The Last Final Girl

by Jones, Stephen Graham

  Laughter. Groans.

  “But maybe the teachers will look away just for a minute, do you think?” Lindsay says. “Teachers, please, can you look away for a moment? We’ll be good, we promise?”

  Jamie pivots around to the crowd, his camera POV clicking on

  → Mr. Pleasance, politely clapping his completely bored agreement;

  → Mr. Victor, still wearing his lab coat like a skirt, raising his clapping hands to make a show his super-sincere school spirit, and, finally;

  → Mrs. Graves, raising her fist like Yes!

  The crowd swells with stomping, faster and faster, thunderous. This is really going to happen, the

  → drum line coming on hard and loud now, stepping out onto the floor,

  → one of the shirtless dudes crowd surfing.

  At the height of it all Lindsay leans down to the microphone.

  “But . . . none of you have a flame of pure school spirit, do you?”

  We wheel around behind her, a disorienting ride but it shows what’s in front of her, like magic: out in the stands, lighters come on everywhere.

  “Oh, good, good,” she says. “There’s so much spirit in the air today!” Lindsay says in her little girl voice. “Now, if one of you could just—”

  “Can we please get this over with already,” Izzy interrupts, stepping forward with her zippo.

  Lindsay slashes her eyes to Izzy but doesn’t lose her winning smile.

  “It’s only fitting,” Lindsay says, and directs Titan’s sword to Izzy.

  Izzy lights her lighter, Titan holds the sword over it, and it flares up, big enough that April slashes her hands out to Izzy and Mandy, pushing them back, keeping them away from this heat.

  “No, it’s gas!” she says to Titan, but her voice is lost in the craziness.

  And this sword, it does look pretty excellent in the darkness.

  Out of nowhere then, “Billie Jean” taps into Izzy from behind.

  She flinches away, embarrassed, and pushes him forward, past her.

  He comes right back, so she has to step aside,

  “Who are we playing?” she says to herself, “the John Carpenters?”

  Billie Jean goes spinning past, into Titan.

  He takes advantage, stabs his sword clean through it.

  → the no-joke point slicing right between Mandy and Jerry

  → the flame all scraped off, onto Billie Jean, who’s reacting just as the sword did to the flame, meaning he was soaked too, but

  → “No,” Mrs. Graves says, her clapping braking to a worried halt, “I told them they couldn’t do that part.” Still:

  → Billie Jean flares up, and, because he was just filled with rags, Titan’s sword has gone deep enough that the arm of his costume is deep in the chest, meaning

  → that sleeve’s lit as well, now.

  “Fire extinguisher!” April yells to the audience as Titan goes rolling out onto the gym floor, trying to douse these flames, but they’re fast. He’s a fireball.

  It’s terrible.

  He’s right at the feet of all the football players, too, who finally start taking their shirts off, trying to blanket Titan.

  Their jerseys are just as flammable.

  Finally a gout of dry whiteness clouds down onto Titan, and we track back up that stream to

  → Mrs. Graves, using this fire extinguisher like Jesse Ventura, and screaming behind it.

  The students around her step away.

  Titan’s out, is just smoking.

  “Is it Masters?” Izzy says, stepping in, fighting through, looking around.

  “The head, the head!” April’s screaming now. “He can’t breathe!”

  She goes to pull it off but has to fall back, the fabric still smoldering, her hands gummy with melted mascot fur.

  “Here,” an offscreen Jake says behind her, nudging her aside with the sword.

  He angles it into the neck, rips the head away, and inside it’s a mess, is the harshest gore since the opening scene.

  Skin baked down to bone, melted off, hair scorched, one eyeball wheeling around in terror.

  “Dead and Buried,” Izzy says to herself.

  “More like Cropsy,” Brittney says, right there beside her, and Izzy looks up to her, sees how shaken Brittney is.

  She takes her hand.

  “It was my flame,” Izzy says to Brittney.

