Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine Page 19

  “Let me ask Wolfgang,” Lanie said, and then she tapped out a text message to her twenty-five-year-old brother, the only source of adult supervision, since Lanie’s parents were in Colonial Williamsburg for the weekend. Wolfgang was upstairs in his room listening to sludge metal at such a low volume that it sounded, from Jess’s position in the living room, like whales dying. The girls had begged Wolfgang to go somewhere else during the filming, but he had flatly refused. He even confiscated a small portion of their weed in exchange for not telling Lanie’s parents what the girls did at the slumber party.

  Lanie’s phone hummed. “He says no,” she said. “He says it’s his camera and it’s really expensive and so he’s the only one who can touch it.” As soon as she finished reading the text, another came through. “He says you can be the monster.” The other girls giggled, but Jess thought about it for a second and then said, “Can I wear a mask?” Lanie asked her brother, who responded, “A kind of mask. Sure.” Seeing no way out of this, all of them so jumpy from the Adderall they’d snorted earlier in the night, Jess agreed. If she was going to be in a movie, she decided, she’d at least like to be the one holding the knife.

  They had been planning the slumber party for weeks. They thought it might be hard to get permission to stay in the house without Lanie’s parents to watch over them, but their parents agreed without any reservations, seemed shocked to remember that they had daughters in the first place. The girls’ first thought was to have a house party with kegs and loud music and no concept of the consequences of their actions. But Jess and Lanie and Mary Beth and Heather and Wallis were not popular kids. They saw how quickly they would be shuffled into the corner of their own party, overpowered by other sixteen-year-olds who did this kind of thing regularly. The girls decided they would be better off scoring some low-level drugs and watching horror movies all night. These girls, and they always thought of themselves collectively, like a dues-paying club, weren’t athletic or exceptionally studious or overly attractive. But they weren’t overweight and they weren’t Goth and they weren’t special ed. They did drugs, but always together and never in a place where someone would take advantage of them. Their grades were good enough to keep their parents happy but not invite the attention of well-meaning teachers. They existed in a no-man’s-land where the kinds of boys they wanted to kiss would forget them instantly and treat them like shit around their own friends, and the kinds of boys who wanted to kiss them were too terrified to ask; so they made do with what they had. And what they had was one another and the weird ideas that sat unchallenged in their brains.

  The girls went into the kitchen and made radioactive nachos and drank some Mountain Dew Code Red while they planned out the movie. Lanie said the first thing, before a single shot was filmed, was to figure out the deaths. “They need to be, you know, as real as possible. It needs to look like we really got killed and then the Internet will get sued because it’s online.” Mary Beth and Heather, who were twins and therefore really spooky to look at when they were tweaking because their head tics were in unison, agreed. “We know how to make blood,” they said. “We learned it in home ec once when Mrs. Jolly was drunk and said we could pick the lesson for that day.” While Lanie wrote things like “blood” and “balloon heads” on a dry-erase board, Wallis made a fake knife with cardboard, aluminum foil, and electrical tape. It took her about ten minutes and looked, according to Lanie, “real as shit.” Lanie handed it to Jess, who tested the weight of the weapon in her hand and made a few lame jabbing motions. She was still finding the necessary emotion to play a remorseless killer. She nodded her approval to Lanie, who turned back to Wallis and said, “Make, like, ten more of them. We’re gonna need a lot of knives.”

  After a few more text exchanges between Lanie and her brother, each punctuated by the other girls imploring Lanie to not involve him, Wolfgang had come down the stairs, movie camera in tow, and stood over the girls in a way that did evil things to their buzz. “So you guys want to make a movie,” he said, and it was creepy enough that Jess hoped someone would say, “No, actually, we do not.” No one did, however, and now he was going to share their space, intrude on the weird things they wanted to do on their own.

