The Final Girl Support Group Page 3

  I take the bus all the way downtown, get off at Olive and take major streets to a nearby multiplex. Outside, I put my back to the wall and pretend to check my phone. Anyone following me is going to have to either stop short or pass me by. Bright white Nikes go through my field of vision, shined-up black Rockports, fat-laced Timberlands; if someone’s following they can change their jacket or their hat, but it’s a whole lot harder to change their shoes.

  I don’t need to look at the roofline or check windows. It’s shoes I have to worry about because the monsters in our lives prefer to get up close and personal. A sniper attack would be like mailing me their penis. They need to touch me.

  After I buy my ticket I stand in the lobby, back against the wall, and watch shoes again. Betsey Johnson ballet flats, beige Uggs, confetti-colored children’s sneakers, Sperry Top-Siders.

  My movie is on previews. I sit in the front row, then turn back around like I’m looking for my date. It’s a computer-animated children’s movie, so it should be easy to spot an unaccompanied adult male. It’s not impossible, but chances are low that anyone following me would bring a child for camouflage. I keep my eyes on the redheaded muscle shirt with brunette twins and the blond male with the beard and the little boy. Both of them scanned the theater when they came in, like they were looking for someone.

  When the movie finally begins I break for the emergency exit to the left of the screen, dash down the stairs, and come out on the street. I don’t see the redhead or Mr. Beard. I do see another Honda with Utah plates but it’s a different number. I memorize this plate, too, noting its dusty windows and mud-spattered bumper, the Triple A sticker on its back windshield. I catch a bus to the Beverly Center.

  Riding the bus, I sit as close to the driver as possible. At every stop I watch shoes. I try to stay focused—Doc Martens, Caterpillar steel tips, scuffed Nikes, white nursing shoes—but Adrienne keeps hijacking my train of thought. She and Julia have thrown me off my game.

  Adrienne was the first and best of us. She’s the reason most of us joined group. Her crisis set the template. Plenty of women survive violence, but what makes those of us in group our own toxic little category of final girl is that we killed our monsters, or we thought we did, and then it happened to us again. We all thought Adrienne was the only one who never got a sequel, but we were wrong, because thirty-three years later, here came her monster one more time, back to finish the job. Adrienne thought she was safe, but she was wrong. What else were we wrong about?

  Adrienne’s crisis happened the same summer as Marilyn’s, and they were similar enough that the press got interested, but she got really famous because of what happened later, with the movies. She was a counselor at Camp Red Lake, and staff had shown up early to get the place ready for campers. Cabins had to be aired out, hornets’ nests had to be sprayed, canoes had to come out of storage. On that first night, nine of her friends were murdered. Four of them were first-year counselors she didn’t know very well; five were people she’d known since they’d been Red Lake campers together as kids. It was twelve long, dark hours that changed the rest of Adrienne’s life.

  The killer turned out to be the former camp cook, a single dad named Bruce Volker, who claimed that twenty years ago, two counselors had let his son, Teddy, drown while they were having sex. He said that Teddy had come back from the grave to kill all the counselors for revenge, although he never really explained why Teddy had waited so long to start. Anyhow, the killings stopped when Adrienne decapitated Mr. Volker with his own machete.

  Things got worse when they found out that Bruce Volker never had a son who’d drowned at Red Lake. In fact, he didn’t have a son at all. Bruce Volker was just a lonely old man with a fixation on kids and a good swing, but he made Adrienne the first final girl, and Adrienne used that to make all her dreams come true.

  Air brakes spit and I look around and I don’t recognize a single pair of shoes. How many people have gotten on and off while I was daydreaming? A leathery grandma sits behind me with her identical spouse, both wearing identical busted Reeboks and dirty red baseball caps. I didn’t see them get on.

