first girl (to die in a horror movie)

a love letter & an imagined narrative

drew berrymore in scream, an iconic ‘first girl’

(this is a love letter to all the first girls to die in horror movies, usually slashers. we have so many theories and cultural explorations of the final girl, but what about the first girl? what is she worth?)

You’re wearing red-glitter cowboy boots and short-shorts and a cropped black tank top, braless. You’re wearing something slinky and insubstantial and hyper-femme hyper-asking-for-it. You’re trying to run in heels, and you’re clumsy, tripping over your own feet, trying to stay alive but girls like you are not meant to stay alive, not meant to survive the night, not meant to be here for more than twenty minutes or so. Girls like you are meant to slip on something small and silly; to cut your hand on a beer bottle and go to the garage to look for a bandage. Girls like you are meant to say be right back in a flimsy giggly voice and believe it, but you never actually make it back. You should lock yourself in a drawer if you don’t want to play the part. You should be a skittish dog, a pious virgin, a sharpened knife, if you want to make it out of here. Listen: girls like you do not stay intact. The movie wouldn’t make sense if you did.

---

You wore too much eyeliner.

You stood up in your boyfriend’s car, and stuck your head out the sunroof, dared the nighttime to swallow you whole, flushed and laughed against the wind, watched your whole lifeless town dissolve.

You wanted too much.

You took an edible. You smoked in the basement of your best friend’s house. You kept refilling your cup, kept downing bad vodka, or Fireball, or whatever happened to be around the house, whatever your parents wouldn’t miss from the liquor cabinet.

You got too stoned. You acted too unafraid. Laughed too loud and too hard, snorted, did a line off the bathroom sink.

You kept laughing. Kept giggling, reddening, kept blooming into the worst kind of girl.

You started singing a Britney song at full-volume and you were off-pitch, off-key, undeterred by shame, by rolled eyes and huffed groans. You danced in your underwear.

You spun in the middle of someone’s living room, hands thrown up, limbs untucked, unhidden, a fever of want and thick blonde hair reeling past all the faces and words and warnings.

You forgot to use your indoor voice. To keep it all inside. To smother each gust of adoration or desire or hungry sticky pink need. Your sentences lilted at the end, a question mark piercing each of your lines like the fake diamond earrings you wear in your last scene. You overused like, dripped in ums and shut UPs, looked up at boys through mountained-on mascara and cocked your head to the side. You twirled your hair, touched their arms, spoke in the languid jeweled tongue of girl, pulling them in, in, in.

You didn’t pretend to dislike yourself for their sake.

You didn’t pretend to love anyone if you didn’t really love them.

You dressed up, thickened your makeup, over-glossed your lips, chewed gum in class, wore too much or too little, didn’t try to keep your body a secret above all else.

---

When the knife arrives—

​Or the axe.

​Or the gun.

​Or the hammer.

​Or the screwdriver.

​Or the chainsaw.

​Or—whatever.

When it comes, you always scream, a canary in the loneliest dark, but no one ever hears you. You try to run. You cry, wail, flail your hands and scratch at nothing. Maybe you escape for a second, but you always die. It’s always a tricky standstill, a hopeless moment suspended between plot-points, you, still breathing, but only just.

You try to run, yes. You try to make a sound. To quake and tear and bruise the script enough that maybe light will flood the stage, and the killer will take off his silly Halloween mask, and maybe you will not be punished, this time, for being seventeen, or fifteen, or twenty, for being horny or garish or ditzy.

You try to fight back, to bite into his arm locked around your neck, to yank yourself free from the flames. You want to live, is the thing. You want to live; you’re always, always, the most alive out of all of them, really. Up until you’re not.

---

The backseat of an old blue Toyota, or the den of your parents’ house. Under the bleachers. The bedroom upstairs, at a party. A bathroom, even. An unlocked closet.