  “You knew,” Brittney says, “how?” and Jamie settles his crosshairs on the two of them there like that and snaps his shutter on the sad scene, delivering us to

  → the Sheriff’s offices, Dante ushering a not-handcuffed Crystal

  Blake past a desk.

  “Dante?” the woman deputy says, standing from a desk, a beige phone still in her hand.

  Before she can say anything, a fire truck’s sirens whip past.

  “Another?” he says to the deputy.

  The deputy’s eyes tell the story.

  The school parking lot again. For the second time this day. It’s snarled with emergency vehicles, with media vans, with concerned parents.

  The sound of a helicopter blade whipping, whipping.

  A smoking gurney is being wheeled out to that helicopter, the police holding their hats to their heads, guiding these paramedics to the helicopter’s waiting door just as Alice Cooper comes on loud, telling us that school’s out for summer, even though the leaves are red and gold.

  We drift

  → inside with this music, to Principal Masters in his office, tranced out, bouncing a racquetball against the wall again and again;

  → Mrs. Graves walking the halls, looking in each doorway;

  → a fireman, smelling this long black tube;

  → Lindsay, dragging this heavy sword one-handed, the tip scraping along the floor;

  → Billie Jean, smoldering on his rope, motionless now;

  → mummy-faced Jake in the biology lab, having a Yorrick moment with a jar of pig baby;

  → what must be Mandy’s school photo on her locker.

  It’s X’d out, now.

  She walks up to it oblivious, opens it

  → delivering us to Izzy and Brittney and her mom, standing from the car in Izzy’s garage, Izzy still hauling that knee brace.

  “Well, in my day they just used rubbing alcohol or something,” Izzy’s mom is saying.

  Izzy slams her door shut.

  Brittney’s still shell-shocked, her eyes red from crying.

  “Maybe it was supposed to be more dramatic,” Izzy says. “The only pep rally visible from space.”

  “There was always a homecoming bonfire, I guess,” her mother says, pushing in to

  → the house.

  “And you still don’t have a date?” her mom continues, to Izzy.

  “Still?” Izzy says.

  “‘Anymore,’ whatever,” her mom says. “You’re young, you’ll heal. It’s part of it.”

  “Theresa,” Brittney says then, looking up to Izzy, with wonder.

  Izzy narrows her eyes at Brittney but doesn’t pursue.

  “And you never told me you were homecoming queen,” Izzy says to her mom. “I knew you grew up here, but that seems like, I don’t know. Vital information to pass along?”

  “I didn’t want to pressure you to succeed.”

  “Or highlight my many failings?”

  “About your escort,” her mom says. “Would you say there are prospects?”

  “The sheriff’s dead, Mom, and the janitor’s dying, and we just buried six kids last week. Do you really think my having a date for a stupid dance is really the key issue?”

  “Or is somebody trying to deflect?” her mom says.

  “I’m not going to win, Mom. We’re just there to make Lindsay look better. She practically said so.”

  “You’re a winner just for being in her court.”

  “Her court. Thanks for the support. You know she’s just stacking Jake in because he got hurt, right? Nobody can see his face, so everybody’ll have to be loo
king at her. It’ll be dramatic for the yearbook. They’re the perfect pair. The supermodel and the invisible man.”

  “In spite of all this social acumen, though—Brittney, will she have an escort?”

  “Ummm,” Brittney says.

  “I can go alone, Mom,” Izzy says. “There’s no shame in—”

  “Your father will take you. One of the girls in my court, her boyfriend had to ship out unexpectedly for the war, so her father stepped in. It was very nice, very proper, almost like a wedding. The crowd loved it. She probably should have won. I probably should have given the crown to her, except. Well. I only had the one, right?”

  “Mom. I’m not letting Dad anywhere near—”

  “I’ll make him . . . dress up,” Izzy’s mom says, and of course we know she’s saying she’ll keep him sober. “He’ll be so proud. His two homecoming girls. A family tradition.”

  “Well this should really be a night to remember,” Izzy says, jerking the refrigerator door open, blocking her mom from her view, from her life.

