Final Girls(95)

At the very bottom of the knapsack, my fingertips skim across a cool slick of glossy pages. A magazine.

I yank it out, flipping it over to look at the cover. It’s a copy of Time, dog-eared and threatening to rip from its stapled binding. The photo on the front shows a ramshackle motel surrounded by cop cars and scrub pines dripping with Spanish moss. The headline, in red letters slammed over a slate-colored sky, reads: HOTEL HORROR.

It’s the same issue of Time I devoured as a child, shuddering beneath my covers, dreading the nightmares to come. I rifle through the pages until I find the article that prompted so much childhood fear. It features another picture of The Nightlight Inn—an exterior shot of one of its rooms. In the open doorway, there’s a flash of white. One of the victims covered with a sheet.

The article begins next to it in a narrow column of text.

You think it only happens in the movies. That it couldn’t happen in real life. At least not like that. And certainly not to you. But it happened. First at a sorority house in Indiana. Then at a motel in Florida.

The passage has the ring of something familiar. A kiss of deja vu. Not from my childhood, although I had certainly read it back then. This memory is more recent.

Sam said it to me during her first night here. The huddled girl talk. The Wild Turkey passed between us. Her sincere soliloquy about The Nightlight Inn.

It was a load of bullshit, lifted word-for-word from this magazine.

I stuff her belongings back into the knapsack. Everything but the magazine, which I can use as ammunition against her, and the stolen iPhone, which can be used against me. The magazine is rolled under my arm. I shove the phone down the front of my shirt, securing it beneath a bra strap.

Satisfied I’m leaving the room in almost the same condition as when I entered, I hurry back to the kitchen and grab the grape soda, carrying it with me to my laptop. I take another sip as I crack open the computer and click my way to YouTube. In the search field, I type samantha boyd interview. It yields several versions of Sam’s sole TV interview, all of them uploaded by the same freaks who run the murder porn websites. I click on the first one and the video begins.

Onscreen is the same TV newswoman who had slipped the Chanel-scented interview offer under my door. Her expression is benign—a mask of impartiality. Only her eyes betray her. They’re black and ravenous. The eyes of a shark.

A young woman sits with her back facing the camera, barely in the frame. What can be seen of her is in silhouette. She’s a half-girl, blurred beyond recognition.

“Do you remember what happened to you that night, Samantha?” the newswoman asks.

“Sure, I remember.”

That voice. It doesn’t sound like the Sam I know. Interview Sam’s voice isn’t as clear, the diction less precise.

“Do you think about it often?”

“A lot,” Interview Sam replies. “I think about him all the time.”

“You’re referring to Calvin Whitmer, right? The Sack Man?”

There’s a tilt of darkness as Interview Sam nods and says, “I can still see him, you know? When I close my eyes? He had cut eye holes into the sack. Plus a little slit right over his nose for air. I’ll never forget the way it flapped when he breathed. He had tied string around his neck to keep the sack in place.”

She stole that line, too. Saying it to me as if for the first time.

I go back to the start of the video, slightly dizzy as Miss Chanel No. 5 trains her shark eyes on Interview Sam.

“Do you remember what happened to you that night, Samantha?”

I blink, my eyes suddenly tired.

“Sure, I remember.”

The voices on the computer become distant and vague.

“Do you think about it often?”

Numbness creeps into my body. Hands first, then up my arms like a line of fire ants.

“A lot. I think about him all the time.”

The laptop screen goes fuzzy, the interviewer’s face lurching out of focus. When I look away, I see the entire kitchen has turned into blurred streaks of color. I glance at the grape soda, which has brightened into a Wonka-like neon purple. My hands are too numb to lift the bottle, so I bump it with an elbow, its dregs fizzing. Swirling along the bottom are powdery bits of Xanax that glow blue.

A voice rises behind me.

“I knew you’d be thirsty.”

I spin myself around to see her in the kitchen, dressed and dry. The shower still runs in the distance, as muffled as Interview Sam’s voice trickling from the laptop. It was a decoy. A trap.

“Wha—”

I can’t speak. My tongue has thickened, feeling like a fish flopping in my mouth.

“Shhhh,” she says.

She’s turned into a shadowy blur, just like her counterpart still talking on my laptop. Interview Sam come to life. Only she isn’t Sam. Even the pills wreaking havoc on my nervous system can’t suppress that. It’s a moment of clarity. My last one for God knows how long.

Maybe forever.

“Tina,” I say, fat tongue still flip-flopping. “Tina Stone.”

She makes a move toward me. I react by reaching for the woodblock knife holder on the counter, my arm moving in slow motion. I grab the biggest knife. In my hand, it weighs a hundred pounds.

I stumble forward, legs useless, feet as heavy as rocks. I manage one weak jab before the knife drops from my limp-noodle fingers. The kitchen tilts, only I know it’s really me that’s doing the tilting, falling sideways, everything a sickening blur as my skull smashes against the floor.