“All’s Fair in Love and Gore: The Intersection of Romantic Comedies and Slasher Films in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuriesreally speaks to the elitist piece of shit in me.”
“Well, if they’re handing out PhDs based on titles, I—”
“Baby girl,” she says like a warning, and it takes everything in me to keep my lips fashioned in a pout when she uses the pet name we have for each other.We adopted it after I made her watch365 Daysas payback for having to sit through the nomadic sheep farmer documentary.Attempts at making Stockholm syndrome sexy aside, what started off as a sardonic joke has evolved into an enduring termof endearment.It’s the closest thing I’ll get to overt affection from a woman whose general demeanor could rival the impenetrable surface of Crystal Lake at the end ofFriday the 13th.
“You need a break.”
“I need towrite.”
“You’re ahead of your Gantt Chart.”
She points to where it lies to the side of my laptop, as if I haven’t memorized each little row of achievement like I memorized Kat’s speech in10 Things I Hate About You.
“Exactly!”I say.“I have all my research, my outline, mytitle.Iknowwhat I want to say, I should just be able to write it.”
“Well maybe, as an ‘elitist piece of shit,’I’mnot the right person to be reading it.”With that she scoots out of the chair and heads for the refrigerator, making a wide berth around the counter when I fling my foot out at her.She opens the fridge and inserts her head into the top shelf as she asks, “When do you see Jordan?”
Romero.My adviser.Not related to the Father of the Zombie Film, but certainly wishes he was.
“Friday.”
“Then this seems like a fantastic concern to raise in that conversation.”Her voice sounds tinny in the confines of the fridge, and I have half a mind to swivel around, place my bare foot on her bony ass, and Spartan-kick her into a container of leftover chow mein for being so logical.
It’s not that I don’t believe in my work.I do.
I could talk about slashers and rom-coms forhours.Longer.
If the makers ofSawneed an inventive form of torture for a new installment, just stick me in a dirty bathroom with a chained morally ambiguous gentleman and he’d end up cutting his own leg off to escape one of my lectures on how Nora Ephron was a visionary.
IknowI know what I’m talking about.Butwhat if?creeps in aseasily as a masked killer at a summer camp.My brain forgets I’m perfectly capable of writing about a topic I have spent the majority of my adult life (and even before) studying and researching and unpacking.
Laurie’s right, though.There’s no point dwelling on a problem that has no hope of being solved until I can engage in some academic repartee with my adviser.She knows she’s right, too, but I don’t want her to get a big head.
“Stop being smart,” I mutter at her sweatpant-covered ass.
“Stop being dramatic,” echoes from the refrigerator.
I heave the most dramatic of dramatic sighs, then grin when she backs out of the fridge with a can of passion fruit sparkling water, holding it to her heart and widening her eyes.The pout is a nice touch, too.It’s the last one, and because I’m not an elitist piece of shit I let her have it.
“What time do we have to be there tonight?”I ask as Laurie takes the sacred last can to the couch and turns on the TV, switching it from Netflix to the news.Yeah, she stillwatchesthe news.I think it’s a guilty pleasure, the closest thing to fiction she’ll view willingly.
“Cocktail hour begins at seven.Dates start at eight.So be ready by… six thir—No, six fifteen?Google Maps predicts it could take anywhere from thirty to forty minutes to get to the bar from Bed-Stuy.”
“You and Google Maps,” I muse, jumping off the counter and sliding into the seat in front of my laptop.“If it were a person, we wouldn’t even need to go tonight.”With a few taps of the keys, I save and close the apparently pointless beginning pages of my dissertation, pulling the screen down in time to see Laurie lift a middle finger in my direction.
“This is as much for you as it is for me,” she calls over her shoulder, keeping her focus squarely on the newscaster who fills the frame of our TV.“Consider this your allotted ‘popping the thesis bubble andreconnecting with the real world’ time for the week.You can’t spend every hour with masked murderers and men who get all starry-eyed every time a girl trips in a nice dress.”
I mean, Icouldspend every hour doing that, but she’s got a point.And I’ve already paid for the ticket.We’re going speed dating.It’s not our first singles event.After a particularly heinous nonstarter situationship a few months ago, Laurie went down a Google rabbit hole incited by her own dating app fatigue.She loves a statistic more than I love a well-executed jump scare, and when the numbers showed thata lotof people in our generation were as fed up with swiping as her (“Seventy-eight percent of users, Jamie!”), I accepted her proposal to attend at least one in-person social event a month.It was an easy decision, since I’m vehemently against apps (it seems more likely you’ll get murdered rather than find love through Tinder these days).And while speed dating definitely has a kind of dated, nineties feel to it, I’ve had fun at the other events we’ve gone to in the past.They’ve never led to actual dates—especially not after we went to a film trivia night, and I got a little too passionate during the horror category—but I like the idea of a real-life meet-cute.I like the idea of locking eyes with someone and thinking:Oh, it’syou.I like it a lot.
I just haven’t seen it outside of the movies yet.
The newscaster changes their angle upon the completion of the weather report and the inset image flips to a story about a pretty woman around our age who was found with her throat slit.
I don’t even blink.It’s not the first time this has happened this year.The banner slowly crawling across the screen with the words “Brooklyn Serial Killer” is evidence enough of that.There’s been four murders in about as many months, and now Casey Langenkamp is number five.The photos pulled from her social media depict a sweet-faced twentysomething who wouldn’t look out of place on a poster with Glen Powell.She fits the usual victim profile that incites fervid,yet fleeting, public interest: blond, petite, pretty, loved by all, and of course she lit up the room when she walked in.
All the classic markers of someone who is destined to be murdered and discarded like the rose petals that have been found surrounding each of the bodies.There’s a clip of a stern-looking woman—the lower third at the bottom of the screen identifies her as a police captain—confirming that the police believe the murders are connected, and then the report closes with the newscaster encouraging women to:
Be vigilant when out and about.
