CHAPTER 22 #2
What if I’m not the Final Girl? What if I’m just Casey Becker at the beginning of Scream and this is the plot twist none of us saw coming?
I flick my eyes down from the stall door to my dress.
Hitchcock once said that blondes make the best victims because they make the blood show up better on screen.
“Like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints” is the exact quote.
If we’re operating by that logic, then I am covered in red.
My dress, both my own blood and other people’s, the fucking glitter—it marks my skin, mapping the last few hours of terror across my body.
But even with all that, I don’t look like a Final Girl.
I mean, I didn’t want the part, but I don’t want the alternative if it means being demoted to Dead Blonde Number Three!
A sickening scratching noise starts up, metal on glass, and all I can do is clamp my hands over my ears. It does nothing to muffle the sound. It goes on for what feels like hours, the screech and scrape of the blade tearing through me as I crouch on top of the toilet.
My feet are stuck to the seat, my hands trembling at the sides of my head, when it eventually stops.
There’s a pause, a shuffle of clothing, before footsteps move out across the tiles.
A long groan emits from the door hinges, the same one that preceded his entry into the restroom, before it’s followed by a dull, conclusive thud. The whole space becomes silent.
I don’t move.
I may be scared, but I’m not fucking stupid.
I don’t get down off the toilet. Instead, I stand up, using the walls on either side of me to maintain my balance and peek over the side of the stall.
I look over into the other stall, across to the sink, anywhere he could’ve hidden to draw me out, and the air rushes out of me when I can see he’s gone. He really did leave.
If he can’t get in, he’s got to give up and move on, right? You haven’t got a slasher if there isn’t any slashing. You haven’t got a rom-com if the love interest isn’t responding to the romancing.
Minutes pass before I get the nerve to grip the top of the door, lean forward, and see the tiles.
The asshole took Laurie’s shoes with him, but he left the corkscrews on the sink counter.
Even he knows they’re useless. Glints of light from the mirror draw my gaze higher and I realize the corkscrews are not all he left behind.
Not again.
The bathroom door slams open and I almost fall off the toilet in shock, but when a tall, maskless figure moves into the restroom, I jump down and unlock the stall door before I can stop myself.
“Wes!”
He’s pulled me into his arms before the door is fully open.
They’re tight, almost restrictive around my body, and I can feel where he’s tucked the flashlight into his pants when it jabs into my ribs, but I don’t pull away.
I need him to take my weight and hold me upright, because I feel like I might fall apart and spill onto the floor if I’m given one more second to process what just happened.
Heart Eyes left me alone.
He left me alive.
He terrorized me, yeah, but it was a game to him.
It was foreplay. Now that he’s made the decision not to kill me twice, I can’t deny I’m the object of his affection.
I can’t deny that even if I don’t look the part, even if I don’t know if I can live up to the title, he wants me to be his Final Girl.
“I couldn’t find Billie, but I thought I found a way out,” Wes grits out before I can ask where he’s been, how he avoided Heart Eyes.
He steps away to check if I have any visible damage, holding his knife away from us, almost behind his back, as I perform my own once-over.
“I turned down a corridor and found a door, but it was fucking jammed, and when I came back everyone was gone and there was blood on the floor, and I thought…”
His eyes are wild, his breathing jagged, but otherwise he’s unharmed, and when he comes to the same conclusion about me, we let out matching breaths of relief and move back into each other’s space.
We’ve escalated from accidental grazes and lingering touches to a full embrace.
This is the closest we’ve been all night.
The pull must be a symptom of the attraction under aversive conditions, and even though the fear hasn’t had a chance to fully work itself out of my system, I let my body relax against his.
I wrap my arms around his waist, duck my head into his uninjured shoulder when his arm curls around my back and his hand slides up to grip my ribs.
He still holds the knife in his other hand, angling it away from our bodies as he drops his chin to the top of my head.
We stay like that for a heartbeat, and it feels… right.
“Are you okay?” he murmurs into my hair, and I lift my head to meet his gaze.
“Yeah…” Maybe if I say it enough it’ll stick. “Yeah.”
His palm moves from my ribs to my jaw as his eyes dart across my face.
His head dips just a fraction, almost like he wants to kiss me, and it’s more instinct than anything else that makes me tilt my chin up.
A second later my senses kick in and I move to pull back, but he’s already let go of me, gripping the handle of his knife and rubbing his free palm over his mouth.
His shoulders are up around his ears, his voice low and gritty when he asks, “Where are the others?”
I can’t help the sigh of relief that tears from my throat.
If he’s asking, then he didn’t come across any bodies in the hallway.
I heard the sound of someone being attacked, I heard that familiar sickly sound of flesh being torn by metal, but maybe they got away.
Maybe Heart Eyes was too preoccupied with finding me so we could engage in a little flirtation in the bathroom and he didn’t get to finish the job.
God, I hope whoever it was has that first aid kit handy.
“I think they ran,” I say, but that doesn’t take the darkness out of his expression.
“Did you see where they went?”
I saw where one went, but I’m shaking my head before the attraction under aversive conditions can make me spill, moving to the counter to collect the corkscrews.
“We have to get out of here,” I say over my shoulder. “He could come back.”
Wes watches my movement toward the mirror and sees the message Heart Eyes left etched into the middle of it: a rough, crooked heart with a “J” in the middle, and underneath it, something I don’t think I’ve seen since middle school: 4EVA.
It’s different from the time and effort invested in the display on the dance floor. This is juvenile, a more possessive assertion than the idealistic declaration from before. I’d think it was done by a different person if not for the fact it’s once again directed toward me.
“Fuck this guy,” Wes mutters, turning his back on our somber reflections as I take one more look at the rounded points of the corkscrews and decide to abandon them. I don’t want to get close enough to Heart Eyes to see if they could do anything.
Wes holds his knife in front of him, gesturing for me to stand behind him as he pulls the door open.
We don’t get too far once we step out into the hallway, though. The bloody handprint marring the male icon on the door across from us, a smack-and-drag stain akin to the car scene in Titanic, stops us in our tracks.