  Jess did not know Wolfgang very well, had only seen him a few times in her life, even though Lanie was her best friend. He was attractive in that sexy elf, Lord of the Rings kind of way, high cheekbones and pale, perfect skin. He covered up this beauty with a layer of grime and scruff that, for Jess, made him handsome. She’d heard all the stories from Lanie, who seemed impressed by her brother’s fucked-up-ness. He’d been expelled from high school for drugs, checked into a very posh rehab clinic, then went to some alternative ranch college where he got all muscular and tough, and then he went to film school, but had just been kicked out for either drugs or absenteeism or stalking one of the girls in his classes. He was the kind of person whose future Jess could see without wanting to, a sad accidental death at an age not young enough to be tragic and the awkward funeral where everyone acted like it was a surprise. His camera, though, Jess had to admit, was top-of-the-line.

  “You kids keep saying movie, but this is barely going to be a short film,” said Wolfgang, his eyes so red from pot smoke that he looked like he should be the monster. “Shut up, Wolf,” Lanie said. “Just shoot what we tell you to shoot.” Wolfgang shook the hair out of his face and looked aggrieved. “I’ll have some say in how this gets made,” he said, his voice rising for no good reason. “I’m a part of this movie now.” Jess, without even thinking about it, corrected him. “You mean short film,” she said. His eyes narrowed and he looked in her direction. “She’s going to be difficult,” he told his sister, pointing at Jess.

  “If you want to finish this by morning,” Wolfgang continued, “we don’t have time to come up with a backstory for Jess. She’s just, you know, real fucking crazy and violent.”

  “Maybe we ganged up on her in the locker room and made her show us her bush,” said Heather, “and now she’s out for revenge.”

  “If that helps, then you can use that backstory to get into character,” Wolfgang allowed.

  “So we’re having a slumber party,” Lanie said, testing the viscosity of the fake blood that the twins had made, “and Jess sneaks in and she kills us one at a time. The end.”

  “Shouldn’t one of us live?” Wallis asked.

  “No,” Lanie said, as if she’d been thinking about this for years and it wasn’t just some revved-up nightmare she’d made up on the spot. “Everybody dies and the monster gets away.”

  Lanie was obviously the director, and Jess found it hard to do anything but what she wanted. They set up for the first scene and Jess watched as Lanie demonstrated the part of the killer. She stepped out of the house, having turned on the floodlights so she could be seen starkly against the dark night, and pressed her face so forcefully against the glass window of the back door that they could see her canines, bared and vicious. Loud, so that she could be heard, she told Jess to punch out the window and then unlock the door. “I’ll cut open my hand,” Jess said, and Lanie frowned, exasperated, and then came back inside. She grabbed a green towel from a hook beside the fridge and handed it to Jess. “Use this,” she said. Jess did not want to break the window, had some inkling, despite the Adderall’s insistence that this moment was the only thing that mattered, that they would be punished for this vandalism. But Lanie’s eyes were doing that dilated thing where it seemed like her internal organs had gone radioactive.

  Instead, Jess thought in terms of the movie, the only thing that now mattered to Lanie. “Wouldn’t the killer want to get inside without the girls’ knowing she was there?” she said, and the other girls, and thank God even Wolfgang, nodded in agreement. “Fine,” Lanie said, defeated, her brain already recalibrating the scene, three steps ahead of everyone else. “There’s a sound outside and I go investigate. I open the door and call out, but nothing’s there. Then I turn around and you’re standing in the floodlights. You push ope
n the door because I forgot to lock it.” As Lanie moved on to the next thing, Jess had the feeling that she had talked someone out of murdering a person who deserved it.

  Jess still needed a mask. Wolfgang, getting into the spirit suddenly, the weed wearing off and his own weirdness starting to seep out of his pores, ran upstairs and came back with a white T-shirt with yellowed stains under the arms. He dipped his hand into the bucket of fake blood and flicked, then smeared, unknowable patterns across the fabric. “Put your hair in a ponytail,” he commanded, and Jess was unnerved by how his forcefulness, and her inability to refuse, reminded her of Lanie. She gathered her hair in a rubber band and then Wolfgang, with unexpected gentleness, placed the T-shirt over her head, pulling the ponytail through the neck of the shirt, so that the chest covered her face. He took off the shirt and then cut eye slits where they were needed and placed it back on her head. “That looks creepy,” he said. He tightened the mask so that it looked more ominous. “Creepy and beautiful,” he said, and Jess knew what he was doing, the stupid ways that boys thought they were clever.

