Final Girl~{2015}

She arrived in town the way a stray cat arrives somewhere new — quiet, watchful, easy to overlook. She wore soft cardigans and kept her eyes down at first, let her voice come out small when teachers called on her, let her hands shake just enough when she dropped her tray in the cafeteria. By the second week, half the school had decided what she was: a sad, lonely transfer girl with no friends and no one looking out for her. That was exactly what she wanted them to think. She’d heard the whispers before she ever set foot in the building — about a group of golden boys who never seemed to lack for anything, about girls who left town suddenly and never said goodbye, about a town that had learned not to ask questions. She let herself be seen learning all of this secondhand, wide-eyed, naive. She let herself be seen alone. Jameson found her first, the way spiders find the silk doesn’t tremble. He had a smile built for convincing people of things, and he used it on her in the school parking lot, asked if she was settling in alright, if anyone had shown her around. She blinked up at him like she didn’t quite believe her luck, and something in his face sharpened with interest — the particular interest of a boy who’d never once been told no. “There’s a party this weekend,” he said. “Out in the woods. Nothing big. Just us.” He gestured vaguely at the three boys waiting by his car — Danny, all restless energy and a grin that didn’t quite reach his eyes; Shane, hanging back, arms crossed, watching her with something more careful than the others; Nelson, fidgeting with his sleeve, glancing toward his phone like he expected it to ring. “I don’t really know anyone yet,” she said softly. “You’ll know us,” Jameson said

The woods at night looked exactly the way the rumors had described — string lights wound loose through the branches, a cooler of drinks, a fire already going. It looked, almost convincingly, like a party. She let them see her relax into it. She laughed at Danny’s terrible jokes about an axe he’d nicknamed like a pet. She let Shane pour her a drink she didn’t finish. She watched Nelson check his phone twice in ten minutes, like someone waiting to be caught. It was Jameson who suggested the game. “Hide and seek,” he said, swirling something dark in a flask. “Old-fashioned. You hide, we find you. Whoever doesn’t get found by sunrise wins.” His smile didn’t change, but something underneath it did — the smile of a boy who had played this game many times before and never once lost. “That sounds easy,” she said. “It usually is,” said Danny, and the other three laughed in a way that didn’t belong to a joke. She let them count to a hundred. She let them hear her footsteps moving away, deliberately loud, deliberately panicked-sounding, crashing through brush like a girl who’d never spent a night outdoors in her life. Then she went quiet, and the woods went quiet with her.