CW: Violence, death/dying, blood/bodily fluids, bodily harm, graphic sexual content.

You can know something is a trap and walk right into it anyway. There’s a vicious kind of glee in the snap of steel jaws springing closed, biting through skin and splintering bone. You can think aha, I knew it as you swallow the pain. After all, you’ve survived worse. It’s kind of what you do.

It was Miller’s idea, hiring you as a consultant on House of Laughter (laughter, slaughter, get it?), but even so, he doesn’t seem to like you. Something about you rubs him the wrong way. Maybe it’s the way you hold his gaze, squeeze just a little too tightly when you shake his hand. He looks like the kind of person who expects starstruck—just look at the length of his IMDb page, after all. You’re happy to disappoint.

Your arrival on set heralds buzzing whispers and a flurry of glances thrown your way. The scream queen ingenue, who in the movie’s final scenes will run through the crumbling house in torn clothing and artfully smeared blood, stares openly with wide eyes. It’s you, the one who survived. Everyone is curious how you did it, how it’s possible. They wonder about your scars.

All this, you expected.

What you didn’t expect is her.

You don’t even notice her until halfway through the first day’s shoot. You think you know the shape of the trap—an honest to goodness final girl consulting on a dime-a-dozen slasher flick. You’re here to lend mystique, cred, an air of authenticity. You’re here to provide a shield for the way the camera focuses lovingly on each thrust of the knife, each chest-heaving breath, every stupid decision the characters make that invites and justifies the violence against them.

You think you know exactly how sharp those jaws are, the sound they will make snapping closed and splintering your bones. Then, between one take and the next, you catch sight of her and realize you don’t know anything at all.

She’s dressed much like you are, except her black jacket is a windbreaker better suited to the threat of rain than the leather you wear. Black jeans, dark hair pulled into a simple, low ponytail. Clothing designed to fade her into the background amidst the crew running wires, checking levels, holding microphones.

She stands just behind the AD, looking over his shoulder at a screen. She holds a blue and white coffee cup, and you know for an absolute fact that whatever else it might hold, it also holds a healthy splash of alcohol. Vodka is your usual poison, but it doesn’t pair well with coffee. Bailey’s, however, plausibly looks like cream and still provides that satisfying bite at the back of your throat, the heat inside the heat steadies the world and lets you pretend everything is okay for a little while.

You wonder about her poison, this woman who looks so much like you. You think brandy, sharp and tasting of plums. You wonder what it smells like on her breath, braided with the coffee, what it tastes like on her tongue. Your head swims, thoughts like lightning strikes, like a series of fucking nuclear bombs going off inside you.

Because she can’t be here, but she is. Because there’s only supposed to be one fucking final girl—you—but there’s two.

She scents you as you scent her, her head coming up at almost the same moment as yours. Eyes lock, magnet tight. You can almost hear her heartbeat from here, rabbit-quick, and then wolf-calm. She blanches and flushes all in the same instant, and you consider as you have many times before—as every director who likes to linger on the knife going in and going in and going in—how close fear and arousal really are.

You raise your coffee cup, a mock toast across the space between you. What else are you going to do? The shape of your doom is finally clear—the sharp-tipped spear swinging down from overhead when you were watching the ground for rusted steel jaws—and it’s all so absurd. She inclines her head, her neck stiff. It looks like it hurts, but you also catch what looks like the shadow of a smile. Like you, she has to appreciate a well-crafted trap when it’s revealed. Like you, she’s survived worse.

But even so, she bolts when the day is done, and maybe that’s pure instinct taking hold. The light is failing, the weather getting worse, and Miller finally calls a wrap. Your feet are sore, your calves cramping. You spent most of the day standing around on hard-packed earth with nothing to do. You never realized just how much waiting around is involved in making a film. A nice PA brought you a folding chair, the kind you’ve seen with a star’s name printed across the back except yours is blank and you were too restless to sit anyway.