You fucked someone, and now you’re here, bludgeoned to pieces, a jigsaw of tendons and blood and bone fragments, a compost heap of girl, all shining rotting mess and a pink retainer lying in the grass and a jaw unhinged and words cut short and a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses or a cute velvet scrunchie and a dropped cell phone and a condom wrapper shining like a jewel in the dirt. You fucked someone, and this is the consequence, always, really, to be strung up like Christmas lights, innards carved out, your hair matted and your eyes unblinking. You fucked someone, someone fucked you, you had sex, you permitted yourself a flicker of warmth, of pleasure, of breathless heat and sweat and entanglement and now you’re here, now you’re gone.

The way his mouth felt against your thigh. The way she kissed your stomach. The noises you made. The momentary obliteration, sometimes like having your wires reglued, sometimes like nothing at all, sometimes boring, sometimes aflame.

Sometimes you came. Sometimes you didn’t. It doesn’t matter.

But maybe it does.

Because the worst thing you could do, the quickest route to here, to now, to dead-girl-on-the-lawn, was enjoy it.

Was ask for it. Initiate. Want. Need. Crave. Be the one to touch, kiss, speak, first.

Gore begins as this, as a needy animal body, as a racing pulse, as an arrangement of skin and features and appetites, as a girl opening a door, a girl undressing, a girl walking home alone, a girl flirting just to flirt, a girl taking something just for the sheer delight of it.

Gore never looks like gore at the start.

---

This time, your teeth ache because you just got your wisdom teeth out and you’re gonna die with your face puffed up like a blowfish, with your mouth and gums swollen and red, so, thanks for that, timing.

This time you sit on your bed and watch porn for a while before it gets boring, until you can no longer endure the men yanking at women’s hair and shoving their dicks into mouths. It gets trite, tired. You rub at your eyes and throw your phone on the bed and maybe you take a nap. Maybe you text your best friend, the one who won’t die tonight, the one who will have to live with the memory and yearning and image and cold weight of your death, but whose heart will, ultimately, keep beating, for the time being, till the credits roll, at least. Maybe this best friend is more than a best friend, when you dare to acknowledge the heart of the thing—maybe you’ve kissed in the dark, or you’ve wanted to.

This time, there might be a premonition, like sudden swarming wasps in your throat, as you lay around with ice cream and press gauze to your aching teeth. This time you ignore the sensation, the knot, the low strained hum of intuition, of what you might deride as paranoia because everyone else does, this time you decide to go out because you’re tired of locking yourself away in your room to tend to your bloody mouth.

You’re not really supposed to be drinking tonight, you know, but maybe this time you can’t quite bring yourself to care.

---

Your death doesn’t collect montages of blood-drenched heroism and resilience, doesn’t draw the many tributes at all. You don’t live entombed in the trauma of remembering because you don’t live at all. Neither is better or worse, exactly. But your disposability, your narrative weightlessness that is still the very flame that ignites all the action, your sudden departure that everyone expects and no one cares much to grieve; why are these qualities assigned to you, why do you become the engine of the plot, the propeller, never much of a person, never much of a character besides the nightmare your ending begins.

There isn’t much room for you here, much sustained reality to inhabit. You have limited screen-time, after all. You are more of a prop, a device, a glitter-coated bomb, than anything else. But you’re essential too, to the plot, to the story, to the terror. So crucial and so negligible. Who were you, besides that name everyone in town knows—her, the one who died first, the one whose death started it all, collapsed every fantasy of safe suburban existence, brought it all to hell. Who were you besides such voided mourning, not really attached to you but to whatever it is you represent or enable or disturb?

Your death is the glue. The connective tissue and the pulse itself.

asking for it / stupid ditzy dumb blonde bimbo whore slut bitch attention-whore walked-right-into-that-didn’t-she / or /she was so sweet so angelic so unreal so paper-thin, she was a good girl, a paragon of good-girlness, actually, even though we know nothing about her or her heart or flaws or loneliness or interests or ambitions. There is no dearth of iconographies to attach to you. And none of them are right.