Jerry’s has a football helmet and a full bottle of beer.
Those helmets slam together again, the sound there this time like it should be, violent and delicate at the same time, with the same crash.
One of the players doesn’t get up from the mud.
We angle up on the crowd, silent now, standing, hands over their hearts, the cheerleaders all taking a knee,
→ one dad in particular standing up at the front rail like he’s either about to jump over or run the other way, a woman at his arm, holding it tight, keeping him there, and then comes a voiceover, a girl we maybe know, reciting lines:
“Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.”
Up in the empty side of the announcer’s booth, we can see that hurt player through the wet glass, but are having to look through three reflected faces to do it: Izzy, Lindsay, Crystal.
We can’t see their dresses, not even really their hair.
Izzy turns her reflection over to Crystal, says, impressed, “Did you just make that up?”
“AP English,” Lindsay says, keeping her eyes straight ahead. “Pleasance?” Izzy asks.
“He lets us grade y’all’s papers if we promise not to tell,” Crystal says mischievously, leaning forward a bit to see
→ that hurt player, standing with help, coated in mud.
The crowd screams like it hasn’t been screaming before and we give them their celebration—they deserve it, deserve for at least one teen to stand back up this month—then go wider, hover on the scoreboard.
It’s halfway through the second quarter, zero to blinking zero, and all around the perimeter of the fence, spaced evenly, their hats in those clear plastic bags, are Dante’s officers, gripping their shotguns, and, closer, closer, there’s Dante, at the left edge of the stands, near- est the field. And he’s hardly smiling, is rolling his toothpick in his mouth, is
→ now at a different, black and white angle. In a set of ghostly crosshairs, the rain all frozen around him.
Snap.
Dante’s strobed silver, looks over to Jamie.
“Jackie Blue,” Dante says.
“Jamie Lee,” Jamie says back, not really grinning.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“We need to talk.”
“Sure,” Jamie says, lowering his camera. “Can I just—?”
“You were the last one seen with her. And we haven’t been able to find you all day.”
“Deadline. Last night was big news. Midnight oil went all the way to that five o’clock whistle.”
Dante smiles, takes Jamie by the scruff of his shirt, slams him closer all at once.
“Should have asked me who,” Dante growls. “Who was the last one you were seen with. Isn’t that your first W? ‘Who, what, where, when, why?’”
“You’re right,” Jamie says, looking out at the game, Dante’s hand just on his shoulder now. “I’m the reporter. You’re the small town law enforcement. I guess when I write this up, I can characterize you whichever way I think best, yeah?
“Characterize this,” Dante says, throwing Jamie forward, into the muck.
Jamie splats to the ground, his camera cracking open in some bad way.
“Don’t get up,” Dante tells him, and says into his shoulder mike that he’s got a person here of not much interest, really, but let’s confine him anyway. “Oh, and yeah,” Dante adds. “He’s kind of a clumsy one.”
“Clumsy, gotcha,” a woman’s voice comes back.
“You can’t, you can’t,” Jamie says, wiping his mouth, not standing, scrabbling for his camera, and we can tell by his eyes that he’s not speaking to Dante but for
→ the people at the rails behind Dante, watching this. Waiting.
Dante doesn’t even consider turning around, just removes his toothpick for once, talks loud enough that they can all hear: “In spite of my best efforts, a lot of these people have lost their sons and daughters this last week. They’ve lost friends and family. And right now I’m the only one standing between them and you, son. I don’t know for sure if you’re involved or not, but right now you’re the best I got. And that might be good enough for tonight. In this small town, anyway.”
The people behind Dante slash their eyes down at Jamie and walk on, ferrying their nachos and cokes up the aluminum steps, into the heavier and heavier rain.
Dante nods, looks away when the woman deputy hauls Jamie up roughly, taking extra care to accidentally grind his camera into more pieces than it already is.
“This is brutality,” Jamie voices-over.