Every now and then, someone would ask you a question, approaching skittishly with a script page, or waving you over to look at the framing of a particular shot. They were told to make you feel useful; they were taking pity on you.

Through it all, you were only half there anyway. Your mind already skipping ahead to introducing yourself to her, the other final girl. Finding a place nearby with cozy booths and low lighting where you could get a couple of drinks, compare scars. I show you mine, you show me yours. And after, well, there are plenty of seedy motels along the same strip as the seedy bars, war stories becoming the war itself, reliving your trauma together with a good, hard fuck.

It feels inevitable and pathetic at the same time. So terribly needy and broken and playing into the sickness the world has come to expect of you. You even briefly allowed yourself to entertain the question of whether she—the woman whose name you don’t even know—would let you lube up the handle of a hunting knife and put it inside her. Or whether she would do it to you. Just going down on each other is far too mundane for final girls. Sex can’t just be sex, like violence can’t just be violence. They have to be inextricably intertwined—phallic symbols all the way down, baby.

You hate it, and it still gives you a subtle thrill, like once upon a time foreplay used to. You haven’t yet figured out a way to escape the rules, so you might as well derive some pleasure from the game. You’ve survived worse, after all.

But instead, she runs.

Gravel crunches in the parking lot bordered by scrubby trees. Why there’s gravel just there, just at the edges where the light fails, is an exercise left for the viewer. Something to give the foley artist in your mind something to do. The rest of the lot is dirt and torn up grass where trucks are already pulling away, but there’s gravel where the woman, your mirror-twin, reaches for the door of a powder blue car.

It’s keyless entry, almost everything is these days, but her keys are threaded through her fingers nonetheless. Her fist tightens around them as you approach, and you imagine every hair on the back of her neck standing on end, every pore on her body puckering and tightening. She can’t help it. You know. You’ve been where she is, but you expect fight rather than flight, startled when she runs.

Even so, your body launches into motion, sprinting across the parking lot, vaulting the rotting logs acting as stops for the cars to keep them from sliding into the trees. Your breath comes ragged, aching in your lungs. It’s been how long since you did this last? And you’re not used to pursuing rather than being the one pursued.

Keys jingle, meaning she’s close by. You cut left. The trees thicken from sparse scrub to proper woods. With the weather damp as it’s been all day, the leaf fall is slick underfoot. Your mystery woman, your final girl, slips. It’s what the rules dictate, allowing you to close the gap. Your fingers brush the back of her windbreaker, the material slippery against your skin, but you can’t quite grab hold.

“Wait,” you pant. “I just want to talk.”

You both know that isn’t true.

She whirls to face you in the same moment you leap for her, both motions an act of faith. You crash into each other, taking each other down. Exaltation grabs hold. This, you get. Violence is a language you understand. Sometimes it’s the only one.

“Wait,” you say again and punch her in the mouth.

Her lips catch her teeth. There’s blood on your fist and an urge in you to lick it clean. You’re straddling her, but her arms are still free, and she manages a quick blow of her own.

She still has the keys in her hand. Your leather jacket takes the brunt, but there’ll be a bruise. She strikes just below the ribs, right on top of your scar—one of them—like she knows exactly where to hit you.

You fall to the side, and she rolls to face you. The adrenaline is already leaving you and you’re having trouble catching your breath. You’re shaking. You hurt. There’s blood on her chin.

“Wait,” you say a third time.

Your hands slide up to circle her throat; violence is the only language you understand, but you don’t squeeze.

“There aren’t supposed to be two of us,” she says, and you feel her pulse and the shape of her words under your thumbs.

You could press down; it might be a mercy. But this—this is the trap Miller set for you, and you let it close around you and answer her instead.

“So,” you say. “What are we going to do?”

