FINALIST
in the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025, and highly commended by our judge, Nuala O’Connor, who described it as ‘A breathless, elliptical riot of a story, stuffed with American pop culture and youthful posturing and longing.’
Listen to a reading of this story (reading by Vero Auclaire):
Callie dies first, because of course she does. She’s a cheerleader. Diamond thigh gap in daisy dukes and perky boobs her boyfriend’s daddy bought her, if you pay any mind to the rumors around school, which obviously we do because we’re sixteen and seventeen and if we know anything at all it’s that gossip is currency we can trade for social capital. In any case Brittany mentions it at the start of the movie – Ryan’s dad paid for those, right? – so that fourteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds later when the camera pans over Callie’s naked chest you’ll probably wonder too: real or fake? You can pause it there, for a second, if you like; examine the body that Callie will be in for as long as you suffer the moment to last. She doesn’t know that Ryan is dead or dying already, bleeding out in the shower. When she feels the dip on the mattress beside her she doesn’t turn to look, only smiles and says teasingly: ready for round two? She hates that line. So porny: cringe! she says, and wrinkles her nose in that way Madison always said made her look like a guinea pig. We didn’t like Callie back then, although I like her well enough now. But I’m prevaricating, to hold off what comes next. Unpause.
When the knife makes its breach the camera follows. In and out and then in again it goes, thrusting, out and in, wet squelch and wordless gasp and arterial spray pulsing in wild rhythmic bursts. And then silence, stillness, and no more Callie. Parts only: crimson streaks on long lean thighs, flat midriff standing out golden brown against suggestively tangled white sheets. The blood is corn syrup, mixed with some other stuff. Callie says it tastes of cherries and America. When she tells us that she sounds wistful and there’s a faraway look in her eyes and I can tell she’s thinking about being the top girl in the pyramid, turning cartwheels in the lilac light of the neon diner sign, Ryan’s grimy truck with the vintage leather seats idling on the long stretch of tarmac that leads out of town and off into the wide horizon, into a future she’ll never see. Real? Or fake?
After Callie, Marcy Ann; after Marcy Ann, Laura. But Brittany’s is the hardest, I think. She wants to live so badly. She doesn’t believe in God, so no hereafter, no beyond, no next time; only this and here and now. When whatever his name is – Jason, Michael, Billy? – breaks in through the dining room window she takes her little brother’s hockey stick and waits in the shadow of his bedroom doorway. And you know what, she puts up a real good fight. Doesn’t stop her from dropping like a stunned steer when he stabs her in the back of the knee, though. (Laura sighs and says well, that’s her hockey career over before it ever even got started). For Brittany’s end the camera grants her a dignity it does not often allow, the reward she earns for fighting, and drifts instead to the blood-spattered framed family picture that hangs above the landing: Brittany and her brother, knotted ocean-breeze hair and gappy elementary school teeth. She stopped going to church with the rest of her family because her brother was diagnosed with leukemia when he was ten and even though he got better she says she can’t believe in the existence of any higher power that would have let him suffer like that when the worst thing he’d ever done in his entire life was flush her math homework down the toilet in third grade. I remember that story as I listen to the rasping gasp of her dying breaths. It’s not so bad, really – Brittany’s a fan favorite, an audience-friendly blend of tomboy spunk and kittenish mien, so they bring her back in the third movie. Not alive, but she gets four lines of dialog in the next killer’s hallucination, a few ethereal seconds in Madison’s dream sequence. She says that’s a kind of afterlife, I guess. It is what it is. Loose shrug, rueful snap of gum, practiced nonchalance that turns to a hollow grief when she thinks we’re not watching. But we’re always watching; we can’t look away.
When the killing started we all knew Madison would be the one to make it. I was her best friend – I knew it most of all. I don’t know how to explain that certainty except to say that she was always a person, and I was only ever a girl. A handful of impressions: pictures of pop stars in a high school locker, long hair obscuring the name on a varsity jacket, sneaker-squeak echoes on a polished gym floor. Like if the Mona Lisa caught fire and everything burned all up except for the smile, and also she’s wearing shiny pink bubblegum lipgloss. A cipher pretending to be an enigma; a whole lot of fucking nothing. But Maddie, Maddie was the whole damn painting, the artist’s muse, a real presence outside of the glass and the gilded frame. A person. You feel it inside of you, when you’re just a tag-along extra to somebody else’s deal. Even my death wasn’t about me. The audience can project whatever they want onto the spectacle of my butchered body: death of an innocent, death of a whore, death of the American Dream. What do I care? Maddie, Maddie, my final girl. In the sequels my picture hangs on your wall. Maddie, my love, I haunt your narrative. An ouija board spelling out: ell-em-ay-oh, a string of knife emojis and a solitary dancing girl.
I don’t want to talk about the ending, Jason/Michael/Billy’s neck opened on his own blade, Madison walking out of the woods in her blood-soaked prom dress. You know all of that already. Hers is the image that persists; not Callie’s seamless tan and long blonde hair, not Brittany swinging that hockey stick like a wild thing, not the way I looked at Madison as though the sun rose and set in her eyes. We are the ashes in which she was reborn, the blast shadows of her nuclear ascension to godhood. We are transfixed in celluloid like beetles trapped in amber: inert eternity. Brittany smiles her funny lopsided smile and says, bet you can’t say that five times fast, huh?
I want to talk about………. math class. I was always the best at trig even though I pretended not to understand it because I was afraid of not being like everyone else. Stupid, right? When I was a little kid I wanted to be a vet. Back then we had a golden retriever named Donatello after my favorite turtle and I used to practice bandaging his paws in gauze until he ate one of the bandages and we had to take him to the vet for real. Then I realised that being a vet was kind of gross, actually, you have to put your hand in cows’ buttholes and stuff, and I decided to be a ballerina instead, and I made my mom pay for lessons all the way up until I hit puberty and my body changed in all the wrong ways for ballet. By the time I turned seventeen I didn’t know what I’d be.
Callie’s cartwheels, Brittany’s brother’s blood cancer, my dumb dog and my good grades and the way boys always liked Maddie best. Stories we knitted together out of props and set dressing and that we tell each other over and over again, like ghost stories at a camp-out. Flashlights shining under our chins as we spin our tales. The more we repeat them the more they begin to feel like memories. Do you know how much it sucks to be seventeen forever? Sugar and spice and all things nice, as if! More like: menstrual blood and backstabbing and scabby knuckles from making ourselves puke after every meal. We inhabit an ecosystem of our own devising, speak our own coded language. We are impenetrable to those without, unless you come wielding knives. But don’t you love to watch?
Go on: rewind, press play, rewind again. Back past the corn syrup blood and the eye drop tears and the carefully coached screams, all the way back to the start. There I am, look! Scene one, INT: high school cafeteria, tossing my braid back over my shoulder and smiling, perfect orthodontics and a spray of freckles across the bridge of my nose. Oh my God, I’m saying to Madison, can you even believe…? Isn’t it soooo funny. Fingertips on an iPhone keyboard tapping out ugh, so hot. Take me back to the beginning. Rewind. Play. Let me come alive for you again.
Robyn Jefferson is a short story writer and aspiring novelist from Bristol, England. Her work has been published widely online, shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and awarded third place in both the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize and the GWG Literary Prize. In 2022 she was the first place winner of The Masters Review’s Novel Excerpt Competition with a chapter from her debut novel, Calling Out. She has a BA in English Literature and an MA in Creative Writing, for which she earned a Distinction.