  “You look like a psycho killer,” Mary Beth said with the kind of admiration that was typically reserved for moments that were not this one.

  The other girls stood behind Wolfgang, as if he would protect them from Jess’s knife. “Action,” Wolfgang and Lanie said at the same time, both of them making strange faces of irritation in the aftermath, but the moment had started and there was nothing to do but move forward. Jess, already realizing how hard it was to breathe in the mask, which reeked of Wolfgang’s bad decisions, crept into the house, following the track made by Wolfgang’s camera movements, and flashed her aluminum foil knife and then the shot was done. Next, Wolfgang filmed Lanie (“I just want to die first so I can focus on the rest of the movie,” she said) standing in front of the open refrigerator, swigging from a freezing-cold bottle of vodka, slipping her other hand into a bag of shredded cheese.

  “Cut,” Lanie yelled, and Wolfgang set the camera on the kitchen counter and then leaned into Jess, whose face was sweating from her own hot breath.

  “Kill her good,” Wolfgang said, his voice a cloud of pot smoke, and he rubbed the back of her neck with his clammy hand.

  Jess felt the sick certainty that, not tonight but sometime before he died, she would fuck him. He would be her first and nothing would ever be that weird and awful again. Her future turned crystalline and assured and then it retracted and she was back in her body. She pushed Wolfgang away from her, holding the knife like it was real and could protect her from her own desires.

  Before the first murder, the girls went into the bathroom and took some more Adderall, which prevented them from growing bored and going back to watching slasher movies on the computer. Jess had decided to leave the mask on, because it was a pain to take it on and off, so she rested her head in Wallis’s lap while they watched Lanie perfect the special effects that would accompany her own death. Lanie hacked a wedge of vanilla ice cream from the container and dumped it into a blender. Then she added as much of the fake blood as would fit and let it all spin until it was ice cold and frothing. “We get one shot at this,” Lanie said. She chugged the concoction as quickly as she could, her throat making sounds like she was eating an entire world.

  “Goddamn, brain freeze,” she coughed once she’d finished, her mouth foaming. She wiped her face clean and took her place, steps unsteady, in front of the fridge. “Action,” she shouted.

  Wolfgang followed Jess as she crept behind Lanie with her knife featured prominently. Jess could not tell if it was better to inhabit the role and think like a psycho killer for whom Lanie was just an irritating light that needed to be extinguished or if she should stay in reality, however obscured by drugs it was, and hold on to the strange feeling of killing her best friend while everyone watched. Before she could decide, Jess’s hand touched Lanie’s relaxed shoulder and she spun her friend around and jabbed the knife, which crumpled upon impact, into her stomach. Lanie’s eyes grew wide and she clutched at the wound, crushing the plastic bag filled with blood that was hidden in her shirt. Then, right on cue, she projectile-vomited the mess of blood and ice cream, her body having rejected the ice-cold monstrosity. She sprayed the counters and floor with an unending stream of blood, gurgling and moaning until she’d purged the milk shake from her body, and then she fell into a heap on the floor and went still.

  “Cut,” Lanie said, her voice weak with exertion. “That fucking ruled,” Mary Beth and Heather said at the same time, and the rest of them, even Jess, agreed. The only way it could have been grander was if Lanie had actually died. Wolfgang wiped a spray of blood from the lens of his camera. “You die good, sis,” he told her, and Jess knew for a fact that it was the sweetest thing he’d ever said to his younger sister.

  I feel like I should be in the movie, too,” Wolfgang said as they prepared for the next scene. “I want Jess to kill me.” Jess refused to look at him, but she was pleased to hear each of her friends, with great emphasis on the word, say, “No!” Lanie touched Jess’s hand and pulled her toward the bathroom, shouting over her shoulder, “This is just for girls, what we’re doing,” and Jess didn’t know if she meant the movie or whatever was waiting for them.

