Last Woman Standing

by Amy Gentry

  “Because Amanda was Neely’s type.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry to be crass, but look at the tabloids. Yes, Amanda is Neely’s type.”

  “And I’m not.”

  “Not for—” He broke off.

  “Go on.” I looked up for the first time and saw that Jason was staring down at his feet, ashamed.

  “Oh, forget it.”

  “No, I won’t be mad. Just say it.”

  He stayed silent.

  “Not for public appearances,” I finished for him. “Just for fucking.”

  Jason scowled. “Isn’t that what happened?” he asked.

  “As best I can remember,” I said, “he only jacked off on my dress. But keep in mind, he drugged me first, so I might have missed something.”

  “Oh, come off it.”

  “He did.”

  “Neely doesn’t need to drug women to get laid. Believe me, I hung out with him at parties. Besides, those rumors have been flying around for years.”

  I gasped. “You knew?”

  “Everybody knows,” he snapped dismissively. “And yet somehow, none of these claims are ever made in public or brought to a court of law. Because they’re just baseless, malicious rumors. Not a single case has gone to trial.”

  I thought of Amanda’s settlement with Runnr, the nondisclosure agreement she had violated by telling me about it.

  “You knew about the rumors, and you sent me to meet him alone.”

  “I was supposed to be there, Dana, remember? And besides, like I said—I didn’t believe it.”

  “Like you don’t believe me now.”

  “This is absurd. You were dazzled by the guy. I get it; he’s dazzling. So you drank too much, and you went too far, and then you woke up with regrets in the morning. I think we’ve all been there. It’s called a mistake.”

  “I came home the same afternoon,” I said slowly. “And I didn’t drink. I had a smoothie. A kale, beet, and roofie smoothie.” He looked skeptical. “Are you saying I just came down with something at random?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Like what you had?”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it. “Sure,” he said.

  “You weren’t sick, Jason,” I said. I was shaking, but the air had cleared of squiggly worms and I could move through it again. I stood up and started grabbing my clothes off the floor. “You played sick so you could set me up with Aaron Neely.”

  “You went,” he said. “You went without me.”

  “Yeah, I did,” I said. “That’s how Aaron wanted it. So he could drug me and jerk off in front of me like he did with all those other women you don’t believe.”

  “Dana,” he said, crumbling. “I didn’t know. I mean, yeah, I thought maybe he’d make a pass at you. What did I care, we weren’t dating. It never worked with us.”

  “Because I wasn’t your type?”

  “Why do you make me say everything out loud?” he yelled. “Why do you have to drag everything out and beat it to death? No, you weren’t my type! So what? I can’t date a hot actress, a model, if I feel like it? What’s the big deal?” He looked desperately sad. “I swear I didn’t know. I thought—look, I thought you’d come home after flirting with Neely for an hour and we’d be writing our show together, just like we always wanted, and it wouldn’t make a difference.”

  “You should have told me,” I said.

  “Maybe I just wanted to see what you’d do.”

  “A loyalty test? To see if I was still your faithful servant? You wanted to see what I would do?” I found my purse with my keys in it. “Well, now we know—what I did was get sexually assaulted for the second time in my life, that’s what. Thanks a lot.”

  On the way out of the bedroom, I slipped on something soft on the floor. With an excruciating effort, I kept myself from falling a second time in twenty-four hours, putting out my hands to catch myself on the bed.

  I looked down to see what had tripped me and recoiled. It was the Betty wig. Amanda had been there in the night after all.

  24

  I stood looking down at the wig in my hand. Its white-gold sheen had dulled; the plasticky waves were now snarled and puffed into an ashen rat’s nest. For all I knew, Carl’s DNA clung to its tangled strands.

  Somewhere in the background, I heard Jason saying over and over again, “She watched us sleep. She watched us together. She watched us.”

  Strangely, I felt no inclination to panic. The panic had arisen only when Jason insisted there was no need to worry. Now, the ghost haunting the house had become a concrete piece of evidence, a signpost, a curiously intimate message. It was the serial killer’s calling card, the bloody horse head in my bed. We understood each other now, Amanda and I. The message was loud and clear. Equally clear was the message I had to send back.

