The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP XXIV:

A New Beginning

A chrome dolphin leaps from ultraviolet waves.

Three lumpy pink elephants link arms and form a kickline, shouting, Happy Visiting Day!

Sometimes the biggest journeys begin with the smallest steps, proclaim a pair of legs in scuffed sneakers.

That one’s for me. Right now, all I can take are small steps.

When they processed me through the metal detector, the new plate in my skull didn’t beep because it’s surgical-quality polymer, but they spent a long time x-raying my cane and confiscated my Tylenol 3, which is bad because I feel a headache coming on. They patted me down and felt me up. By the time they allowed me into the Central California Correctional Facility, I felt ninety years old.

Getting shot in the head turned out to be the miracle cure for panic attacks. When I woke up in the hospital, Julia told me I’d been unconscious for three days while they let the swelling in my brain subside. I waited for my lungs to cramp or my throat to close but all that happened was a slight elevation in my heart rate. I guess my body figured if there was anyone else in Stephanie and Skye’s conspiracy they would have taken their shot already. I still don’t feel safe, but for the first time since I was sixteen I’m not scared all the time either.

“Is everyone okay?” I asked Julia the next time I woke up, and she started saying something with too many words and I passed out again.

The TV was always on in my room and people drifted in and out telling me things I couldn’t understand as I slipped into unconsciousness and back out again, floating on big waves of painkillers.

In my lucid moments I watched Skye’s lawyer. He held daily press conferences where he read extensively from his client’s manifestos. Turns out he’s a big men’s rights activist and their plan is to claim that Skye was the victim of an out-of-control feminist conspiracy. Skye’s venom is getting amplified and re-amplified all over the Internet. It would have been easier for Dr. Carol if I’d let Heather shoot him.

We all got famous again. So famous, in fact, that when I finally got out of the hospital Marilyn sent a car and two security goons to pick me up. We had a very nice conversation in their car about the hold one of them had used to take me down in Marilyn’s backyard. When I’m able to walk unassisted again he’s going to teach it to me.

My apartment was still evidence, and my landlord was suing me for tens of thousands in damages. I had nowhere to go, no life to get back to, I had nothing except an endless parade of people who wanted to put me on the news to “tell my story.” They all want to know how I “feel.”

No one’s asking me how I feel as I sit in the visitor’s area of the CCCF looking at the stock-art inspirational posters and the amateur-hour murals on the walls. If they did I’d tell them that my jaw aches, the scalp around my new plate itches, and an ugly brown headache throbs behind my eyes. And I’m beginning to think I’ve made a mistake coming here.

Marilyn arrives before I can change my mind and leave. Allowable jewelry is limited to a single necklace and one ring, strapless dresses are forbidden, and you can’t wear orange, beige, blue denim, or forest green, but they do allow sun hats and she’s carrying an enormous white one in her hand.

I get a kiss on each cheek.

“Have you heard from Dr. Carol?” I ask, wiping her lipstick away.

“I wrote her a note,” Marilyn says. “I think we’re going to have to accept that she’ll be out of circulation for some time.”

I spent the first two days after I got out of the hospital trying to reach Dr. Carol, but I could never get through. She read one public statement and that footage got aired over and over again. Dr. Carol looking down at a piece of paper shaking so hard in her hands she had to place it on the table. She recited a series of short, stiff sentences asking for everyone to please respect her privacy in this difficult time. It didn’t do any good. They hounded her until she disappeared. None of us could get her on the phone, none of us could reach her by email. I wanted to help her. I wanted to tell her it’s okay. She’d done so much for me. But I didn’t get the chance.

“Dani’s not with you?” Marilyn asks.

After I got out of the hospital, Marilyn offered me her guest house but I wanted to be somewhere quiet. I asked Dani if I could stay on her ranch. She didn’t say no, so I took that as a yes. I like it out there. I can see anyone who’s coming from a long way away. All her horses came back, and I like spending time with them. I like the way they smell, how they move, the wary way they check out the world. I think again that Gillian loved horses, and she never got to ride. I’m building up to it. Maybe.

“She’s at PT,” I tell Marilyn. “She’s getting a ride with Julia.”

They’re going to have to rebuild Dani’s left leg, her left hip, and both knees. For the first two days, she refused to get out of her hospital bed. On the third day, Julia rolled into her room and clapped briskly.

