For Lisa, that meant facing the situation head-on. She suggested I grant a few interviews to the press, but under my terms. She said talking about it publicly would help me deal with what had happened.

I followed her advice and granted three interviews—one to the New York Times, one to Newsweek and one to Miss Chanel No. 5, who ended up paying me that one-hundred grand even though I didn’t ask for it. It went a long way toward buying the apartment. And if you think I don’t feel guilty about that, think again.

The interviews were awful. It felt wrong to be talking openly about dead friends who could no longer speak for themselves, especially when I couldn’t remember what had actually happened to them. I was as much of a bystander as the people eager to consume my interviews like candy.

Each one left me so empty and hollow that no amount of food could make me feel full again. So I stopped trying, eventually landing back in the hospital six months after I had left it. By then my father had already lost his battle with cancer and was simply waiting for it to make the knockout blow. Still, he was by my side every day. Wobbly in his wheelchair, he spooned ice cream into my mouth to wash down the bitter antidepressants I had been forced to take.

A spoonful of sugar, Quinn, he’d say. The song doesn’t lie.

Once my appetite returned and I was released from the hospital, Oprah came calling. One of her producers phoned out of the blue saying she wanted us on her show. Me and Lisa and even Samantha Boyd, too. The three Final Girls united at last. Lisa, of course, agreed. So did Samantha, which was a surprise, considering how she was already practicing her vanishing act. Unlike Lisa, she never tried to contact me after Pine Cottage. She was as elusive as my memories.

I, too, said yes, even though the thought of sitting before an audience of housewives clucking with sympathy almost made me plummet back down the rabbit hole of anorexia. But I wanted to meet my fellow Final Girls face to face. Especially Samantha. By that point, I was ready to see the alternative to Lisa’s exhausting openness.

I never got the chance.

The morning my mother and I were scheduled to fly to Chicago, I awoke to find myself standing in her recently remodeled kitchen. The place had been completely trashed—broken plates covering the floor, orange juice dripping from the open refrigerator, countertops a wasteland of eggshells, flour clumps, and oil slicks of vanilla extract. Seated on the floor amid the debris was my mother, weeping for the daughter who was still with her yet irrevocably lost.

Why, Quincy? she moaned. Why would you do this?

Of course I had been the one to ransack the kitchen like a careless burglar. I knew it as soon as I saw the mess. There was a logic to the destruction. It was so utterly me. Yet I had no memory of ever doing it. Those unknown minutes spent trashing the place were as blank to me as that hour at Pine Cottage.

I didn’t mean it, I said. I swear, I didn’t mean it.

My mother pretended to believe me. She stood, wiped her cheeks, gingerly fixed her hair. Yet a dark twitchiness in her eyes betrayed her true emotions. She was, I realized, frightened of me.

While I cleaned the kitchen, my mother called Oprah’s people and cancelled. Since it was all of us or nothing, that decision scuttled the whole thing. There would be no televised meeting of the Final Girls.

Later that day, my mother took me to a doctor who gave me a lifetime prescription for Xanax. So eager was my mother to have me medicated that I was forced to swallow one in the pharmacy parking lot, washing it down with the only liquid in the car—a bottle of lukewarm grape soda.

We’re done, she announced. No more blackouts. No more rages. No more being a victim. You take these pills and be normal, Quincy. That’s how it has to be.

I agreed. I didn’t want a troop of reporters at my graduation. I didn’t want to write a book or do another interview or admit my scars still prickled whenever a thunderstorm rolled in. I didn’t want to be one of those girls tethered to tragedy, forever associated with the absolute worst moment of my life.

Still buzzing from that inaugural Xanax, I called Lisa and told her I wasn’t going to do anymore interviews. I was done being a perpetual victim.

I’m not a Final Girl, I told her.

Lisa’s tone was unfailingly patient, which infuriated me. Then what are you, Quincy?

Normal.

For girls like you and me and Samantha, there’s no such thing as normal, she said. But I understand why you want to try.

Lisa wished me well. She told me she’d be there if I ever needed her. We never spoke again.

Now I stare at the face gazing from the cover of her book. It’s a nice picture of Lisa. Clearly touched up, but not in a tacky way. Friendly eyes. Small nose. Chin maybe a bit too large and forehead a touch too high. Not a classic beauty, but pretty.

She’s not smiling in the picture. This isn’t the kind of book that warrants a smile. Her lips are pressed together in just the right way. Not too cheerful. Not too severe. The perfect balance of gravity and self-satisfaction. I imagine Lisa practicing the expression in a mirror. The thought makes me sad.

I then think of her huddled in her tub, knife in hand. An even worse thought.

The knife.

That’s the thing I don’t understand, more than the act of suicide itself. Shit happens. Life sucks. Sometimes people can’t deal and choose to opt out. Sad as it may be, it happens all the time. Even to people like Lisa.

But she used a knife. Not a bottle of pills washed down with vodka. (My first preference, if it ever comes to that.) Not the soft, fatal embrace of carbon monoxide. (Choice No. 2.) Lisa chose to end her life with the very thing that almost stabbed it out of her decades earlier. She purposely slid that blade across her wrists, taking care to dig in deep, to finish the job Stephen Leibman had started.