  There was a fire pit in the back yard, where Jason and I had invited friends over, back when we still had mutual friends. Had they really been friends? Or had one of them put a hand on my knee once as we sat partially illuminated around the fire pit and implied he might consider introducing me to his agent if I slept with him? I honestly couldn’t remember. Before Neely, that stuff happened to me all the time, and I barely even noticed. Like the hecklers, I brushed them off. But the rage had been building secretly, all the same, like the smoldering cigarette butts we’d bury in kindling to start the flames. That’s what Amanda had been drawn to. The smoke coming off me must have been like a bonfire.

  It was time to rage.

  With my free hand, I grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter off the counter and opened the back door, ignoring Jason’s frantic questions. Standing in front of the pit, I tossed the Betty wig onto the charred remains of someone else’s fun time. It sprawled pale and serpentine on the black, a stranded sea creature baking in the sun. Then I pulled out a cigarette, lit up, and smoked a third of it before dropping it onto the wig. Where the butt landed, the white-blond strands caught, curled, and writhed black, sending a toxic exhalation into the smoggy L.A. morning, an odor as nerve-shattering as a scream.

  “Smell that?” I muttered vindictively. Then, just in case she really was close by, hiding, watching, breathing in the burned-plastic reek, I said a little louder, “That’s what I think of your pact.”

  For good measure, I lit up and then dropped five more cigarettes onto the pile, finishing the pack. I watched until every last piece of what I’d done, what Amanda had wanted me to become, had twisted up and melted away.

  I was done with pacts and alliances, partners and friends. What I needed was a plan.

  When I got back inside, Jason had calmed down. He was sitting on the sofa, looking shell-shocked. He held up his phone and showed me an image attached to a text. I already knew what it depicted. It was excessive, unnecessary. Just another slasher-movie flourish.

  “Great depth of focus,” I said drily. “Like an Ozu film.”

  But Jason hadn’t heard me. He was shaking his head in disbelief. “There weren’t any extra keys,” he said helplessly. “She must have made a copy. She played me every step of the way.”

  I threw the empty pack of American Spirits onto the sofa next to him. “You want to go to the corner store and pick up some more of these?”

  He looked up at me like I had lost my mind.

  “I know, I know, you only smoke when you’re drinking. You’ve told me a million times. Don’t worry, I’m done badgering you to quit.”

  “I’m not leaving you alone, Dana.” His eyes were wide.

  “It’s just the corner store. It’s five minutes away.” We’d walked there and back a million times. “I’ll be fine.”

  “She’s here,” he said firmly. “Maybe still close by. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Listen to me,” I said. “We need to split up. It’s you she wants. As long as we’re together, you’re putting me in danger. I need you to create a diversion, draw her off long enough for me to leave.”

  “The motel again? Dana—”

  “Not the mot
el. I’m going home.”

  “Home?” He looked around the house, confused, as if he’d already forgotten I’d ever lived anywhere else.

  Time was running out. I had to get him out of the house. “This isn’t working, Jason. All we do is fight. If we’re ever going to be friends again, I need to get out of L.A., back to a place where things make sense. I don’t know, maybe I’ll stay with my mom in Amarillo for a while. Get a job. No, don’t look around for the bug—I left it in the other room, and anyway, this isn’t for Amanda’s benefit. It’s for mine. If she can hear me, she’ll be thrilled that I’m giving you up.”

  “Wait. Just wait.” Jason stepped toward me, his hands reaching out blindly to grab me. “Don’t go. I’ll leave if you want. I’ll draw her away. I don’t want to put you in danger. But—please don’t go just yet. Don’t let her get between us. We’ll talk this out when I get back.”

  “Fine. I’ll wait. But you have to go somewhere far. Let her follow you somewhere isolated, somewhere she’ll think she has a chance of getting to you.”

  “She can get in here,” he said, almost in tears. “What if she hurts you to get to me?”