“This pity party is hereby canceled,” she said as a nurse rolled in an empty wheelchair. “It’s time you got out of that comfy coffin and started living again.”

Julia loves knowing more about something than someone else, and she definitely knows more about wheelchairs than Dani. She came out to the ranch and the three of us spent a week making it accessible, the two of them in chairs, me with my cane, just three broken-down final girls and a couple of contractors from town. Dani’s gotten so good that she bought one of those Freedom Chairs and disappears into the desert for days at a time.

The first time she vanished overnight I freaked out. When I saw her returning through the scrub in back of the house the next day around dusk, sawing away at her push levers, bumping hard over the dirt, I ran out and gave her hell. She waited until I ran out of steam.

“I like sleeping under the stars,” she said. “I watched the hawks, I watched coyotes. Michelle came and sat with me for a while. She didn’t say much but she listened. I’ll probably go out and see her pretty regular now.”

She levered past me toward the house, then stopped and said:

“I liked you better when you didn’t talk so much.”

“Do you hate me?” I ask Marilyn, as we wait together in the empty CCCF visiting room.

Plastic tables are bolted to the linoleum floor, there are no windows, there’s a play space in the corner with dancing cartoon animals painted on the walls. It looks like the saddest grade-school cafeteria in the world.

“Do I hate you?” Marilyn asks.

I nod. I’m thinking about my letters, thinking about the book, thinking about how I called her a spoiled alcoholic, thinking about all the mistakes I made.

“Let me show you something,” she says, putting her big straw purse on her lap and pulling out her enormous phone. She swipes her thumb down and down and down and then taps her screen and holds it out.

At first I don’t understand what I’m looking at and then I don’t know how I missed him.

“Fine!” I say out loud.

She’s transferred him from his pot into one of the soft, loamy flower beds surrounding the guest cottage. He’s grown since I abandoned him, unfolding new leaves, tiny green peppers blooming from his buds, spreading his roots wide, unfurling new fronds.

It feels like a touch of mercy I don’t deserve.

“I hope it’s okay,” Marilyn says.

“Fine,” I say, and it’s embarrassing that I’m talking to not even a plant but a picture of a plant on someone else’s phone, but I can’t help myself. “Look at you. You’re growing up. And you’re surrounded by so many sexy ferns.”

Huge, primordial ferns rise from the ground around him.

“He was all cooped up in that pot,” Marilyn says. “There was no room for him to grow. I mean, his poor little roots were traumatized. I hope I did all right.”

Fine won’t be coming with me anymore. He won’t sit on his perch and watch TV with me ever again. He isn’t mine anymore.

“It’s great,” I tell Marilyn. “It’s perfect. I think I was holding him back.”

“There’s a lovely pepper bush in there waiting to come out,” Marilyn says. “He’s going to just grow and grow. Next time you see him, I bet you won’t even recognize the little guy.”

You see, I tell Fine inside my head. You’re going to be better than ever.

“And now you’ve got an excuse,” Marilyn says.

“For what?”

“To come visit,” she says.

She tucks her phone back in her bag and I sit on the hard plastic chair and stare at the humming vending machines on the other side of the room and try to figure out why I feel so lonely.

“I miss Adrienne,” I finally say.

“Me too,” Marilyn says.

“She was the best of us,” I say, and my chest aches.

I turn my head to study a mural on the far wall. It’s of a sunset on a tropical beach that looks like it was painted with several different shades of mud.

“No,” Marilyn says, and she takes my chin and turns my head to face her. “You’re the best of us, Lynnette. You never quit. You never stopped. You saved everyone.”

Faint lines radiate from the corners of her eyes, and tiny indentations mark her upper lip. I can see her roots. A single hair sprouts from her chin. I’ve never seen anyone this closely before. I’ve never been seen this closely before.

She leans back and rummages in her purse, looking for gum.

“I’m in suspense about Dani,” she says, finding a pack of Big Red. “The visitation rules said no denim, no camouflage, and no fabrics that resemble state issued-inmate clothing. What’s she going to wear?”

After Dani disappeared inside that day, I stood out back by myself for a while and looked across the desert. Hordes of cicadas sawed their legs together in the eucalyptus trees as cliff swallows swooped and darted, chasing bugs. Something stirred into motion far to my right, and I watched the sandy tail of a snake disappear beneath a creosote bush.

