The Last Final Girl

by Jones, Stephen Graham

  “There’s Zodiac”—reaching down to tap it, in Thriller—“but it’s more serial killer, if that’s what you’re into.”

  “You tell me what I should be into,” he says, catching her eye for a moment, in case the single entendre go unappreciated.

  Brittney bites her lower lip deep into her mouth, pivots like a model at an auto show, and manages to bend down mostly in front of Jamie, come up with a battered VHS of My Bloody Valentine.

  “It’s a love story,” she says, batting her eyes playfully.

  “Sounds romantic,” Jamie says, looking across to the front of the store, as if for Brittney’s manager.

  “There’s a special promotion this week, too,” Brittney says, reeling the video back, tucking it into her apron. “Home delivery for holiday-themed bodycount movies from the eighties—but only if they’re Canadian. We’re hoping to attract a very specific kind of customer, I guess.”

  “I do have a VCR I haven’t used in a while.”

  “Those kind of units,” Brittney says, “they need constant attention.”

  Jamie smiles.

  “Still got that camera?” Brittney asks.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, no reason,” Brittney says, practically flipping her skirt when she bounces away, except she’s wearing pants.

  Jamie gets the idea.

  Also getting the idea is some tall, leery dude standing in the Adult section but peering across genres, watching all this. Putting it in the spank bank for later.

  “Here,” Jamie says to him, and flips Driller Killer up into his chest—fumble, fumble, catch—leaving us to wonder if he knows that movie or if this was just random, and we cut ahead a handful of minutes,

  → to that leery dude setting Driller Killer down at Brittney’s register, his eyes all about her unbuttoned button.

  She pushes the business card she was fondling back under the cash drawer, but not before we see a handwritten address.

  “Name?” she says, fingers cocked over the keyboard, tracking from Driller Killer up to this dude then pulling her eyes away, looking past him, her POV tracking Jamie, ducking out the exit door

  → but the leery dude just smiles, watching her. Or, parts of her.

  Surreptitiously, Brittney punches the manager assistance bell.

  “Stay away from that camp . . . ” the guy finally Crazy Ralphs out, smiling behind it, sure that he’s found the magic key for the two of them, that’s he making a connection.

  “I’m doomed, right?” Brittney says, on autopilot here, still looking past this dude, the assistant manager approaching.

  “How old are you?” the dude asks back, Brittney’s POV on

  → Jamie again, retreating alongside the front windows of the video store, lobbing the cap from his just-bought coke at the trashcan.

  It rims out.

  He looks both ways like for witnesses. There aren’t any, but still, good guy that he is, he ferrets the cap up from the parking curb, steps over to drop it into the trashcan, our POV suddenly in that trashcan, so we can look up from low enough to see Jamie’s little chuckle of surprise at what’s in there.

  Or it could be satisfaction.

  Or serendipity: there’s a sword in play already.

  Now there’s a mask, too.

  All we need to complete a holy trinity is

  → Mandy Kane some indefinite amount of time later. Long enough for it to be a lot darker, anyway, and the night has a feel like it’s been in swing for a bit, as established by Mandy, standing from the open door of a car, her hair mussed, shirt untucked, some mellow smoke curling up around her.

  She reaches back in for Jerry to hand her her barberpole tights and stands into them, snugging them up her thighs, her POV studying the posh house the party’s going on at, the silhouette of some guy in a swimsuit running along a peak of the house, cannonballing off the backside

  → into a swimming pool, barely avoiding both the tiled edge of the pool and a guy floating on his back there like an otter, his beer on his chest.

  The pool gulps the cannonballer in, the inevitable splash misting out across the various beer drinkers and hellraisers, not even one of them aware of a suspicious shape past the open gate of the fence around the backyard, in the turnrow of the corn field. A shape very possibly wearing a pale mask of some sort, and carrying something dull and heavy down by its right thigh.