  “That’s not her MO,” I explained patiently, as if speaking to a child. “That’s how she would punish a woman, not a man. She’s punishing me by going after what I care about, which is you. That means, if anything, she wants to kill you twice over—once for her, and once for me.” I could tell he was struggling, and I had an idea. “Look. Look. I’ll put an order in for a locksmith to come change the locks. I’ll get someone over here fast. I’ll even do it on the old phone, so if she’s monitoring that, she knows not to try it again.” I went into the other room and pulled my old phone off the charger cable.

  “I’ll wait for him to show up.”

  “Jason, leave now,” I said, opening the app and typing in my request. A beautiful interface, really. So easy to use, I didn’t even have to enter Jason’s address. It knew where I was at all times. “Or else I’m leaving. I can’t be around you anymore.”

  “Show me,” he said. “I want to see proof.”

  I flashed him the phone, where a map screen showed a red dot moving toward a blue dot. “Look, there’s already somebody on the way. Daniel R. That’s a nice, locksmith-y name.”

  “I just want to know you’re going to be okay while I’m gone.”

  “He’s almost here. He’s a few blocks away. If you leave now, she’ll follow you. Go.”

  Jason left. I stayed behind to wait, my hand inside the purse in my lap.

  Only a few minutes went by before there was a polite knock at the door. I took the object out of my purse and held it in one hand as I opened the door.

  “I’m Amanda, your runner,” she said, her eyes on my stun gun. “I understand you need your locks replaced?”

  25

  “Don’t call anyone,” Amanda said. “Remember what we’ve done together.”

  “You’d be in worse trouble than I would.”

  She shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

  I backed slowly away from the door, keeping the stun gun poised in front of me. “Come in. We need to talk.”

  “Of course. That’s what friends do.” She stepped across the threshold and closed the door politely behind her. “You look terrible. Did he do that to your face?”

  “You know he didn’t,” I said. “You’ve been listening in the whole time. You have the house bugged too, right?”

  “Now, that’s just paranoid,” she chided. “You’re the one who put out the Bat-Signal for me, remember?” She pulled her phone out of her jacket and pointed at the Runnr notification on her screen, the balloons and confetti showering from the sky.

  “That’s because I knew you would come the minute he left me here alone. What’s the matter, are you scared of him?”

  “Are you?”

  “I don’t need to be. I’m not a psycho who’s breaking into the house and watching him while he sleeps with his girlfriend.”

  She let out a long-suffering sigh. “Dana, I’ve done everything in my power to open your eyes. Some people just can’t look the truth in the face.”

  “People like Fash?” I said.

  “You’re still blaming me for that?” She sighed again. “You have a serious lack of imagination, Dana. It’s probably your biggest liability as a comic.” She considered. “Well, second biggest. You know you’re only funny when you’re mean, right?”

  “I don’t need you to tell me what’s funny, thanks,” I snapped. “What’s funny, in my opinion, is how the people whose eyes you want to open always seem to end up dead. You’re sick, Amanda.”

  “Am I?” she asked. She walked around the front of the couch, and I circled quickly around behind it as she took a seat on the sofa facing away from me, put her arms out, and kicked her long legs up onto the coffee table. Her hair was darker and wavier in the back, crowned around the edges with frizzy blond curls. The stun gun shook in my hand. Without her dark-shadowed eyes staring at me, I could end this right now. Shoot fifty thousand volts of electricity through her, knock her out, and then call the police. But as I stared at the back of her head, I wished I had something heavier than a stun gun in my hand. Something that would silence her permanently and end this for good. I took a step closer to her, hardly noticing my feet moving forward.

  Her curls bobbed as she spoke. “At least when I hurt someone, I know exactly what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.” Lazily, she half turned her head toward me, so I could barely see her profile. “Can you say the same?”

  “I am so sick of this shit, Amanda. Just tell me what you want.”

  “You know what I want.”

  “I think you want an excuse to kill me,” I said. “Get rid of me, the way you had me get rid of your enemies—Branchik, Carl. That way you’ll never be implicated.”