Dante smiles, watching the game again, his toothpick back in its place, his POV tracking a ball spiraling downfield, a Hail Mary if there ever was one, the Bulldog receiver rising up to meet it, catching it in the chest with both hands and splashing down hard on his back, at the Titan twenty.
Dante chocks his shotgun under his arm, claps loudly, and
→ the visiting head coach looks up to the Titan stands, cheering this Bulldog play on, and he nods to himself, spits, reseats his wet hat and turns back to the game.
Lindsay’s standing at the metal door that will let them out of the booth for halftime, her dress shrouded under a football-player-sized Titans rain jacket.
Izzy and Crystal are covered up as well, though something about Izzy’s hair is different.
Lindsay’s studying her make-up in the mirrored back of the small square window, but now her POV’s mostly on Crystal, just sitting there.
“What was it like?” Lindsay says back to her.
Crystal turns up to Lindsay, then comes down to Izzy, says, “What do you know?”
Izzy swallows.
“What was in the papers,” Lindsay says for her. “Some freak with a bag over his head and a machete in his hand, a to-do list about eight kids long.”
“Nine, counting me,” Crystal says. “He was my big sister’s ex. Kept trying to pop in, play like he was swimming in the victim pool too, but then sneak out, do his thing. Wasn’t that hard to figure out.”
“If you’re watching on a screen it’s not,” Izzy chimes in. “If you’re just in one room of a house, though, you don’t know who’s who in America, right?”
“I was just collateral damage,” Crystal goes on. “I figured it out all by myself, but they’d left me behind, because I wasn’t old enough. So I snuck out, found them, but then Rex—he was this other perv— he thought somebody was coming, and didn’t want me to get caught out yet, so we fake kissed in the hay, so whoever it was would just keep walking. Except, well.”
“It wasn’t just anybody else,” Lindsay finishes.
“And his hands up my shirt weren’t all that fake,” Crystal shrugs. “I guess I looked enough like her, though. To the first perv, I mean. Not the second.”
“Bag Head,” Izzy fills in.
“I shouldn’t be here, either,” Crystal says, and parts the front of her rain coat, scooches her short dress up past her boy shorts to show her stomach. Her no-joke scar.
“He liked to heat his machete up first,” she says, smoothing her dress back down over her thighs.
“It made the wounds cauterize, not bleed out as fast. Saved my life and ruined it all at once. Doctor says if I ever get pregnant, that skin there might split, go all spontaneous cesarean, all chest-bursty. Pretty great, yeah?” Then, to Izzy: “Still wish it was you, brave girl?”
“I’m so sorry,” Lindsay says.
“Long ago and far away,” Crystal says, shrugging it off. “To keep any aliens from spurting up from my stomach, though, I get all the birth control I can handle, anyway. That allows certain . . . freedoms. So long as I don’t ever decide to grow up, things are going to be pretty fine.”
“Did she kill him?” Izzy says. “My sister?”
Izzy considers her words, says, “If you were a surrogate for her, for him, then—”
“—your
sister was the natural final girl,” Lindsay finishes, asking the question as well.
Crystal studies
→ the field, a Titan runningback breaking free of the line, running hard for maybe ten yards before the horde closes in on him, swallows him to the ground, yellow flags arcing through the air like dead canaries in the rain.
“I didn’t get to,” Crystal says, looking up to Izzy, then Lindsay.
“But you weren’t—” Lindsay says.
“He should have killed me then,” Crystal says. “I wanted that gas can, that match, that righteous kill. Now I’m in the sequel but never had the right kind of closure.”
“You lived,” Izzy says.
“He killed the good part of me,” Crystal says. “Took it with him to hell.”
Lindsay’s just staring at Crystal.
Izzy scooches her hand over, to touch Crystal’s, but Crystal looks down to this laughable effort, just smiles.
“Not to speak too ill of the dead either,” Crystal says, turned away from Lindsay for this, “but there’s a reason your boyfriend wasn’t much use last weekend. Against Billie Jean, I mean.”