  From one of the bathroom drawers, Lanie produced a fancy box of chocolate truffles. “My mom hides these in here and eats them when she gets sad,” she said. She handed one to Jess, a work of art, a sugared, purple flower sitting atop the chocolate. Jess lifted the mask up so that her mouth was exposed and ate the truffle in one bite. Lanie did the same. For the second chocolate, Jess took her time, let the filling melt in her mouth and coat her teeth.

  They lay in the bathtub, which was as large as a wading pool, though they fit themselves closely together. They were shoulder to shoulder, pressed against each other, their legs tangled up so that Jess kept flexing her toes to differentiate between what was hers and what was Lanie’s. The intimacy of their arrangement, if they were not best friends, would have taken up eight diary pages to explain.

  It always amazed Jess that she was friends with Lanie, someone so rich it couldn’t be quantified by the teenage brain. She could not understand why, with all this money, Lanie wasn’t more popular. The only reason, which Jess kept coming back to, was that Lanie did not want to be popular. She wanted to be as strange as the money and her parents’ lack of interest allowed.

  “I think my brother is falling in love with you,” Lanie said to Jess, who could feel her friend’s breath on her cheek. She wanted to look at Lanie’s face, to see her expression, but it would require too much effort to reposition herself.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Jess replied.

  They were silent for a few seconds, sharing another truffle, when Lanie finally said, “Please don’t let him ruin you. I know that sounds melodramatic, but don’t do something with him that would make you feel weird.”

  “Sometimes I like feeling weird,” Jess said.

  “There’s good weird, like you and me in this bathtub,” Lanie said, “and then there’s bad weird, which is whatever my brother would do to you.”

  Jess felt like this was the best chance she would ever have to make out with Lanie, and yet she knew it would be an effort that would turn toxic over time. It would complicate their relationship in ways Jess could not quite see to the end of. She felt like she was in the ocean and a massive wave was building up behind her. If she just paddled hard enough, made herself a part of it, she could ride it all the way back to dry land. She had maybe four more seconds to decide how she wanted to remember this night, and, as usual, the moment passed and Jess’s mouth was wide open and dumb.

  “I feel like I threw up my soul down in the kitchen,” Lanie said. She stood up in the tub and then stepped out. “Come on,” she said, “you have a lot of killing left to do.”

  What were you doing in there with my sister?” Wolfgang asked, cornering Jess while Wallis and Mary Beth and Heather each went over their upcoming deaths with Lani
e, who was showing them what it was like to die.

  “None of your business,” Jess said. She loved this mask, the way it obscured her emotions and made her stronger. She would be taking it home with her in the morning, that was for sure.

  “Don’t turn her lesbian, okay? Lanie has a hard enough time as it is,” Wolfgang said.

  “We’re not lesbians,” Jess said, though she didn’t feel indignant at the accusation or even certain of her reply. “We’re best friends.”

  “Fuck,” Wolfgang said, almost in a whisper. “I can’t tell the difference with girls.” He tried to look into her eyes, but Jess knew the eye slits were throwing him off. “Okay, forget I said anything,” Wolfgang said, and then stalked over to Lanie to prepare for the next scene.

  At first, Mary Beth and Heather wanted to die in the bathtub, with the whirlpool jets spreading their blood around the water, but Lanie said they’d have to get naked for it to make sense. Instead, the twins brushed their teeth and Jess jumped from behind the shower stall and stabbed them, a fake knife in each hand.

  In the first and only take, Jess stabbed them each in the neck and blood spilled out of the twins’ mouths, mixing with the toothpaste foam and spurting against the mirror. Jess then shoved them into the bathtub, where they would bleed out. Heather lost her balance and hit her head on one of the knobs and got a huge goose egg on her forehead, already red and angry as she wobbled out of the tub. “Fuck,” said Heather, touching the bump like it might explode, inspecting herself in the mirror. “I always get hurt when we’re fucking around.” Wolfgang came back from the kitchen with a box of frozen canapés and placed it delicately against her head. “You’re sweet,” Heather said, and Jess was jealous for exactly one second.