In this queer YA psychological thriller from the author of Some Girls Do, perfect for fans of One of Us is Lying and A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, the sole surviving counselors of a summer camp massacre search to uncover the truth of what happened that fateful night, but what they find out might just get them killed.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from the third chapter of Jennifer Dugan’s The Last Girls Standing, which is out August 15th.
Sloan and Cherry. Cherry and Sloan. They met only a few days before masked men with machetes attacked the summer camp where they worked, a massacre that left the rest of their fellow counselors dead. Now, months later, the two are inseparable, their traumatic experience bonding them in ways no one else can understand.
But as new evidence comes to light and Sloan learns more about the motives behind the ritual killing that brought them together, she begins to suspect that her girlfriend may be more than just a survivor—she may actually have been a part of it. Cherry tries to reassure her, but Sloan only becomes more distraught. Is this gaslighting or reality? Is Cherry a victim or a perpetrator? Is Sloan confused, or is she seeing things clearly for the very first time? Against all odds, Sloan survived that hot summer night. But will she survive what comes next?
Chapter Three
The toothbrush was hard and heavy in her hand. Her fingers curled around it so tightly that it might snap, would have snapped, should have snapped, if she had been anywhere except in a dream.
And Sloan knew it was a dream. A nightmare, really, although Sloan knew the real nightmare wouldn’t begin until she opened the door to her cabin. Until she saw the blood running in rivulets, following the same divots in wood and grass that the rain had the day before. But she could never get that far. Not anymore. It was as if her mind was working backward, clearing out the memories from the end to the beginning, leaving her with confusing flashes of half memories—all without order or context.
But the dreams still came like clockwork. Every night pinned to her bed, she relived the final moments before it all went to shit, before she opened the door. Beth had suggested that if they could break the pattern, if Sloan could get the door open before the dream ended, maybe they could make some real progress. Whatever that meant.
Still, Sloan hoped this night, this dream, this nightmare, would be the one.
If she had to open that door, she would rather do it on her own terms, in her own bed, instead of sitting on an oversized armchair in front of Beth.
She looked at the toothbrush in her hand, looked at the wide-eyed reflection of herself in the cabin mirror, and tried to sink all the way inside herself. Deep, deep, until she was drowning in the sensation. Until she felt fused with the body looking in the mirror, until her past and present melted together into one word, one thought: now.
Sloan had been in the bathroom when she’d heard the first scream, and so the bathroom was where she always started, caught in a time loop in her head every night like a rabbit in a snare.
She had just changed into her pink-striped pajamas. Because she knew Cherry liked them best and had been expecting, hoping, waiting for her to visit for one of their late-night talks. Cherry had made it a habit to show up out of the blue, and Sloan wanted to be ready.
Thus, the cute pajamas, the toothbrush heavy in her hand. They had kissed earlier, and she hoped they would again, and she’d be damned if their second kiss was going to start with stale garlic crouton breath.
Five, four, three, two, and—
The scream ripped through the dream exactly as it had that night.
Sloan had thought nothing of it at first until others joined in. Until the screaming turned to crying, to begging. Until a heavy thunk—followed by the sticky wet sound of what she had at first thought was a watermelon being split, but later turned out to be the sternum of one of the other counselors—had made her bones rattle and her teeth ache.
Something was wrong.
Very, very wrong.
Sloan set the toothbrush down and crept over to the tiny, frosted bathroom window, just as she had that night. The rough unfinished pine logs that made up the cabin walls scratched her cheek as she tried to pry the window back. She couldn’t see anything through the cloudy glass, but maybe if she could get it open, she could make something out through the screen, even though it was pitch-black outside.
The solar-powered motion lights on the other cabins began to flick on, and then off, as if someone—or something—was moving from place to place. A shiver ran down her spine as the light two cabins down clicked on. Whatever it was, it was heading in her direction, getting closer.
And she supposed that made sense.
Most of the other cabins were empty, after all.
Next week the summer camp would be bustling full of little kids, mostly middle schoolers—but also the occasional elementary kid whose parents needed them out of the way, or high schooler working as a “junior counselor.”
But that was next week.
This week, the week Sloan learned that chopping watermelons doesn’t sound all that different from chopping bodies, there was only a small group of counselors and workers. Ten, to be exact. Spread out all over the camp.
And somehow, even then, still trying to unjam the bathroom window and get a better look, Sloan knew that number wouldn’t last the night.
She gave up on the window, blurry and stuck shut, even though it had worked every time before that. Sloan paused for a second to try to remember if it really had been stuck that night; she had a sneaking suspicion that was a new detail, only for the dream, her mind trying to take away even more, to hide it away where it couldn’t hurt her . . . but she couldn’t be sure.
And if she started thinking too much, if she pressed too hard, if she started taking control instead of running on time-loop autopilot, she knew she would be flung back into the waking world before she even got to the doorknob. Would wake up sweaty and hot even in the cold autumn night, her sheets tangled around her like a straitjacket.
Sloan was determined not to let that happen.
Not tonight. Not again. She had to stay. She had to stay.
Sloan dropped to her knees when the second scream hit, followed shortly thereafter by a deep rustling sound near the edge of the cabin. She crawled to the main room, the sound of her breathing too loud and scratchy in the stillness, bordering on hysterical. The room was small, barely room enough for a bed and a table and a woodstove. Barely any room to hide.