“What?” Lindsay says, her fingertips to the hollow of her chest.
“Crystal, no,” Izzy hisses.
Crystal’s just smiling into her drop-dead beautiful reflection, though.
“It’s because virgins are the only ones who are any good against a real slasher,” Crystal voices-over, her grin in that glass sharp and mean.
“But—but we’d been together since seventh grade!” Lindsay says. “You didn’t, you didn’t move here until ninth.”
Crystal shrugs, the answer too obvious to say.
“Bitch,” Izzy says, staring out the glass now too.
“Survivor,” Crystal corrects, and then the walkie-talkie on the counter before them crackles alive.
“Girls, girls!” Mrs. Graves is saying, so that Izzy leans forward, for an angle on Mrs. Graves, standing by the Cadillac, the roof ratch- eting back.
“I think the rain’s going to stop for us!” she screams over the roar of the crowd, and
→ yep: the drops are more scattered now, umbrellas folding in the stands, the scoreboard under two minutes now, and counting down.
“Well,” Lindsay says, her eyes wet, lips tense.
Crystal stands, faces her.
“You look good,” she says to Lindsay. “You’ll win for sure.”
Lindsay’s just staring heat at her.
“We all grow suicidally beautiful at the beginning of October,” she quotes back at Crystal.
Crystal smiles a bring-it-on smile and follows Lindsay out the door, leaving Izzy for one last look out at the serene football field, long enough to say, “Suicidal, anyway,” and then
→ they’re under the stands, still in their bulky raincoats, walking along a concrete path, their heads ducked like it’s a Mean Joe Green tunnel they’re passing through, from darkness to light, Dante the guard at the end of that tunnel, his back to them, his face dipped down to his shoulder mike.
“She’s what?” he’s saying into it, turning, seeing these three slow- motion girls approaching, his eyes about as close to what would have to be panic, on him.
“Stay here,” he says to them, holding Lindsay by the shoulders to make this stick, then speaking into his mike: “Rodge, you and Cliff, under the stands, now. I want you to personally carry these three girls to my car, you got that? Rodge?”
Dante starts to walk away, comes back to the girls.
“My officers are on the way, you just need to stand right here, and don’t let anybody approach, got it? Scream if they do, okay? And don’t stop screaming.”
“Th-thank you,” Lindsay says for all three, and then Dante’s running, Lindsay’s face instantly shifting back to magazine-cover mode.
“Everybody wants to ruin our special day, don’t they?” she says to Crystal and Izzy, and, of the three of them, Izzy’s the only one to stop, track Dante for a few steps, as if she can tunnel ahead
→ to where he’s going: the skewed, shaky image of that woman deputy, butterflied open in the backseat of her cruiser but still alive somehow, the blue and red lights above her slowly rolling, her eyes open, staring above, through the headliner, at
→ a football hanging forever in the misty air like it’s that same punt from hours before.
It tumbles through the darkness and leftover rain, through the stadium lights, and, miles below it the clock on the scoreboard zeroes out, the buzzer going off, the audience standing to cheer,
→ the marching band slopping through the muck, their sound covering
→ the Cadillac’s ignition turning over, the hand guiding it Mrs. Graves’.
Principal Masters steps out onto the red-clay track, the thoroughly streamered homecoming baton in one hand, a bullhorn in his other, some kind of announcements and thanks to the visiting team happening but they’re lost, now look to be introductions for the homecoming candidates this year, and, under the stands,
→ it’s what we’ve all been waiting for: still walking in slow motion, Lindsay and Crystal and Izzy cross some magical barrier between the real world and the timeless land of glamour shots:
→ Lindsay trailing her coat off her shoulders elegantly, her dress red-carpet worthy times two, and slinky, cut to fit, to allow for her sling, even, and the train—train?—it’s trailing behind her but somehow never quite touching the ground, her good shoulder bare and tanned, a swirl of cut-outs in her dress snaking fingerwide ripples of flesh down along her side to her leg, her chin set in satisfaction;
→ Crystal letting her jacket go behind her, stepping out of it so that all there is at first is bare leg and impossibly high heel, next her short cocktail kind of dress, very classy, very proper, very surprising for her even if it’s not a proper homecoming dress, and this isn’t a Megan Fox under-the-hood moment, and it isn’t Shannon Elizabeth through a hidden camera, this is Sheena Easton strutting out in front of everybody, her eyes dialed up to Susanna Hoffs, this is Ursula Andress, rising from that blue surf. This is Crystal Blake, saying under her breath, “What would you little maniacs like to do first?”