• • • •

You buy her a drink after all. Two six packs worth. Beer isn’t either of your poisons, but it’s neutral ground. You end up in one of the seedy motels you imagined. The chain slid across the door would snap with one good kick, but it provides the illusion of safety. There are twin beds, the covers on them some scratchy material that looks like it traveled forward in time from the 1970s. You sit on the one farthest from the door while she paces the room.

The curtains are twitched closed, the first thing she did when you arrived, but light the color of a bruise still leaks around edges. You suspect sex is off the table, but you’re not entirely sure. There’s a nightstand between the beds that also looks like one good kick would end it. You haven’t opened the drawer, but you’re certain there’s a bible inside. Dear lord, forgive us the sin of surviving, of daring to still be alive.

“So,” she says, and turns to face you.

She told you her name is Stacy. Probably a lie, but not one that bothers you. Stacy, Sidney, Laurie. All your names end with an eeeee, like a scream. Even Ripley. This other you might as well have a name of her choosing.

She leans against the door, arms crossed. It’s a pose that could be defensive or threatening.

“So,” you say.

“What if . . . ” Here she hesitates, rabbit-fear flickering in her eyes.

This isn’t what a final girl is supposed to be, not by the time she’s final, not by the time the sequel rolls around.

“What if he’s trying to summon one of ours, you know? To lend real authenticity to his movie. Two of us in one place. How could they resist?”

“One of—”

And then you understand, and try to hold down a scoff, because the fear in her eyes looks real. And after all, weren’t you the one quoting rules in your head just moments ago? What she said isn’t that farfetched, when you think about it. There was a knife inside you. A machete, in fact. You held your intestines in your hands, and it was the most fucking disgusting thing in the world. You shouldn’t be alive. Impossible is kind of your thing.

“Okay,” you say, taking a deep breath.

You meet her eyes and put your armor to the side. You want her to know you’re sincere. Masks are for killers, after all.

“Say he is trying to lure one of our slashers here.”

You keep your eyes on her as you speak; she looks relieved to hear your words. Final girls are used to being disbelieved. You believe Stacy, and you want her to believe you. You want to be in this together. Didn’t some part of you suspect that’s what was happening all along, after all? You hope to offer Stacy something to calm the wild look buried deep in her eyes, because you both know nothing buried stays that way for long.

“I figure our options are to roll with it, deal with the punches as they come, or we go on the offensive, strike the first blow,” you say.

The second option, the one you hope she goes for, has the element of surprise. Miller seems like the type to think he’s terribly clever while thinking everyone around him is dumb. The more you think about it, the more obvious it becomes. Of course he doesn’t just want the air of authenticity a final girl brings—he wants the full experience. Final girls are meant for dissection, meta-narratives all the way down. He wants characters that know they’re in a film, but are still bound by the rules. And when your killer (or killers) inevitably take the bait that is the two of you, Miller’s cameras will be ready to roll.

The thought quickens your breath. Part of you wants this, craves this; you’ve been waiting for it since your first go-around. And now you no longer have to wonder when the axe will finally fall, because its bright, hungry blade is swinging for your head.

Though there is a tiny possibility that Stacy is clouding your thoughts. You’re giddy, drunk on her in a way the beer sweating in your hand could never achieve. You consider that Miller built this trap just for you. He wasn’t there to see the way you looked at the girls who were the first to fall that night at the lake, but it wouldn’t be hard to piece your desires together. If he’s read even one single interview, he would know what you’re like, understand your sheer fucking ego as well. He’d know you’d be drawn to someone so exactly like you. Of course you’d immediately want to go fuck yourself.

He wants you off your game and not thinking clearly. All the better to make it look really real. And even knowing all this, you’re still willing to throw caution to the wind. Because there’s only supposed to be one final girl, lonely and disbelieved. But now there’s two.

“We can do this,” you say. “We can survive anything, together.”

You’re final girls; it’s what you do.

You set your beer down, stand and close the space between you. Stacy’s arms are still crossed; she resists for just a moment, then she unfolds. Her relief is palpable when you take her hands, which are clammy from passing the beer back and forth between them.

