Page 17 of Final Girls

She mutters “Jesus Christ” and tosses the cigarette into the street. She reaches for a large knapsack sitting at her feet. Heavy and full, whatever’s inside presses against the frayed seams when she lifts it. Soon she’s across the street, right in front of me, dropping the knapsack so close to me that it almost lands on my right foot.

“You don’t need to be such a bitch,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

“Listen, all I want to do is talk.” Up close, her voice sounds husky and seductive. Cigarettes and whiskey ride her breath. “After what happened to Lisa, I thought it might be a good idea.”

I suddenly realize who she is. She looks different from what I expected. A far cry from the yearbook photo that was printed everywhere one long-ago summer. Gone is the too-high hair, the ruddy cheeks, the double chin. She’s thinned out since then, shed the cherubic glow of youth. Time has made her a taut and weary version of her former self.

“Samantha Boyd,” I say.

She nods. “I prefer Sam.”

6.

Samantha Boyd.

The second Final Girl.

Of the three of us, she probably had it the worst.

She was two weeks out of high school when it happened. Just a girl trying to scrape together enough money to pay for community college. She got a job cleaning rooms at a highway motel outside Tampa called the Nightlight Inn. Because she was new, Samantha had to work the red-eye shift, fetching towels for exhausted truckers and changing sheets that reeked of sweat and semen in rooms occupied only half the night.

Two hours into her fourth shift, a man with a potato sack over his head showed up and all hell broke loose.

He was an itinerant handyman with a boner for the parts of the Bible few like to talk about. Whores of Babylon. Smiting the sinners. Eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. His name was Calvin Whitmer. But after that summer, he would be forever known as the Sack Man.

The name fit, for he carried lots of things in sacks. The back of his pickup was full of them. Sacks of empty tin cans. Sacks of animal skins. Sacks of sand, salt, pebbles. Then there was the sack of tools he carried to the Nightlight Inn, filled with saw blades and chisels and masonry nails. Police found twenty-one tools in all, most of them crusted with blood.

Samantha personally met two of them. One was a sharpened drill bit that found its way into her back. Twice. The other was a hacksawthat caught her upper thigh, severing an artery. Her brush with the drill bit came before the Sack Man lashed her to a tree behind the motel with a loop of barbed wire. The hacksaw was after she had somehow managed to break free.

Six people died that night—four motel guests, a nighttime desk clerk named Troy, and Calvin Whitmer. That last one was Sam’s doing, once she freed herself and got her hands on the same drill bit that had entered her back. She leapt atop the Sack Man and plunged it into his chest again and again and again. The cops found her like that—trailing barbed wire, straddling a dead man, stabbing away.

I know all this because it was inTimemagazine, which my parents assumed I never read. That issue I did, poring over the article under the covers, penlight clenched in my sweaty palm. I had nightmares for a week.

Sam’s story, meanwhile, made the same rounds as Lisa’s and, eventually, mine. Evening news. Front pages. Magazine covers. Oh, how the reporters came running. Probably the very ones who would later camp on my parents’ front lawn. Sam granted a handful of print interviews, plus an exclusive one to that TV bitch with the Chanel-scented paper, likely for more or less the same price given to me.

Her only condition was that her face couldn’t be shown on camera, nor could any new photographs be taken of her. All anyone saw was that single yearbook photo—the permanent face of her particular ordeal. That’s why it was a big deal when she agreed to join Lisa and me in a chat with Oprah, on camera, for all the world to see. Which made it a bigger deal when I backed out. Because of me, no one got to glimpse another view of Samantha Boyd.

A year after that, she vanished.

It wasn’t a sudden thing, her disappearance. Instead, it was a slow fading, like morning fog sapping away in the sun. Reporters writing about the tenth anniversary of the Nightlight Inn Murders suddenly had a hard time tracking her down. Her mother eventually came forward to admit she’d lost touch. Federal authorities, who like to keep tabs on victims of violent crimes, couldn’t find her.

She was gone. Off the grid, as Coop puts it.

No one knows for sure what happened, but that didn’t keep theories from sprouting and spreading like mold spores. One article I read surmised that she had changed her name and moved to South America. Another suggested that she was living in isolation somewhere out west. The murder-porn sites took a darker view, naturally, tossing out conspiracy theories involving suicide, kidnapping, government cover-ups.

But now she’s here, right in front of me. Her appearance is so unexpected that I’m at a loss for words. All I can muster is, “What are you doing here?”

Sam rolls her eyes. “You really suck at this hello thing.”

“Sorry,” I say. “Hello.”

“Good job.”

“Thanks. But it still doesn’t tell me why you’re here.”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m here to see you.” Sam’s voice brings to mind a speakeasy—smoky and booze-scented. It contains the dark lilt of something forbidden. “I thought we should finally meet.”

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