White moths fluttered between dusty scrub underneath a pale crescent moon in the early-evening sky. Away in the hills, cars glittered and flashed like tiny jewels, and I thought about how many people were out there. There were so many people.

Something tapped my foot and I jumped, then realized it was just a cricket. It sat there on my shoe, pulsing for a split second, and then, with a snap, it was gone. In the distance, I heard one of the horses snort.

There’s so much life and it just keeps going. Maybe not everyone’s life, but Life. It doesn’t stop for anyone. Chrissy said there were only two forces in the world and they balance each other: life and death. Creation and destruction. But she’s wrong. There’s only one. Because no matter how hard we try, we can’t stop life. No matter how much we fight, no matter how many we kill, things keep changing, and growing, and living, and people get lost, and fall away, and come back, and get born, and move on, and no matter what it’s all so much, it’s all so hard, the way life just keeps going and going.

“Hey, y’all!” Marilyn hollers beside me, waving one arm. “Over here.”

Julia and Dani roll toward us in their wheelchairs from the far end of the room, Julia talking and talking at Dani, who’s totally focused on steering her way through the plastic tables to where Marilyn and I sit in a small circle of folding chairs.

“They tried to make us use prison wheelchairs,” Julia says. “I asked them how they’d feel about an ADA lawsuit and I practically had to draft one before they let us through.”

I look at us with our wheelchairs, and stitches, and gauze pads, and aluminum canes. We look like models at a surgical supply convention.

“Your man’s waiting outside,” Dani says as she rolls to a stop.

When my taxi pulled up outside the CCCF earlier, I didn’t see Garrett P. Cannon at first. He had on an obnoxious new dove-gray hat and matching suit with one of his bolo ties so I don’t know how I missed him. He caught me as I limped across the sidewalk to the entrance.

“Gratitude comes hard for you, I know,” he said, dropping his Dutch Masters cigarillo and grinding it out with the heel of his cowboy boot. “But even so, I’m thinking you should spare some thank-you-kindlys for the law enforcement hero who made this all possible.”

“Hello, Garrett,” I said.

“I hollered your name three times,” he said. “At least.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry. The pain from my injuries make it hard for me to walk so I really have to focus. That must be inconvenient for you.”

Once I get started walking, I can’t stop for too long or I start to stiffen up, so I kept going but I moved so slow it was easy for Garrett to keep pace.

“Don’t get your panties in a twist, Lynney,” he said. “I’m just saying, I had to bend a lot of rules and call in a lot of favors to get y’all some alone time in there. Not many men would do that for a woman who treated them the way you treated me.”

“I’m very grateful, Garrett,” I said.

“So this afternoon I’m going to call my agent about our book,” Garrett said. “You said we’d write it if I set this up, and I think you’ll agree that I’ve done a hero’s duty. Obviously my name will go first on the cover.”

I stopped and faced him.

“Garrett,” I told him. “When I said I’d write a book with you? I lied.”

I started limping forward again to the sound of him cursing me up one side and down the other.

Inside the visiting room, Marilyn asks, “When does this start? We’re all here.”

No one knows where Heather is, but we assume she’s okay. I would have liked to tell her that I don’t blame her for calling the cops but, as always, Heather isn’t going to give anyone an ounce of satisfaction. Marilyn set up a small bank account for her and told us there were regular ATM withdrawals. Maybe someone killed Heather and took her card. Maybe she’s looking for the Dream King. Maybe she’s just out there somewhere, being Heather.

We all turn when we hear the door open at the far end of the room, but it’s only a tall corrections officer with a big belly striding between the tables. He’s wearing a beige shirt and dark green pants and for some reason people in this field still think it’s okay to have a mustache.

“I’m Captain Winslow,” he says, and none of us get up.

He goes around our circle, introducing himself to each of us in turn. I’m surprised at how soft his hand is when we shake.

“I want you ladies to know that I need to be in here with you the entire time,” he says, looking sad about it. “But I will respect your confidences. Just pretend I’m part of the wall.”