Masked killers are inevitable, a force of nature, but so are final girls. You’ve been waiting for this unholy synthesis where you pick up the axe, the chainsaw, the blade, whatever phallic weapon happens to be near to hand and go on the offensive. It sucks, choosing violence, playing by rules that someone else has written. Becoming masculine to be powerful and emasculating the killer at the same time. Both of you sexless in your own way, weapons replacing your generative organs, locking you in an endless cycle where you create each other and it never ends.

You hate it, and it’s stupid, but there’s still a part of you that thrills to it, the idea of violence justified. To fight back. To scream all your rage into the night, feel the blade bite and sink in and watch the light disappear. It’s almost easy when all you can see is a glimpse behind the eyeholes. You’re ending the mask, the killer, not anything human anymore.

“So,” you say. “What are we going to do?”

“Survive,” she says.

You tilt forward and she is your mirror. The heat when you fall into each other is like a star going supernova.

Her mouth tastes like plums, exactly as you imagined, and it turns out violence isn’t the only language you understand after all.

You peel each other with gentle reverence, removing layers of clothing and tumbling onto the twin bed closest to the door. You trace each other’s scars with fingertips and lips and tongues, but don’t ask each other how you got them. That isn’t something either of you need to know. It’s a moment of grace. You can’t escape without becoming monsters, without getting blood on your hands. You can bend the rules, but people like you don’t get to break them.

All you can do is hide for a little while, with the bruise-blue light leaking around the edges of the curtain, and the dark of Stacy’s eyes. She knows everything you could ever say without you having to speak a word, which frees your mouth up for other things. It turns out going down on each other is more than enough after all. When she comes, she threads her fingers through your hair, and she shudders instead of screaming. When the tremors stop, she pulls you up to kiss you and whisper in your ear.

She tells you her real name.

• • • •

You saw there was a trap and walked right into it. Who does that? Look at the ego, look at the motherfucking balls on you.

You and Stacy sneak into the House of Laughter, hand-in-hand. You giggle like teenagers at a drive-in, right before getting hacked to pieces by a demented clown. Baiting a trap of your own with yourselves and waiting for the masked killer to come.

The house is a set, built as a ruin, a crookedy, Norman Bates-looking monstrosity crouched up on a hill. It’s cleverly constructed, looking the way a house should, but with a myriad of little niches and out of the way alcoves where cameras can hide. You and Stacy tuck yourselves into a bedroom on the second floor. There’s no bed, but there’s an iron ring bolted to the floor, and marks suggesting something heavy dragged across the boards in endless, repetitive motion.

And you wait.

You don’t remember there being this much waiting the first time around, and maybe that should be your first clue—things strung out for dramatic effect. But your edges are blurred, your thoughts dull. Because, finally, here is someone who understands, and you don’t have to explain or apologize or hide the ugliest pieces of you. Stacy knows your scars without naming them; she has them too. So, no, you’re not thinking straight, and then you finally hear the first creaking step from the floor below and you’re not thinking at all.

Instinct kicks in; the narrative takes hold.

You grab the first thing that comes to hand—a baseball bat, lying on the closet floor. A prop, or an artefact left behind. You can no longer tell. It’s not just your thoughts that are blurred, but every single line between real and unreal. There’s a name burned into the wood, but part of it has been meticulously gouged away so all that remains is Boy. Because, of course, your killer grew up in a house just like this one, recreated here, making the trap even more alluring. His mother, or his father, or his uncle, or his cousin, used to hit him with this bat because that’s what happens to bad little boys. And still he curled around it lovingly in his closet, the instrument of his destruction, his only friend. Broken and helpless and hateful, growing more so every day until he snapped and turned all that useless rage outward against the world.

