Books Teen Horror Time Machine Surviving Senior Year: Christopher Pike’s Final Friends Trilogy You know it’s been a great year when it ends with a double wedding in Vegas. By Alissa Burger | Published on May 22, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share In the world of ‘90s teen horror, Christopher Pike is the master of complex extended narratives, including his Remember Me trilogy (1989-1995) and the Last Vampire series (1994-2013). Each of these stories include ensembles of characters with all kinds of personal motives and secrets; interconnections between the living, dead, and undead; and roller coasters of twists, turns, and unexpected revelations. The Final Friends trilogy is another of Pike’s series, though in some ways it’s more streamlined than the others: all three books (The Party, The Dance, and The Graduation) were published in 1988, it stays clearly focused on one core group of friends throughout the series with no new characters added along the way, and it works within the contained chronology of the main characters’ senior year of high school.  The Final Friends series has a rich cast of characters, whose interconnections, desires, and secrets keep the drama coming. While some of them have known each other for years, they’re also making some new friends, as two high schools—Mesa and Tabb—are consolidated at the start of the characters’ senior year, a dynamic which balances familiarity with the thrill of the new. Former Mesa High students Jessica Hart, Sara Cantell, and Polly and Alice McCoy have known one another their whole lives. Jessica, Sara, and Polly are seniors, while Polly’s sister Alice is a couple of years younger than them. They all come from fairly privileged backgrounds: Jessica is a few days late to the start of the school year because her family’s vacation in Switzerland ran long, while Polly and Alice are actual heiresses to their family’s company and fortune. Jessica is an image-conscious girl whose big dream for the year is to be homecoming queen, Sara goes out of her way to be abrasive and holds people at arm’s length, and Polly quietly hovers around the margins. Part of Polly’s sadness comes from her parents’ deaths when she and Alice were young, which left the sisters under the care of an elderly maiden aunt and Polly in the role of a surrogate mother to Alice. Alice is bright and bubbly, a kind girl and a creative artist, though her work takes a darker turn when she starts dating a mysterious boy named Clark, who encourages her to trade her cute animals and rainbows for scenes of death and horror.  The girls start making new friends—and enemies—when they move to Mesa High and when Alice throws a party to bring kids from both schools together to get to know each other a little better, the Final Friends group coalesces. Like the Mesa crew, there’s a cohort of Tabb High students who have known each other for years, bringing their past relationships and baggage into the mix. Michael Olson is shy, smart, and immediately develops a crush on Jessica when they’re assigned to share a locker. Michael is friends with a guy everyone just calls “Bubba,” a slightly overweight guy who has impressive computer skills, a salacious sexual reputation, and rumored organized crime ties in his extended family. Bill Skater is the bland but handsome high school quarterback and he’s dating Clair Hilrey, the beautiful head cheerleader who immediately becomes Jessica’s main competition for homecoming queen. There’s a beefy, aggressive football player that everyone just calls “The Rock,” who seems to have more muscles than heart (though of course, first impressions can be deceiving). Russ Desmond is a stellar cross country athlete but also an antisocial slacker, constantly drinking beer and with zero interest in what anyone thinks about him. Unlike the former Mesa students, most of the teens from Tabb High don’t come from lives of privilege and prosperity; Michael, for example, lives with his single mother and works a full time job at the local convenience store to help cover the bills, while Russ has a job stocking shelves in a grocery store to help support his family. The group is rounded out by two new students: Nick Gruntler, a tall Black guy who just transferred in from East Los Angeles and Maria Gonzales, a sweet girl who keeps a low profile because she and her family are in the United States without documentation and she doesn’t want any trouble. Finally, there’s Kats, a former Tabb High student who dropped out, works at the local service station, and somehow always seems to be hanging around.  The teens all start getting to know one another, though their preconceived notions and prejudices throw up a few roadblocks along the way, like everyone thinking Nick’s a dangerous gang member because of how he looks and where he comes from. The Rock and Nick get in a fight in the weight room, which leaves Nick constantly watching his back. Kats thinks it would be a laugh to rob the convenience store; he comes in with a loaded gun and gets mad when Nick tackles him, adding one more name to the list of guys who are out to get him. There’s a lot of tension and competition between Jessica and Clair, who both want to be the prettiest and most popular girl in school. Sara is annoyed with Jessica and Polly because they secretly signed her up to run for class president, and following a snarky speech full of eye rolls and insults, she unexpectedly wins. Russ knocks Sara down when she accidentally steps in front of him during a cross country race and he stops to talk to her, which costs him the race and gets him kicked off the team. Sara and Polly both like Russ, who Polly busts trying to chop down the campus’s victory tree one night while he’s drunk; she takes away his ax and gives him a ride home, but he’s convinced it was Sara who stopped him, which leads to all kinds of “where’s my ax?” confusion. Michael likes Jessica, but Jessica’s got her eye on Bill.  