  The party mutes, becomes a

  → heart, beat; heart, beat

  → and we’re close on this masked face, now—Billie Jean, hell yeah—his face now moving slightly, left to right, so his twin-eyehole POV can track a careless Lindsay working the crowd along the edge of the pool. She’s in a sarong and bikini top and heeled sandals, all matching of course, her hair perfect, her smile even moreso.

  “Look, I’m moonwalking!” somebody yells—probably while styling it off the roof—and Billie Jean’s POV tears away from Lindsay, to

  → not Izzy, but we’re in the car with her now, so who knows. Maybe he was thinking about her.

  Izzy’s smoking but having to hang her head out the window to do it. Because it’s not her car.

  What’s coming through the stereo at high-volume is—get this— “Just Like Jesse James.”

  Izzy’s singing with Cher for all she’s worth, drumming the dash, shooting fake six-guns, smoking like a pool hustler. It all adds up to

  → her POV registering somebody standing in the road a moment too late, so that, for the second time this night, a bumper of her car nudges into that fingerswidth of loose jean fabric at somebody’s knees.

  Except this somebody has to step back to keep it from being worse.

  It’s Ben.

  He climbs into the passenger seat.

  “You’re smoking in her car,” he says, still wet and not even slightly happy, the grinder in his lap now, its battery light flashing yellow, the blade spinning each time he taps the trigger.

  “And you’re sitting in her leather seat with wet clothes, Mr. Haute Tension.”

  He shrugs, stabs a button on the radio, killing Jesse James taking us right into “She’s not There,” just ramping up.

  “What is this, oldies night?” he says, giving up, then, remembering: “You were there, weren’t you? ‘One school mascot please, and, can you make it well-done this time?’”

  “It wasn’t funny.”

  “You love this stuff.”

  “I love it on video. You didn’t see him.”

  “Accidents happen.”

  “Except this wasn’t one.”

  “In your wet dreams.”

  “Just don’t go down by the creek for a few days, okay?”

  “It’s not deep enough by our house anyway.”

  “Yeah, and I suppose my vodka just turns to water all on its own down there?”

  Ben doesn’t acknowledge this. “Promise?” Izzy insists.

  “Tired of it anyway,” Ben says. “Ready to graduate to bigger shit. That high school’s never going to know what hit it, when I get there.”

  Izzy looks over to him, really evaluates him. Enough that she doesn’t burst his bubble here.

  He catches her watching him, scowls.

  “So you think you’re going to win the crown?” he says. “Get to be queen slut for the night?”

  “That’s Mom’s job,” Izzy says, and both of them kind of smile.

  “But no, I don’t have a chance in hell. Dad’s my date, you know?”

  “Serious?”

  “As the heart attack he’s working up to.”

  Ben nods, considering this. Staring straight ahead, their shared POV showing the metal sculptures of their house taking shape in the headlights.

  “You’re not coming back again after graduation, are you?” Ben says, our angle on him through the side glass, so we can see what he’s hiding: that he’s actually kind of serious, here. And absolutely terrified.

  “Why would I?” Izzy answers back, then wishes she could reel it back in. “I mean, I guess I’
ll have to, to play good aunt to all the little Bens you’ll be fathering your sophomore year, right?”

  “Me neither,” he says, still looking out the window. “I’m never coming back here. No matter what she says.”

  “Come live with me,” Izzy says, waiting for the garage door to reel itself up. “Me and Brittney are going to have this rocking apartment, and go to concerts all the time, and date tattoo artists to get free ink. I’m sure there’ll be a high school near.”

  “I’m going to be in the basement,” Ben says, standing all at once from the car, before they’re even in the garage.

  Izzy watches him walk through the headlights into the house, and dials the volume down on the radio, looks down the slope behind their house, so that her imaginary POV is tunneling down through the brush and darkness, hurtling towards the creek and what we know’s there, under a blanket of fake leaves:

  → a red-rimmed eye, slamming open.

  Back to Izzy’s face, breathing deep on her cigarette, the car still idling in front of the empty garage.