The bat’s grip is sweaty in your hands. Your thoughts spin a mile a minute. You creep into the hall, no longer holding on to Stacy. You’re in this together, you wouldn’t leave her behind, but the bat is the only thing you love right now and the only thing you ever will, your phallic weapon of retribution letting you rebalance the scales. Because this is how it goes. You can’t escape the trap Miller set for you without getting blood on your hands.

Your masked killer peers at you from halfway up the stairs. The mask looks different this time, but maybe your killer made some changes after he died. Like flesh and rubber all at once, full of visible seams and ugly joins. It sits crookedly and that only makes it worse; your killer looks lost and sad as he cocks his head to consider you.

You rush to him as he rushes to you, on stairs no less, which is a terrible idea. He’s limping, like he’s already been through it tonight—digging himself out of his own grave, clipped by a car while hitchhiking along a lonely road. Gravity both is and is not on your side. You swing and the motion carries you past him, twisting you into empty air so he grabs at nothing as he tries to wrap you in his arms.

The world turns end over end—step, mask, banister, rasping breath. You catch a brief glimpse of Stacy watching in horror from the second floor, eyes shocked wide.

You hit the bottom in an untidy pile and everything hurts. At least one bone broken, maybe more. But you’re alive. You haul yourself up, a marionette gathering and tangling its strings. All your limbs are loose, at least one at a wrong angle that won’t come right.

Your killer drags the bat behind him, because of course you dropped it in your fall and of course he picked it up. It’s his by right. It scrapes and thunks on each step as he descends, and it would be funny if it wasn’t so goddamn serious. You laugh anyway, a bitter huffing sound and holy fuck it hurts. The world narrows to just the two of you—mask and final girl. You wrap your good arm around your midsection and limp toward the door.

As you do, part of you thinks this is ridiculous. Masked killers aren’t real. Neither are final girls. There are people who survive terrible things, but that doesn’t mean there are rules and mythologies. All of this is just too posed and perfect—the house, you and Stacy, your plan.

The edges of the trap, its shape, fleeting through your mind. Then there’s a bat swinging at your head and you duck and that hurts too, splintered bone scraping splintered bone and flaring your vision white so that you’re certain you’ll pass out. Except you remain upright somehow. Your hand is slick with blood as you fumble at the knob though you don’t remember cutting yourself. This is just the way things go.

The door is locked, of course it is, even though neither you nor Stacy would be so fucking stupid as to deliberately close the trap behind you. The bat misses your head by the scantest hair. You wheel and scream—pure primal rage—and shove your masked killer as hard as you can. Fire races up your arm. You think again that you’ll pass out, but you don’t because you can’t. You’re the final girl; this is your final scene.

Your killer is off-balance. He stumbles back just far enough for you to squirm past him down the hall, limp-running for the kitchen. His fingers graze the back of your jacket, don’t quite catch in your hair. Even though no one has ever lived here, there are pots and pans for you to crash into in your stumbling flight.

Tunnel vision, you only see the back door, mercifully unlocked. Onto the back porch, slamming the door behind you, frantically looking for something to wedge under the door to hold it closed. There should be a rocking chair, but instead your gaze falls on an axe, propped conveniently right next to the door.

Danny Boy or Johnny Boy or Little Pig Boy—whatever his family called him before he gouged the name out of the bat, used this very same axe to chop wood for his father-mother-brother-cousin. Wood he carried in his scrawny little arms all the way down to the shed at the bottom of the garden. The shed where bad boys go. Hysterical laughter gags in your throat.

House of Laughter. Oh. You get jokes.

You seize the axe, and just in time, because the glass shatters, your killer’s hand jump-scare lurching right toward your face. You don’t think about how or why the glass breaks so easily. It’s a movie set after all. You swing the axe and even though it’s had years to dull, even though it’s a prop—isn’t it?—it bites true. This is everything you ever wanted, everything you’ve been waiting for since you became a final girl. The scream from the other side of the door is too high, too real.

