoved up her nose, from the impact with Jake.
“April,” Izzy says, leaning conspiratorially across the table.
“Do I know you?” April whispers, leaning away, keeping an eye on Brittney as well.
“You told us about Lindsay coming back,” Brittney says. “Thank you! Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Yes?” April says, her finger still in her book like she can click her heels, go back to that place.
Izzy takes both her hands in hers, though.
“We’re sisters now,” Izzy says.
“Oh, yeah,” April says. “You mean because neither of us rate on the social scale? Or is it that we’ve dated all the same boys? Or our fashion decisions? Our hair styles? Our grades, our future plans? Do I want to be a full-time skank too when I grow up? You’re right, I do. Gosh, you’re right. Thank you, thank you. Do you want to get matching bracelets now, or share make-up? BFFs, right? Or does that stand for what it actually sounds like?”
And she gives Izzy’s hands a meaningful squeeze.
Izzy takes her hands back calmly. Has to work her lips to keep from snapping back.
“You thought this was going to be easy, didn’t you?” April says.
“I don’t even know what this is,” Brittney says, watching the librarian watch her back.
“So what do you need?” April says. “Is this course-work related, or does it involve files from the office? Files cost more.”
“We need to get into the biology lab,” Izzy says.
April twitches her eyes, doing the mental calculations necessary to say “Sixth period is AP. Can’t you just wait?”
“Pretend we can’t,” Izzy says.
“Shh,” the librarian says in passing, rapping her knuckles on their tabletop, daggering her eyes to all three girls.
“Shhh-what?” Izzy says, at full voice, rapping her knuckles on the table as well. “Shhhrink my ass to fit in this dress again, like ten years ago? Shhhrooms are good for you? Shhhrodinger’s cat is dead?”
Brittney looks away, ovals her mouth out not to smile, and Izzy just glares up at the librarian.
“What do you think is the worst thing I can say to you, dear?” the librarian asks.
“‘Shhhower with me?’”
“You remind me of another seventeen-year-old girl I used to know.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Me,” the librarian says, and walks away, Izzy wordless, pinned to her seat.
Across from her, April’s smiling, can’t seem to stop.
“So what exactly do you need to get this done, businesswoman?” Izzy asks, dejected.
“I just got it,” April says, and’s
→ already walking into the biology lab in that here-from-the- office way, her pigtails making her invulnerable to suspicion.
All the begoggled students are cutting on pigs, some of their faces spattered with blood.
April goes sideways to slip around one of them, walks efficiently up to Mr. Victor, at his desk applying expiration-date labels to the pig baby jars (“Never! It’s formaldehyde!—Dr. V”).
“Yes, Ms. Ripley?” Mr. Victor says.
“So he didn’t break them all, then?” April says, taking a jar in her hand.
“Give him time,” Mr. Victor says, holding his hand across for whatever paper April’s here to deliver, and April ‘remembers,’ has to shift hands to pass it across, thoughtlessly chock the jar she was inspecting up under her arm.
“April, April—” Mr. Victor says, standing, grabbing for the jar, but April’s already spinning away like to see what he’s worried about here: a spider? is her pen exploding in her chest pocket?
Just a jar full of pig baby, ma’am.
It shatters hard and April jumps away from the splash, knocking her wrist harder than necessary into a line of them, tipping another bottle over into open air.
Mr. Victor slips forward, just catches it by his fingertips, but the reach—a suspicious crunch involved with that, that he’s already grimacing about—has left him stretched awkwardly across his tall desk, so that he can’t see April stepping aside, extracting a number two pencil from behind her ear, using the eraser to nudge another jar off the back of the counter.
It explodes, splashing as high as the chalkboard.
“I’m so, so sorry, Mr. Victor,” she says, her voice not at all matching with the face the rest of the class is seeing through their goggles.
She coughs once, into her hand, and, one by one the class gets it, a nod passing between them, and they start coughing, gagging.
“Vent hood, vent hood,” Mr. Victor waves, and April reaches over, expertly turns it on with her pencil, blinking either innocently or in an evil way, it’s hard to tell.
That fan starts sucking, moving what little hair Mr. Victor has left on his head.
“Did I mess up class?” April says earnestly, in a little-girl voice, “here, let me,” and she takes the jar Mr. Victor managed to save, sets it up with the rest. “But I think it’s on your—” she says, nodding to his crotch, somehow wet with formaldehyde. “Is that, is that bad for. . . it?”
Mr. Victor closes his eyes in mental pain,
→ passes Izzy and Brittany, getting a superlong drink from the fountain.
A moment after, April’s swishing by.
“See you at the pep rally, sister,” she says, and doesn’t look back. “I kind of hate her,” Izzy says.
“Not the only one,” Brittney says, pointing with her chin across the hall, to
→ wh
at must be April’s upper-level locker.
It got the same school photo/magnetic crown treatment.
Only, somebody’s used a sharpie to drag an X across April’s face.
“Wasn’t me,” Izzy says, stepping wide around it, her hands up by her shoulders like that’s proof of her innocence, and
→ moments later they’re stepping through shattered glass and baby pig, using forceps to open the big drawer of Mr. Victor’s desk.
It’s where he puts whatever he’s confiscated.
Izzy digs, sorts, digs some more—tangled ear buds, a frisbee, cell phones, a plush wine bottle, something that might be sexual in nature, that Brittney won’t touch when Izzy tries to pass it back— and finally comes up with the distinctive cell Mr. Victor took from Stuart the day before.
She punches a button and the screen lights up.
“Happy birthday to me,” she says, sitting down behind the desk with Brittney, their two sets of boots Batman and Robin’d up on the wall.
“Happy birthday to Crystal,” Brittney corrects.
“Nine, one . . . one,” Izzy narrates, shutting her eyes to punch that last digit, sending us
→ winding down all the phone lines to a female mouth, a headset microphone bobbing before it.
“Please state the nature of your emergency,” that dry voice says, and we hear a magazine page turning.
Back in the biology lab, Brittney holds the voice-changer across like a mike.
“The sheriff was fun,” Izzy says. “But over too fast. Don’t worry, though . . . I’ll be back.”
She raises her shoulders to Brittney for an idea but Brittney’s got nothing, so Izzy hangs up, turns around to put the phone back, and
→ in her POV, the janitor’s standing there leaning on his mop, and, it’s hard to tell with the hat, the coveralls, but . . . is that Ron Jeremy?
Surely not.
But maybe?
“Somebody reported a spill?” he says with that distinctive Queens lilt.
“We were just—we were just,” Brittney says, clambering up with the desk’s help, dropping Stuart’s phone back into the prize drawer, shutting it unslyly with her knee.
Izzy stands behind her, trying to hide the voice changer.
The Last Final Girl Page 9