  I slap the emergency stop and can barely wait for the doors to open before I slide off. Three blocks to the Beverly Center and I can’t run, because no one runs in L.A. I speed walk and get on the number 14 bus. This last leg takes me back to the Red Line the wrong way around, and when I get to the Vermont/Beverly stop the train is already at the platform, and I slip on board as the doors close. There are fifteen people in the car, and I find a seat equidistant from the doors at either end. I scan the shoes and none of them look familiar. Five stops later I transfer to the Antelope Valley line.

  I need to get home, but I can’t rush my routine. I need to find out what happened to Adrienne. Marilyn had read the rest of the article off her phone, but details were thin: a man killed her in her home, but that was it and I need to know more because outside of group Adrienne was the one I talked to the most, the one who brought me in after my crisis, the one I called every month to check in. Well, every other month. Sometimes every third month, maybe not even that so far this year, but it felt like a lot. The point is, Adrienne always made time for me.

  When I finally get back to Burbank, I get off at the airport stop and ride the rental car shuttles for a while. When I’m convinced that only new shoes are getting on each time the shuttle stops I catch the city bus, transfer twice and, almost three hours after I started, I reach my building.

  My route varies every time, but the essentials are the same: go slow, lots of small loops within bigger loops, stay alert, stay aware, watch the shoes, don’t get stupid, don’t get dead. The line between being too careful and not being careful enough is a line you only get to cross once.

  I couldn’t even tell you what the inside of the elevator looks like in my building; I always take the stairs. An elevator is a box with one door. Any man can take you in an elevator, even a big fat guy because you’ve got no place to run. On the stairs I’ve got options, plus it’s good cardio. It took me a while to settle on the third floor, but it’s the perfect height: too high for someone to reach my windows, low enough that I can survive a jump. I make sure no one else is in the hall, and then I unlock the double deadbolts and step into my cage.

  When I moved into this apartment sixteen years ago the building was a dump and the landlord didn’t care what kind of renovations I made so long as no one complained. I still had a little money left over back then, and as a result my apartment is the one place I’ve been able to make truly safe.

  Each of us responded to our trauma differently. Dani became self-sufficient, Adrienne got into self-help, Marilyn married up and buried her head in the sand, Heather got high, Julia went activist. Me? I learned how to protect myself.

  My cage is an expanded steel mesh box the size of a phone booth bolted to the wall around my front door. The mesh is tough and the cage is so small that no one can work up enough momentum to break through. The door of the cage is sealed by four electromagnetic bolts. There is no way to open them without punching in the code on the keypad, and if there’s a power cut the bolts lock down. If the code is entered wrong, the bolts lock down. It’s a way of stopping anyone who comes into my apartment from penetrating further unless they have my permission. I’d have preferred a steel front door and a couple of security cameras in the hall, but that would call attention to my door, so I settled for the cage.

  With the front door deadbolted behind me I punch in the code and the cage’s four bolts slap open, and then I enter my apartment, shut the cage behind me, and enter the code again. The bolts shoot home with the satisfying metal snap that lets me know I’m safe. I breathe in and my apartment smells reassuringly like bleach.

  “Hi, Fine,” I say to my plant. “Things aren’t good. I’ll tell you about it after I secure the perimeter.”

  I’m only alive because I have willpower and self-control. I open my gun safe and take o
ut my .38 Special. If diamonds are a girl’s best friend, then reliable handguns with a lot of stopping power are a final girl’s. I don’t have any illusions: this kind of gun didn’t stop Ricky Walker the first time, and it didn’t stop his brother either, but two rounds in the center of someone’s mass will slow him down long enough for me get to my panic room. Well, panic closet.

  Gun in hand, I sweep my apartment. It takes fifteen minutes. It’s only after making sure that it’s completely empty, that my panic room door is prepped, that my cell phone is charging, that my curtains are drawn, that the interior doors are locked, it’s only then that I sit down and pick up Fine and put him in my lap.

  “Adrienne,” I tell him, and then I realize that I can’t say what happened to her without crying, but I say it anyway. “She’s dead.”

