No, Jade will never be any kind of final girl, she knows, and has known for years.
Final girls don’t wear combat boots to school, untied in honor of John Bender. Final girls’ wrists aren’t open to the world. Final girls are all, of course—this goes without saying —virgins. Final girls don’t wear “Metal Up Your Ass” shirts to school, with the indelible image of a knife thrusting up from the toilet. Final girls never select the SKANK STATION mirror, or wear this much eyeliner—they don’t need to. Their eyes are already piercing and perfect.
Instead of getting lost in Letha’s, Jade sneaks a quick look down to the shoes this impossible girl-woman has to have all the way down there, and, yep: no pumps, nothing stiletto or even near-stiletto. Because she’s too young for that, is still Cheerleader Sandy, not Leather Sandy.
Jade could puke, except she also wants to cry, and isn’t sure which is maybe going to happen, is just watching Letha’s hands under that solid sluice of water now, the suds sliding away, the hands tending each other, the nails unpainted, of course, and neither long nor French.
“Jade,” Jade manages to cough out, her throat clenching shut again immediately after.
Letha turns the water off, reaches the other way for a paper towel.
“Jade,” she says, her eyes practically glittering. “That’s my birthstone, wow.”
“You’re—you’re—”
“From Terra Nova,” Letha says, shrugging as if embarrassed by all this unasked-for notoriety. “Or, once our house gets finished, I will be. So I guess we’re neighbors then, aren’t we? Just across the lake? Maybe we can hang out some afternoon?”
“Terra Nova,” Jade says, stabbing the soft dull point of the eyeliner into the white of her eye and not letting herself flinch from the burn. Relishing it, actually. Using it to ground herself in this moment, not float away.
“I better—” Letha says, leaning sideways towards the door, and like that she’s gone, the bell probably holding its breath for her to find her classroom, then ringing in celebration.
Letha Mondragon, the new girl, the final girl.
“Unauthorized Use of the Town Canoe,” Jade whispers to her moments after she’s gone, and it takes her a halting breath or two to understand what the black drips are in the sink she’s holding on to by both sides.
Tears.
She’s crying and smiling, everything all at once.
SLASHER 101
Don’t feel bad, Mr. Holmes. Not everybody knows about the Final Girl in the slasher. But let me give you this blood pass. It’s like a hall pass, just all the lights are off.
First and this goes without saying, final girls have the coolest names. Ripley, Sidney. Strode, Stretch. Connor, Crane, Cotton. Even Julie James from I Know What You Did Last Summer has that double initials thing going on, that kind of gets your mouth addicted to saying her name. They’re more than cool names though. As you can tell by what they’re called, they’re also the last girl alive. But that only means she’s last, maybe by luck, and not “best,” when the actual REASON she’s last is that she IS the best of us all.
The REASON she’s final is her resolve, sir. Her will and her insistence not to die. She runs and falls of course, and probably screams and cries too, but this is because she’s started her horror journey out bookish and timid, with good values, the home by nine-thirty good big sister type. But of everybody in the movie she’s the one with “more” inside her, by which I mean at a certain point in all the running away, during all the stalking and slashing, when the bloodletting’s reached a sort of crazed frenzy where the bodies are just falling left and right and between, this Final Girl stands up through the heart of it all, through the fragile shell of her old self, and she goes toe to toe with this bad evil.
The Final Girl is a hero for our times, sir, kind of like a certain student Principal Manx can’t really prove was me leaving that bucket of pig’s blood in the rafters of the Sadie Hawkins dance, that wasn’t even really pig’s blood.
But the best ever example of a real and actual final girl is from Just Before Dawn where Constance finally turns to face her mountainous hillbilly slasher, who’s already carved through the rest of her friends. She’s had enough. Being attacked over and over, it hasn’t weakened her, it’s cut away her restraints. The slasher thought he was tormenting her. He thought he was the one in charge.
Wrong. He was fashioning his own death. He was building the perfect killing machine.