  “Theresa is long for Terry,” Brittney says, now. “And Terry is a boy’s name too.”

  “And—okay,” Izzy says. “Final girls have names that go both ways, AC/DC, and maybe that’s a social shield or something, keeps them virgins longer than the rest of us. Ripley, Blake, Mandy. I’m with you.”

  “Lindsay Theresa Baker,” Brittney says. “I remember it from third grade. Jake used to call her ‘Lieutenant,’ for her initials.”

  “So that just leaves me then, right?” Izzy says, taking a whole container of leftover something under her arm. “‘Izzy,’ buy me at Starbucks. Deflowered apple of her father’s eye. Cusses like a sailor who went to cussing school, smokes like a ballerina, drinks like a Nascar fan, studies like a . . . like you. Can you remember anybody like me on any final girl roster?”

  Brittney shakes her head no.

  “Then what am I doing up there?” Izzy says, shutting the refrigerator, walking away but we stay there, on the dry-erase board, her family’s running grocery list, evidently.

  Underlined with an angry slash: burritos?

  “I’m just saying,” Brittney’s saying, her and Izzy walking down the hill toward the river, Brittney carrying the leftovers now, Izzy the knee brace. “I don’t think it’s a slasher yet. One dead cop, one disfigured janitor. Those don’t a slasher make. I don’t even think either of them were having sex when they got it. Isn’t it supposed to be about all your friends dying, right? Until only you’re left, have to face your own personal demon?”

  “Careful what you wish for,” Izzy says, fighting a branch. “My friend is you.”

  Brittney slows, realizing this.

  “It’s Lindsay,” Izzy says, seeing the sheriff’s badge in the leaf litter. She steps on it, holds a branch aside for Brittney to pass. “Fucking karma,” she says to herself, about the badge, looking from it to Brittney, walking ahead, so alive. So not dead.

  “Karma?” Brittney calls back.

  “It’s Lindsay,” Izzy repeats, falling in. “Well, first, she’s the definition of batshit. And I say that as a certified crazy person. It takes one to know one. But second, I think she’s scared.”

  “Of losing the crown?”

  “She’s always had the crown, and, with school cancelled tomorrow, how many votes do you think are going to trickle in? No, what she’s scared of is that they never found the body.”

  “Billie Jean.”

  “She doesn’t think it’s over yet. She knows the genre better than she lets on, has to hide it because only losers get their thrills in the horror section, right? But she’s seen Maniac, New York Ripper, all the down and dirty stuff, all the video nasties. And she learned from it, like I did. She knows she’s still the perfect target, the source of imaginary revenge, the end result of some escaped lunatic’s twisted logic—”

  “Her dad’s.”

  “Yeah. But what she’s doing—she’s insulating herself the best way she knows. If it is all about the people around you dying, then she’s specifically chosen a group to be around that she doesn’t care about, right? That she probably thinks the yearbook would be better without. Crystal, who’s prettier than her. April, who’s smarter. Mandy, who’s trying to be her clone. And—”

  “And you.”

  “And me, her exact opposite. We’re all story padding. Bodies Billie Jean’s going to have to carve through to get to her. I should write a paper on it for Pleasance.”

  Brittney stops, looks back. “And you’re not worried?”

  “That little dumb show at the pep rally? She was overcompensating. Trying to tell the whole school she’s not afraid, that she faced Billie Jean down and lived to make jokes about it.”

  “Either that or calling him out,” Brittney says, almost stepping into the suddenly-there creek.

  Izzy pulls her back, barely.

  “Calling me out, more like,” Izzy says, and Brittney looks up to her.

  “Jake?”

  “She can have any guy she wants, and she chose him.”

  “But she’s—if you’re right, she’s setting it up so she’s the final girl of all the final girls, isn’t she? The queen of the final girls.”

  “If it even goes that far,” Izzy says, squatting down by her tree, ferreting a yellow ski rope up from the leaf litter. “But you’re right. This isn’t a slasher. Not yet.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Izzy looks across the water wistfully.