  I sit like that for a while, my tears dripping onto Fine’s leaves. I wonder if salt water is bad for him, but he’s not complaining. He’s a good listener. He’s my best friend.

  Fine is the only living thing besides myself who I’m responsible for. It took me a long time to get up the nerve to make that commitment, and then the first three plants I bought didn’t make it. Number four was Fine, which is short for Final Plant. I’m a final girl, he’s a final plant. We make a good team.

  We’ve been together for nine years, and when he got spider mites two years ago I couldn’t handle the thought of putting him out with the trash, so I stayed up for three days straight, rubbing his leaves with water, then a soap solution, then rubbing alcohol, then water again, over and over, nodding off over his leaves, making sure every single spider mite was dead. I wasn’t going to lose another friend. He made it through, and the leaves he kept were the shiniest, cleanest leaves a pepper plant ever had. He’s back at full strength now but I can still see some scarring on his stalks from the leaves I couldn’t save.

  I’m crying less now, and I want to tell Fine all the details, but I realize that I don’t know any. Was Adrienne at Red Lake this morning? Was that footage I saw shots of her murder site? Were the two incidents even related? I take Fine over to the desk and we turn on CNN. Adrienne’s face is all over the news. It’s been a long time since anyone cared about a living final girl, but I guess a dead one really brings the circus into town.

  Most of us stay out of each other’s pasts, but lately I’ve been looking at Adrienne’s old info for personal reasons, and the pictures they’re showing on CNN are familiar. The only new shot is of the interior of her refrigerator with the mummified head of Mr. Volker digitally tiled out, which is too bad. That’s the only picture I want to see.

  A very concerned CNN anchor who has never been in the same room as Adrienne is speaking sincerely to the camera as if her sister has died. At least CNN has taken the time to make sure a Black anchor is delivering this story.

  “. . . the shocking death of Adrienne Butler, the survivor of what’s known as the Camp Red Lake Killings, and best known as America’s first final girl. A leader in the recovery community, Butler devoted her life to ending . . .”

  If you’re fifteen years old and you only watch horror movies, this is probably the first time you’re realizing Adrienne is Black. They made her a white girl in the Summer Slaughter movies, which was their mistake. I’m convinced that’s why Adrienne got the idea of going after them in the first place. She was proud of her ethnicity and the fact that they were making movies based on her life and erasing something so important flipped her switch.

  The first Summer Slaughter movie was already a hit and the sequel was about to be released by the time Adrienne’s lawyer filed his injunction. He had to file a lot more, and by the time the judge finally granted one, Summer Slaughter Part III in 3-D was in theaters. Adrienne had family money and a settlement from the camp owners, so she hired a real shark to batter the movie producers into submission. When the studio finally forced those fly-by-night exploitation hacks to come to the table, Adrienne told me what they said.

  “What do you want from us?” they’d asked, thinking she’d take a check, an onscreen credit, something that meant things wouldn’t change too much for them.

  She’d smiled and told them:

  “I want everything.”

  And she got it. By the time the case was over she owned the rights to the entire franchise: the first three films and any future installments. They even had to give her the script they’d already commissioned for Part IV. Adrienne’s case set the precedent that the rights to the story belonged to the sole survivor, not the families of the victims, not whatever studio got their movie onscreen first, but to the final girl. Right or wrong, it changed everything. It gave us power.

  Once Adrienne got her rights she burned that franchise to the ground. Everyone got fired. It took her two months to clean house while the studio squealed like a stuck pig and their lawyers tried to explain that she didn’t understand how these things worked, how there were unintended consequences, how grips and gaffers would starve in the streets. Then she did the last thing they expected: she flipped the switch back on.