We all nod, and then he’s gone, and no one says anything. Sitting hurts, and my joints ache. The air in the room gets too thick to breathe. Right now, we’re all having second thoughts, but before anyone can change their minds, the door opens, and Captain Winslow leads Stephanie into the room.

She’s not wearing makeup, but her hair is thick and glossy, and it looks like she’s got polish on her nails. She’s wearing a light blue shirt and jeans, with shackles on her wrists locked to a chain around her waist. There’s a look of terror in her eyes that she carefully replaces with bored nonchalance as Captain Winslow brings her closer.

This was my idea. Everything I’d predicted back in that Camp Red Lake hydrotherapy room had come true. Stephanie hadn’t actually killed anyone, just put Dani in a wheelchair and me on a cane. She’d shot one of the food service workers and they’d lost an eye, but all the rest of the murders were Skye.

The two of them had put a lot of effort into the whole thing but where Skye was all cold calculation, Stephanie drove him crazy by improvising. She’d done the first part according to plan—befriending Christophe Volker, letting him into Red Lake, telling him where Adrienne lived, and then she pushed him out the hayloft because she thought it looked more real. When I showed up at her house, she decided to come with me on a whim. That was Skye she’d been talking to at the rest stop on the way back to L.A., reassuring him everything was still on track.

His master plan had been to murder everyone his mother ever cared about, to leave her all-important career broken into pieces that could never be repaired, to humiliate her in front of the whole world, but he teamed up with an erratic partner who got her rush from near misses and close calls. He probably would have shot Stephanie at the end out of sheer frustration if Heather hadn’t stopped him first.

Stephanie would have been victim number nine.

A long time ago I tried to watch one of Adrienne’s Summer Slaughter movies, but I turned it off after twenty minutes when I realized they weren’t going to tell us about any of the victims. I remember how sick I felt as human beings with families and dreams were reduced to splatter effects who only got first names. It’s important to remember their names.

There was Russell Thorn.

The woman at Red Lake who lost an eye was named Eva Watanabe.

Jack Burrell.

Brenda Jones.

Marcie Stanler.

Edna Hockett.

Julius Gaw.

Amanda Shepard.

Remember their names but let the world forget Skye Elliott. Let them forget Stephanie Fugate.

Stephanie’s parents got a lawyer who claimed her PTSD from the Tennis Coach Killings made her an aggressive hybristophile. She lost herself in the love of a Monster in a version of the “if you can’t protect yourself from being killed by them, join them” philosophy. I don’t think her lawyer was wrong. Skye spent two years seducing her, grooming her, transforming her into his perfect playmate. Another girl to add to his list of victims. She got twenty-five years for each of the three charges of assault with a deadly weapon, and three of battery causing serious bodily injury. She’ll be in here for the rest of her life.

I thought about it for a long time, but I couldn’t see it any other way. Technically, she might not fit the description, but no matter how you look at it, she’s been victimized by a Monster and I have a responsibility. I’m not leaving anyone behind. It’s what Adrienne said to me once when I told her I thought I didn’t deserve to survive.

“That’s your vanity talking,” she told me. “You just want to be special. Let me tell you something: no one is too far gone to be brought back. No one is too lost to be found. No one.”

This probably won’t work. Stephanie will resist everything we do, she’ll mock my efforts, she’ll fight us all the way, but if there’s one thing I learned from Adrienne it’s that it doesn’t matter. We can’t help ourselves. This is what we do. You never stop trying to save your Sisters.

It still surprises me that everyone agreed. Then again, maybe we all need a reason to keep seeing each other. Maybe we all need a reason to live.

Captain Winslow sits Stephanie down in a folding chair, then disappears to the other side of the room. Stephanie’s made her face bored and blank, radiating contempt, already determined to ignore our appeals to her better nature, already opening her mouth to say something shocking.

I beat her to the punch.

“Stephanie,” I say. “Welcome to the Final Girl Support Group.”

Ever wonder what happens to those final girls? After all their plans go belly up and all their weapons fail? After their defenses crumble and they’ve been shot in the head? After they’ve trusted the wrong people, made the wrong choices, and opened themselves up at the worst possible moments? After their lives are ruined and they’re left at thirty-eight years old with nothing in the bank, no kids, no lover, and nothing to their name but a couple of ghosts and a handful of broken-down friends?

I know what happens to those girls.

They turn into women.

And they live.