Splinters bit into her skin as she crawled across the floor and up onto her bed to peer through the dusty screen of another stuck-shut window. At least this one wasn’t frosted. She wedged her shoulder against the little lip of the window and got it to open just a crack, just enough to let the air from outside slip in, cocooning her in the scent it carried.
The breeze had transformed from something earthy and crisp to something metallic that made her stomach clench. Sloan couldn’t place it, but somewhere deep inside her, every single cell in her body was screaming at her to run. Now. Go. Leave. Danger. Danger! Her primal instincts taking over as if she was more feral beast than house cat. Every muscle tensed to bolt. To save her. To escape whatever it was that smelled like that.
But that’s when she saw the man.
At least she thought it was a man. She was pretty sure. He was tall, lumbering, a body in stark relief, an inky shadow beside the bright yellow of the motion light on the cabin next to hers. But the shape of his head was distorted into something odd, something pointy.
It wasn’t until he stepped under the light, the machete in his hand stained red—god, so much red—that Sloan realized it was a mask. A crudely made monstrosity, carved out of wood and affixed to where the face of a person should have been.
Sloan thought it was supposed to be a fox, but it had been thoroughly distorted by the slices and gouges in the wood. This man wasn’t a fox; he an approximation of a fox, a sloppy kid’s drawing come to life. An insult to arts and crafts everywhere.
And it made Sloan mad. If she was going to be murdered, if this was going to be her last night on this dying earth, she at least deserved a quality, clever, talented killer.
But no, that wasn’t right. That hadn’t been what she was thinking then at all. That was Real Sloan leaking in—frustrated and furious from the future—and no, no, no, no, the real her needed to pull back before she got ejected.
Autopilot. Time loop. “Be a casual observer,” Beth had once said. “Let your memories lead the way.”
So she did.
Sloan blinked, observing the man—The Fox, as she would come to call him—as he turned and started walking, walking slowly toward the cabin she was in, his head tilted to the very window she looked out of, and all that fear, all that lizard-brain survival instinct came flooding back. Could he see her?
Her stomach roiled as her eyes fell on the slumped shadow left abandoned on the porch in the man’s wake. At first, she thought it was a pile of clothes. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t someone taking a nap or passed-out drunk; it wasn’t any of the good things that the first days had brought. It was sweet Beckett, a college sophomore from Virginia. She could tell it was him from those expensive hiking boots he never took off. A dark puddle slowly spread beneath him and surrounded him like a halo.
Sloan clamped her hand over her mouth to stifle a scream and then rushed to the exit, tripping over her comforter as she clawed her way past. Panic sent her careening toward the door on hands and knees. If she could get the door open, if she could just get out, she would run, far and fast. Never stopping. Never looking back.
She hoped Cherry would be waiting on the other side of the door, like she supposedly had been in real life, with a kiss and an outreached hand and running feet that had ultimately led them to the old canoes stacked up next to Kevin’s office. They had hidden under them, had lain as still and quiet as mice while the director’s blood soaked into Sloan’s hair.
But when Sloan turned the knob, it was locked. Locked hard, as it had been in every single dream before. Sloan clawed and cried and screamed, pounding against it even as the motion light flicked on over the door.
Then there it was, like every time, the sight of Cherry’s face in the small window, at first relieved and then confused, as his blade pushed through her, pulling up, and Sloan was hit with the realization of exactly what that wet thwack she’d heard earlier was.
She would never eat watermelon again.
And Cherry? Cherry slid down, her blood slipping underneath the still-locked door, wet and warm beneath Sloan. The Fox stood at the window, tilting his head left and right, exactly where Cherry had been a second before, and then he—
“Shhh, shhh, I got you. I’m here. It’s not real. We’re okay.”
Sloan struggled against the body holding her down, kicking and screaming until the words wove into her brain and dragged her from the dream. Her eyes opened, wide and painful. Every light in the room was on, and there were so many—she had added them after her parents brought her back home, stained inside and out and still wrapped in the shock blanket she had refused to let go of during her long days in the hospital.
She clenched her fingers around Cherry’s T-shirt and buried her face against her girlfriend’s belly. Cherry was here. Alive. It hadn’t been real. She had never been stabbed. It was okay.
It was okay.
Cherry gave Sloan a moment to pull herself together, letting her take big, gulping breaths through the open window that Cherry had slipped through.
“You were dead. You were dead.”
“It was a dream, baby,” Cherry, real and alive, said over and over again until Sloan stopped crying.
“You came,” Sloan said eventually, when she could finally find her voice through the sobs.
One side of Cherry’s mouth slipped up into a smile. “Well, it’s family night, right?” she teased. “I couldn’t miss that.”
Sloan tried and failed to push out a smile. She melted into Cherry instead, let herself go limp in the other girl’s arms, let Cherry hold her up . . . until her door swung open and tore them from the little peace they had found.
Sloan’s parents took in the sight of the girls—wrapped tight around each other like two halves of a lock—and then the opened window, the tattered blankets, the tears, and they scowled. Well, Sloan’s mom, Allison, did. Her father, Brad, simply shook his head and walked away.
“I told you to use the door, Cherry. My insurance won’t cover you breaking your neck climbing the side of my goddamn house,” Allison said, before she slammed the door shut behind her.
Cherry giggled. She dragged Sloan down onto the bed with her and carefully arranged the blankets over them both. “Your mother loves me.”
“I’m the only one who needs to love you,” Sloan answered and drifted off to the sensation of Cherry tracing slow circles on her skin.
She was here.
She was real.
She was safe.