  There was a line producer who’d been on all three Summer Slaughter movies, and Adrienne set her up as the executive producer with the understanding that there was only one person she needed to keep happy: Adrienne. Her lawyer negotiated an amended contract with the studio and the following summer, Summer Slaughter Part III in 3-D was rereleased in theaters, which was what you did back in those days, and two months later, Summer Slaughter IV hit screens.

  Before Part IV came out, Adrienne went on all the talk shows and made sure everyone knew the proceeds from these movies weren’t going to her, they were going to her nonprofit, the Adrienne Butler Fund for the Prevention of Violence against Women. While other slashers were getting slammed as misogynistic, the press hung a halo on Adrienne’s Summer Slaughter movies. No one felt guilty about buying a ticket because all the profits went to a good cause. By the middle of the nineties, Adrienne was the Oprah Winfrey of violence against women. Some people didn’t even know about her connection to the films.

  She wrote books, she gave lectures, she shot TV specials, she held seminars, she led workshops. She used her movie money to buy Camp Red Lake and turn it into a retreat for victims of violence. She was tireless, she was devoted, she was positive and upbeat. She was America’s favorite final girl.

  She made the rest of us feel like frauds, like we weren’t living up to our fullest potential, like we should be asking what we could do for our country rather than putting security bars over our windows and learning how to shoot. But Adrienne never judged our choices, and she definitely didn’t think I was the crazy one.

  She was never as rich as Marilyn, but she was always more generous. She paid for Julia to make the house she loved wheelchair accessible. When Dani moved to her land, Adrienne paid for a panic line to be put in.

  “It’s not for you,” she said. “It’s so I can sleep at night, knowing the odds are a little bit more in your favor.”

  The Summer Slaughter movies were the dark engine throbbing away down in the boiler room of Adrienne’s empire, turning her pain into cash. There were nine original movies in the series, more than any of us ever got. There was a science fiction version set in the future where an implacable Teddy awakens from cryo-sleep and starts to kill people on a space station. There was a crossover with Heather’s Dream King that she set up to try to send some money Heather’s way, but that ended badly because, well, Heather. There were action figures. Plush dolls. Strangely enough, she never insisted they cast a Black actress as the lead. Adrienne always had a realistic mind-set when it came to who Middle America thought of as sympathetic victims.

  Julia asked Adrienne once if it bothered her that the man who tried to murder her, the man who murdered her friends, that this man was memorialized on lunch boxes and T-shirts. That this man was probably more famous than Adrienne.

  “It wasn’t Teddy who killed my friends,” Adrienne said,
smiling. “Teddy never existed. If Bruce Volker knew that the lie he told is helping me end violence against women he would spin in his grave, and that makes me very happy.”

  As Fine and I watch CNN, we learn that while Bruce Volker didn’t have a son named Teddy, he did have a nephew named Christophe, and he was three when his uncle died. Now he’s thirty-five and pissed that his family tragedy has become a global entertainment empire and no one thought to cut him in for a percentage.

  I’m familiar with the name. Christophe was one of a dozen crazies filing nuisance lawsuits against Adrienne, but she always had more lawyers and more money, and most judges take a dim view of a killer’s nephew trying to take money from one of his dead uncle’s intended victims. Christophe’s lawsuits became a game of Whac-A-Mole, and finally, totally broke and more than a little deranged, he decided to take a cue from Hollywood.

  A few years ago, he’d started stalking Adrienne’s Camp Red Lake property until they’d gotten a court order to keep him one thousand feet away. He’d respected that until last night when he’d suddenly stopped, dug up his uncle’s grave, gone to the camp, killed the skeleton staff who were shutting it down for the season, got pushed out of a hayloft, limped away from the cops, then drove three hours to Adrienne’s house and placed his uncle’s decapitated, mummified head in her refrigerator. When she came downstairs to make her morning coffee he stepped out of the pantry and stabbed her in the back of the skull twenty-two times with an ice pick.

  Like the rest of us, relationships were not Adrienne’s strong suit, so no one found her body until the police came by to tell her about the murders at her camp.