Cutting through heavy clothing and human bone is harder than it looks, not easily accomplished in a single blow, especially when the arm is waving around in the air and not braced against a hard surface with the axe coming down deliberately from overhead.

But a wound is a wound and the hand withdraws and somehow you manage to wrench the axe free and keep hold.

“Ohgodohgodohgod,” a voice whimpers from the other side of the door.

Masked killers aren’t supposed to talk. They certainly aren’t supposed to feel pain.

“Please.” And then the fumbled opening of the door.

Your killer staggers onto the porch, clutching his wounded wrist, blood soaking the thick hunting jacket he wears. There’s a panicked hitch to his chest. His mask is even more askew, the holes nowhere near his eyes, his rubber expression betrayed.

He lets go of his wrist to paw at his face. Blood smears everywhere, but he can’t get the mask off. His knees fold, dropping him at your feet like he’s praying to you, like you’re a fucking god. His head is even bowed, slumped in defeat. The mask muffles words already thick and wet with tears.

This is it. This is what you’ve always wanted, the only thing you can want anymore. Violence is the only language you understand. This is how you, the final girl, transcend.

“Somebody call—”

You don’t let him finish.

You swing the axe.

You see the trap with stunning clarity only as it snaps closed. The axe ignores the heavy, blood-soaked fabric, ignores the fucking laws of physics, and burrows right into your killer’s chest.

You were already astounded at the amount of blood one little wounded wrist could produce, and this, well. You should have known. You held your own intestines in your hands, for fuck’s sake.

Thud. The axe drops as your masked killer drops, crumpling, dead. Like dead-dead, not waiting to close his fingers around your wrist in one last jump scare as you reach for the mask and tug it free.

He’s just a guy. You’re pretty sure you saw him around the set yesterday. He held one of the boom microphones. He was the nice man who asked if you wanted more coffee and showed you a funny video of a dog on his phone.

Oh fuck. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.

Lights snap on across the yard. All those clever niches for cameras, you never thought to check if they were full. You should have kept hold of Stacy’s hand. But you let the narrative sweep you up and now here you are, the trap finally closed.

Stacy takes a step forward, into the full blaze of the light, a beatific smile playing at the edges of her mouth.

“I think we got it, don’t you?” She turns her head just enough to address Miller, but keeps her eyes on you.

Her windbreaker makes a little thwipping sound as she crosses her arms, tilts her head to consider you. You want to believe the motion is her holding herself together, holding on to everything this is costing her.

You limp down the porch steps toward her. She holds your gaze. And then you see.

This is how the final girl transcends. This is how she sets herself free, bends the rules to the point of breaking and seizes control of the narrative reins. She becomes the monster without ever picking up a weapon, not directly. She does it all by proxy, no blood on her hands.

Looking into her eyes, the absolute worst of it is, you know that everything she told you was a hundred percent true. Her scars are real; the name she whispered in your ear is hers. With every beat of her broken heart, she is a final girl, through and through.

And you, you walked right into the trap she set, because some sick part of you needed this—your pain, excavated, your trauma reiterated for the camera’s eye. The guilt and weight of your survival are too much and you need to suffer for the sin of being alive.

Which is bullshit. You don’t believe a fucking word.

Yet here you are. Standing in front of Stacy, your mirror-twin final girl.

You drop like your masked killer before you. Gravel bites through the knees of your jeans, because of course there is gravel right fucking here and nowhere else in the yard. You bow your head, respect more than worship. She did what you could never do.

Stacy puts a hand beneath your chin, tilts it up as she leans toward you. She makes sure you see the sincerity in her eyes, the faint sheen of tears. After everything she’s has been through, she’s free by your hand. She makes sure that you know she means the words before she grazes her lips against your ear, before the credits roll and she walks away. These words aren’t for the camera, they’re only for you. To break your heart, the final thrust of the knife, going in with loving care.

“Thank you.”