  “You know that moment in the high school romantic comedy where the bookworm reject charity case lets her hair down, takes her glasses off and walks down the stairs a stone cold fox on top of the world?”

  Brittney’s POV looks over at Izzy, shaking her hair around, pulling her Buddy Hollies off, the dying sun right behind her.

  “This is that,” Izzy says, and whips the yellow cord back,

  → our POV dizzying up above them, looking down on the two of them standing there, a blanket of leaf-litter hunting camo whip- ping away from the prone form of Billie Jean, staked to the ground with camping equipment.

  Brittney steps back, screams to make Janet Leigh roll over in her grave, the leftovers falling from her hands.

  Izzy grins, watching Billie Jean’s bloodshot eyes, seeming to drink this sound in.

  “He liked that,” she says. “Shit. And here I’ve just been feeding him burritos.”

  Brittney takes another step back, looks up to the house. Comes back to Izzy. “That’s—that’s why you needed the brace,” she finally manages to get out, about to either laugh or scream again, it’s hard to tell.

  “Lindsay’s right,” Izzy says, collecting the leftovers. “Billie Jean is coming back for her. With a little help from his friends.”

  “So . . . so is this a horror movie now, or a teen comedy?” Brittney says.

  “It’s an afterschool special,” Izzy says, Hoddering her head over to study Billie Jean. “Know what the take-home message is? Don’t fuck with Izzy Stratford.”

  “Can’t ‘Izzy’ be a boy’s name too?”

  “Shut up. I’m having a moment here.”

  “You are batshit,” Brittney says, impressed.

  “Got to be, these days,” Izzy says, and drops to one knee, cracks open the leftovers, Billie Jean lunging for them in his broken way.

  “He’s cute,” Brittney says, coming in beside Izzy.

  “Just don’t get too close,” Izzy says, and holds a spoonful across the void,

  → our POV lining up with Billie Jean’s slashercam angle: through two Michael-ish eyeholes, these two teen girls are right there, so close.

  His breathing accelerates, matches up with

  → Jamie’s. He’s still working his camera at school, just not the gym anymore, but the trophy case, Principal Masters and Mrs. Graves and Deputy Dante all there at the edge of this photo opportunity, the rest of the hall deserted.

  One-armed Lindsay is putting the sword back where it belongs.

  Flash, flash, and,
in the last pic she looks back, smiles this absolutely killer smile and we cut to

  → thick chains passing through two institutional door handles, then clanking tight, and somehow tighter.

  Backing up, it’s the front doors to the school.

  And it’s Dante applying the padlock, testing the doors, flexing his biceps.

  They’re tight. His arms and the chains.

  He holds the key up for Masters and Graves to see, then delicately places it on his tongue, swallows it.

  “But—but the dance, it’s tomorrow night,” Mrs. Graves says, looking around for support.

  “Call me about four o’clock,” Dante says. “Men’s bathroom at the Texaco. This shit ends tonight.”

  “Sh-sh—?” Mrs. Graves says, sure she’s hearing wrong. “Tonight? But what about the Texaco?”

  “Figure of speech,” Dante says. “No more deaths on my watch. There’s a new sheriff in town, people. One who doesn’t take any— it’s the end of the killings, I mean. Right here, right now. No more accidents, no more bodies. This is my town.”

  Principal Masters

  → directs his POV away from all this stupidity, to the helicopter banking away on the other side of town.

  So serene, so idyllic.

  We know where we are, though.

  This is the calm before the massacre.

  N o Intermission

  Across town, somewhere under that helicopter, down deeper in the trees than Dante can see is the creek again, always.

  We’re right down at the surface of it, looking across it, lingering long enough that it’s starting to feel like filler, like stock footage, ‘sunset in a small town,’ except . . . is that trash and flotsam on the far bank about to resolve into a Halloween mask?

  Is another body going to come floating past?

  Is Billie Jean going to step down into the water, his blank eyes neither grim nor hungry?