  “Why should I be? I didn’t do anything.”

  “Except plan the whole thing,” I said. “Using stolen data from your old job.”

  She twisted at the waist, put her hand on the back of the sofa, and drew herself up to look me full in the face. I could see something I’d said had touched her at last; her brows were drawn violently together, her giant eyes dark. “You can’t steal what you built from the ground up,” she said, “and if that’s not the law, then it should be. They’re the ones who stole from me, years of my hard work. And then Branchik got rid of me the way they get rid of any woman who might start asking for more. What do you think happened to the other women who brought allegations against him? They got demoted or ‘moved horizontally’”—she put air quotes around the words—“to teams where they’d never have the chance to rise through the ranks. Or they quit and went somewhere else, where it probably happened all over again.”

  “Or they revenged themselves on a few of their coworkers,” I said. “Not to mention customers.”

  “Only the ones who deserved it,” she said. “You know this is how they destroy us, Dana. Don’t pretend you don’t.”

  “Nobody’s destroying me,” I said. “I’m doing fine. Except for you.”

  “You’re doing fine because of me!” She stood. “Why can’t you see that? I freed you from the fiction that everything was okay. I gave you permission to see the obvious. I set the real you free.”

  “The real me? You mean the me who’s twisted and angry and paranoid, like you?”

  “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, Dana,” she said with a smile, but it was weaker than the ones before. “Don’t you know that yet?”

  “And now you want to take credit for my success,” I continued. “Why, because of Betty? I burned the wig, Amanda. I don’t need her anymore. And I don’t need you either.”

  “That’s just what I’ve been trying to tell you.” She stepped around the sofa, and I took a half step back into the hallway before I realized I’d just put her between me and the only exits. “Let the masks go. Get rid of them. You don’t need the lie. You can admit it n
ow.” Her voice took on a wheedling tone, and she started slowly walking toward me, as if coaxing a frightened animal to her. “I didn’t go to that open-mic looking for you that night. I went looking for Kim. But as soon as I saw you deal with that heckler, I knew it was you I wanted. I chose you, Dana. I chose you.”

  “Don’t come any closer.” I held the stun gun up in front of me.

  “Or what? You’ll shoot?” She casually pulled something out of her jacket pocket.

  I gasped, and my eyes widened to take in the handgun. Suddenly it all made sense. “That’s it. You’re going to kill me, and you’re going to pin it on Jason. Oh my God.”

  But she turned the gun around and held it out to me.

  “It’s for you, Dana. Take it.”

  We were both in the narrow hallway now, Amanda leaning forward with the gun outstretched toward me, me shying away from it with one hand on the stun gun, the other leaning against the wall, which seemed to be tilting somehow. I wondered why the pictures, the kitschy portraits Jason and I had bought at Goodwill for a joke, weren’t tilting too. I saw the painting of the big-eyed cat out of the corner of my eye and almost jerked to the side, it reminded me of Amanda so much. She was pushing me toward Jason’s bedroom, still offering the gun.

  “How do you know I won’t use it on you?” I said. But I didn’t grab it.

  “All the things he used to say to me,” she said. “He told me I was garbage, Dana, and I believed it. I felt like garbage. You saw where I was living after Runnr. My whole life had imploded. The only thing I cared about was finishing the app so it wouldn’t happen to anyone else. But he got to me first.” She advanced toward me like a zombie, dead-eyed, but her words came faster and faster. “We had sex where he treated me like a thing. He wanted to pretend I belonged to him. I didn’t have friends, much less contacts in the industry. All I had was money from my settlement, and he wanted it. I paid the rent, and I paid the bills, but I let him pay for me in public, buy me drinks, buy me dinner, sometimes with my money, so he could feel like a big man. He watched me like a hawk. He texted me constantly. If I had an audition, he blew up my phone until I came home. He put software on my phone—yeah, the same stuff I put on yours. Only mine is a more sophisticated version, because I’m smarter than him. Way, way smarter.” She shrugged. “That doesn’t help when someone is abusing you, to know that. But I know it now.”