  A hand reaches around her neck, plucks her cigarette, drops it.

  Mom.

  Izzy sits up straighter, looks ahead, into the garage.

  Her dad’s there, barefoot in a poorly-fitting suit, drink in hand.

  “Thought we were doing wardrobe rehearsal tonight?” Izzy’s mom says, opening the door.

  Izzy’s POV looks down to the brake and the gas pedal, side by side, so easy, then up to her father, just standing there drunk and stupid, and all we can hear is her breathing, and, in that, her deliberation.

  She finally kills the car, steps up from it.

  “This should be fun,” she says, and, before following her mom inside, she stops to grind out the cigarette on the driveway, look around one last time, her POV suspecting . . . a shape in the trees?

  Either way, she walks backwards into the garage, then brings the door down between her and us, so that at the end she’s just combat boots.

  Then nothing.

  The wind whistles through the metal sculptures of her dark house, and the cigarette she ground out, it glows back on and we’re right on top of it, as if curious that this can happen, though we’re also not sure if we’re a lumbering POV or not.

  A jarring cut later—lost in darkness, like that cigarette died— we’re looking through a video camera at the out-of-control party out in the spooky corn fields.

  We’re not in the corn, though, but are following some girl’s ass, her skirt not that long, her heels uselessly tall.

  And, that girl?

  She feels this attention, turns around: it’s April, her hair down, her clothes not at all her usual nerdware, the

  → cameraman complimenting her with a “Sa-andy,” doing the Travolta shock down to his knees.

  It’s Davis, from English class.

  “Got that right, stud,” April says, and drops an imaginary cigarette, looks away like it’s hot and she’s bored, her hand coming over like the most natural thing, to unbutton the top button of her too-tight blouse.

  The camera’d POV zooms back in, drawing closer to this action, closer, finally close enough that April can lean forward, plant a fat sloppy kiss right on the lens, smearing the already unfocused image of her, so we pull back to

  → “Shit, April!” Davis is saying, pulling his camera down “I thought you were cool now?”

  “Really?” she says, taking this insult in stride. “I never thought you were,” and when Lindsay walks by, hugging April’s shoulder in some ‘sisterly,’ ‘hopeful’ way we go with her, kind of drop into her

  → privileged POV, so we can see the party’s reaction to her: they all love her, want to be next to her, want to be seen by her, are glad just to go to the same high school as her.

  “Final girl high five!” some guy yells, and April touches her palm to his.

  “Michael Jordan sucks!” another says, but somebody punches him in the chest, says, “Michael Jackson, ass hat.”

  Another walks backwards in front of her, singing, “I always feel like, somebody’s wa-atching me . . .” which cues up that song’s intro synth, either on the stereo system or the soundtrack, it’s hard to tell, but it goes unnaturally long before the lyrics start, long enough for

  → Mandy to ask, “Where’s Jake?” her make-up fry-daddied, her eyes mellow yellow.

  “Home for his beauty rest,” Lindsay says, shrugging. “Doctor’s orders . . . don’t want tomorrow night to be anything less than perfect, do we? And”—Lindsay adds, reaching across to touch up Mandy’s face—“is this really the image we want to project, you think, or . . . surely it’s not a tactic to appeal for votes, is it?”

  “Ballot boxes are locked in the school,” Jerry says.

  Lindsay appraises Jerry, her face calm and tolerant, and she looks calmly away, a practiced gesture, it seems,

  → her aloof POV settling on Crystal over by the pool, talking to some Ponyboy of an underwear model, reaching across to guide her long hair over her shoulder, out of the way. She’s in shorts that would make Catherine Bach blush, an almost long enough white t-shirt, and old brown cowboy boots, making beautiful such a ca- sual affair

  → that she—Lindsay—is about to eviscerate Jerry with words, it looks like, when he’s saved by a wall of water rising from the pool, everybody there recording this with their phones, Lindsay screeching away.