Just in case we can’t tell she’s upstaging Lindsay, either, we look
→ ahead, for Lindsay’s tight-lipped reaction to the crowd’s swelling noise;
→ to Mrs. Graves covering her mouth with her hand;
→ to Principal Masters, suddenly wordless, his bullhorn squealing;
→ to an unclaimed, breathing POV watching from under the stands;
→ but then we have to dive back immediately for Izzy, trying to untangle herself from her rain jacket, having to stumble ahead out of it, shake it off behind her.
Her dress, though—now we can see what’s different about her hair.
She’s dyed her streaks to match the demure pink skull bleeding down the side of this scaly grey armless take on a kimono, but the real attention keeper is the police tape she’s got draped across her like a beauty pageant sash, like the skull’s peeking out from under that do-not-cross line.
And of course no heels like Lindsay and Crystal, just her same clunky combat boots, only with fat pink laces for tonight, and, on her shoulder, a sparkly letter B brooch she’s touching for strength, her lips tight, her steps nervous, her POV turning scarily up to this wall of people watching her. This wall of people not clapping, just trying to figure out exactly what she’s wearing, here, and whether it’s an insult or not—whether she’s making a mockery of the dead or claiming some kinship. The band starts in to fill the empty space and Izzy turns her eyes forcefully away from them, to Crystal’s ass in front of her, a re-do of the opening scene of Bogey’s party, pretty much. Which is our cue to cut to
→ the three of them already standing on the trunk and backseat of the Cadillac, Mrs. Graves behind the wheel.
“Your mother let you wear that?” Lindsay hisses through her smile to Izzy.
“Your mother let you live?” Crystal says back
to Lindsay, not even having to look over to deliver it.
“Actually, she’s probably having a cute little heart attack right about—” Izzy says, and like that we’re
→ back in her POV, scanning hard for her mom, her dad.
Nowhere.
Nowhere nowhere nowhere.
Principal Masters steps up onto the bumper then, his weight making the whole car sink a little.
“Everybody do whatever the opposite of a rain dance is!” he says, smiling, waiting for everybody to laugh with him.
Crickets.
He takes it in stride, switches the bullhorn to his good hand.
“And now their daaaaaaates!” he announces, trilling it out wrestling style, holding the homecoming baton high.
Izzy’s reaction is pure terror.
Walking out of a GQ ad to take Crystal’s hand is the Ponyboy she was talking to at Bogey’s party. His tux is grey and pinstriped, the collar loose, bowtie already hanging like it’s the afterparty.
He takes her hand, turns around for the crowd so she can stand there with her hands on his shoulders, the flashes popping.
Then, from the other side of the stands, a string of firecrackers go off and a roman candle lobs its flare up into the air over the field.
Women in the stands scream, people mutter, Masters lowers his bullhorn uncertainly, and Titan comes out on the shoulders of the Bulldog cheerleaders.
The crowd goes even insaner than it was for Crystal.
“Who?” Izzy says, but then Titan’s kneeling, two of the Bulldog cheerleaders lifting his head off.
Inside, it’s a mummy, it’s the English patient, it’s
→ “Jake,” Izzy says, close up. Painfully.
He stands, his cartoon mitts taking Lindsay by the waist, twirling her out and around then setting her back where she was like she weighs nothing.
The Last Final Girl Page 16