Final Girls(5)

“Suicide?” I say, the word bitter on my tongue. “I thought she was happy. I mean, she seemed happy.”

Lisa’s voice is still in my head.

You can’t change what’s happened, Quincy. The only thing you can control is how you deal with it.

“They’re waiting on the tox report to see if she had been drinking or was on drugs,” Coop says.

“So this could have been an accident?”

“It was no accident. Her wrists were slit.”

My heart stops for a moment. I’m conscious of the empty pause where a pulse should be. Sadness pours into the void, filling me so quickly I start to feel dizzy.

“I want details,” I say.

“You don’t,” Coop says. “It won’t change anything.”

“It’s information. That’s better than nothing.”

Coop stares into his coffee, as if examining his bright eyes in the muddy reflection. Eventually, he says, “Here’s what I know: Lisa called 911 at quarter to midnight, apparently with second thoughts.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing. She hung up immediately. Dispatch traced the call and sent a pair of blues to her house. The door was unlocked, so they let themselves in. That’s when they found her. She was in the bathtub. Her phone was in the water with her. Probably slipped from her hands.”

Coop looks out the window. He’s tired, I can tell. And no doubt worried I might one day try something similar. But that thought never occurred to me, even when I was back in the hospital being fed through a tube. I reach across the table, aiming for his hands. He pulls them away before I can grasp them.

“When did you hear about it?” I ask.

“A couple hours ago. Got a call from an acquaintance with the Indiana State Police. We keep in touch.”

I don’t need to ask Coop how he knows a trooper in Indiana. Massacre survivors aren’t the only ones who need support systems.

“She thought it’d be good to warn you,” he says. “For when word gets out.”

The press. Of course. I like to picture them as ravenous vultures, slick innards dripping from their beaks.

“I’m not going to talk to them.”

This again gets the attention of the au pair, who looks up, eyes narrowed. I stare her down until she sets her iPhone on the table and pretends to fuss with the toddler in her care.

“You don’t have to,” Coop says. “But at the very least you should consider releasing a statement of condolence. Those tabloid guys are going to hunt you down like dogs. Might as well toss them a bone before they get the chance.”

“Why do I need to say anything?”

“You know why,” Coop says.

“Why can’t Samantha do it?”

“Because she’s still off the grid. I doubt she’s going to pop out of hiding after all these years.”

“Lucky girl.”

“That just leaves you,” Coop says. “That’s why I wanted to come and tell you the news in person. Now, I know I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to, but it’s not a bad idea to start being friendly with the press. With Lisa dead and Samantha gone, you’re all they’ve got.”

I reach into my purse and grab my phone. It’s been quiet. No new calls. No new texts. Nothing but a few dozen work-related emails I didn’t have time to read this morning. I shut off the phone—a temporary fix. The press will sniff me out anyway. Coop is right about that. They won’t be able to resist trying to get a quote from the only accessible Final Girl.

We are, after all, their creation.

Final Girl is technically film terminology, used to describe the last woman standing at the end of a horror movie. At least that’s what I’ve been told. Even before Pine Cottage, I never liked to watch scary movies because of the fake blood, the rubber knives, the characters who made decisions so stupid I guiltily thought they deserved to die.

Only what happened to us wasn’t a movie. It was real life. Our lives. The blood wasn’t fake. The knives were steel and nightmare-sharp. And those who died definitely didn’t deserve it.

But somehow we screamed louder, ran faster, fought harder. We survived.

I don’t know where the nickname was first used to describe Lisa Milner. A newspaper in the Midwest, probably. Close to where she lived. Some reporter there tried to get creative about the sorority house killings and the nickname was the end result. It only spread because it was casually morbid enough for the Internet to pick up. All those nascent clickbait websites starving for attention jumped all over it. Not wanting to miss a trend, print outlets followed. Tabloids first, then newspapers and, finally, magazines.

Within days, the transformation was complete. Lisa Milner was no longer simply a massacre survivor. She was a straight-from-a-horror-flick Final Girl.

It happened again with Samantha Boyd four years later and then with me eight years after that. While there were other multiple homicides during those years, none quite got the nation’s attention like ours. We were, for whatever reason, the lucky ones who survived when no one else had. Pretty girls covered in blood. As such, we were each in turn treated like something rare and exotic. A beautiful bird that spreads its bright wings only once a decade. Or that flower that stinks like rotting meat whenever it deigns to bloom.