  “I can’t get my arm wet!” she screams, but it’s lost, and then the Rockwell cues up properly as we pan out to the corn field again, no shape there anymore. Just menace.

  Back in the backyard, one of the refugee football players shucks his shirt, shields Lindsay back towards the dryness of the patio just as a rumbling sifts down over the party.

  Not thunder . . . footsteps?

  Yep: a lineman absolutely launches off that last eave of the house, still pedaling even in the air, like he’s going to need every inch of distance he can coax out of this jump.

  It’s nothing new for this party, except, this time, he’s cradling a bikini-clad girl in his arms, and the way she’s writhing against him, it’s not exactly helping their balance.

  People scream, fall back, but the two suicides make it, somehow.

  More than that: the lineman comes up with the girl’s bikini top

  in his teeth, shakes it in his mouth, everybody close enough pouring their beer onto the monster he now officially is, the topless, holding- herself girl getting some of that fountain action herself.

  “Talk about Gorillas in the Mist,” April says, her new and brave outfit evidently not working the magic she thought it was going to. We can tell because she’s nervously braiding her hair back into pigtails.

  But maybe it is working?

  A football player is suddenly running toward her, scooping her onto his shoulder, running for the half wall that leads up onto the roof, but

  → close-up and in jangling motion, we see her hiking her already short skirt up to the danger zone, reaching in and

  → leaning back in this football player’s two-arm hug, a small- caliber pistol right in his face, both her arms behind it like she’s on the range.

  “Whoah, January, June, Ms. September, whatever,” he says, setting her down gently.

  “It’s April,” April says. “But thanks for the effort.”

  She watches him back off, hikes her dress back up to snug the pistol high on her thigh.

  “My father calls it a chastity belt,” she says, snapping the garter holding the pistol up. “What do you think?”

  “We’re just having fun,” the football player says, his hands still up, fully in view. “Listen, I’ve got a game tomorrow, you know? And—and my dad, if I don’t get to play, he’ll—”

  “Go,” April says, waving his boring self away, already looking somewhere else:

  → at Lindsay, studying her.

  Lindsay raises her good hand to the one in the sling, gives April a polite golf clap, though the way she’s biting her bottom lip, she’s n
ot just completely in approval here.

  “Gonna make a great nun-slash-assassin someday,” a thicknecked rich boy says, sidled up next to April somehow.

  April turns, evaluates him and his friend, the friend shirtless and in charge in a way that means this is his party. It’s the kind of swagger a young Brad Wesley could pull off without trying: days spent on the links, nights spent in hot tubs, wine with dinner, and dinner lasts for hours.

  “Bogey,” April says, naming him for us.

  “You got a, you know, a permit for a weapon that dangerous?” Bogey says, pointing to her skirt with his mixed drink hand.

  “You gonna take it away from me?” April says.

  “I just might at that,” Bogey says, April never even for an instant breaking eye contact with him, at which point glass breaks offscreen and an octopus shadow passes across the pebbled cement, screaming the whole way, a bikini top drifting down.

  A few steps away, Jerry plucks that top from the air, gets what’s probably his trademark evil grin, and passes it to Mandy, who slides it through her left sleeve hole, settles it in place then lifts her arms for Jerry to shimmy her top off.

  She turns around, kissing him deep as her nimble fingers tie the bikini string behind her back.

  Close-up on their mouths, both kissing and speaking.

  Mandy: “Is she watching?”

  Jerry’s POV ratchets around so as to keep this kiss going. He finds Lindsay, sneering.

  “Screw her,” he says right into Mandy’s mouth, and

  → we’re looking at her back, can see her quit tying her top, the strings dangling now, everybody around the pool chanting for them to take it farther, meaning none of them are aware of the dim outline of Billie Jean, standing ominous and judgmental up on that launching pad of an eave above them all.

  Just watching. A sword rising in silhouette from his middle.

  The song coming on strong now, definitely from the house speakers, is “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor.”