Polly and Alice’s party seems like an ideal opportunity to start building some camaraderie and community, but it ends tragically when Alice is discovered dead in one of the upstairs bedrooms, with all signs seeming to point toward a self-inflicted gunshot as the cause of death, though Michael refuses to accept this explanation. There’s a lot of conflicting information, including uncertainty about where people were and discrepancies in exactly where the sound of the gunshot came from, mysteries that lay the foundation for the second and third books in the trilogy: The Dance and The Graduation.  With Pike’s approach of structuring each book around a core event—Polly and Alice’s party, the homecoming dance, and graduation day—the narrative chronology leaves time between these installments for characters to grow and change. Individual characters’ approaches to coping with their grief, the way they drift apart and come back together, and their own internal trajectories remain largely untold. At the start of The Dance and The Graduation, readers come back to these familiar characters, but with the deck reshuffled. Polly distances herself from her friends as she grieves the loss of her sister, Michael avoids Jessica because he knows she likes Bill, Sara embraces the responsibilities of leadership and makes tough choices. The characters and their relationships develop and change, with readers needing to get to know them anew after this time away from the story. Some of these changes are even for the better. For example, Nick becomes a star basketball player, which completely changes things for him as he becomes popular and confident, gains his father’s approval, and earns a college scholarship. Bubba and Clair become a surprising and adorable couple.  While Michael continues to investigate Alice’s death throughout the entirety of the series, the central conflict of The Dance is who will be named homecoming queen. Jessica, Clair, and Maria are three of the four finalists for the crown; the fourth is a peripheral character named Cindy Fosmeyer, whose sole distinguishing characteristics seem to be that “She had huge breasts and a big nose” (51). The interpersonal conflict in The Dance gets increasingly vicious: Jessica really wants to be homecoming queen and when Polly sees Clair looking queasy at the local family planning clinic, Jessica doesn’t hesitate to start a rumor that Clair got an abortion in an attempt to tank the other girl’s popularity and cost her votes. Polly steals thousands of dollars that are earmarked to cover dance expenses from Sara’s purse. Polly knows how much Sara likes Russ, but when he shows up at her house looking for a place to crash after his dad kicks him out, she invites him in and is all too happy to let everyone think they’re having sex. Jessica and Michael finally get a date lined up, but she blows him off at the last minute to go out with Bill instead. On the big night, Maria wins homecoming queen, though this victory ends up costing her, because someone sabotaged the float and she falls, sustaining injuries that might leave her paralyzed for the rest of her life. In The Graduation, all of the secrets finally come out. Jessica makes up her mind to have sex with Bill, only to realize that her seduction attempts have been unsuccessful because Bill’s gay. Michael finally finds Alice’s shifty former boyfriend Clark, just to learn out that he didn’t have anything to do with the murder (though Clark does get understandably on edge when Michael shows up with a gun, and he hits Michael in the head with a canvas, giving him a concussion). Jessica and Michael finally each declare their love for the other and get together. The friends find out that Maria can walk again, though she lets everyone think she’s paralyzed for just a little longer in an attempt to draw the attempted murderer into a confession. Most importantly, they find out the truth about what happened to Alice. As the tagline on the cover of The Graduation says, “The truth was neither black nor white … but a horrible shade of gray.” Alice’s death was a tragic accident, the result of a fall from a ladder while she was getting some cups from the closet and arguing with Polly. Polly was devastated by her sister’s death but set it up to look like suicide to deflect any suspicion from herself. And then there’s Clark … or rather, the two Clarks. There’s the actual, real life Clark that Alice dated and Michael tracked down, and then there’s Polly’s imaginary version of Clark, who killed Alice, is constantly threatening her, and pushes her to do violent and destructive things, like blow up the boat where the senior class party is being held. Polly has deep-seated trauma and guilt, blaming herself not just for Alice’s death but for their parents’ deaths as well, because she was annoying her father when they had their car accident and because she lived while her parents died. This guilt seems to have been exacerbated by electroshock treatments she received while she was institutionalized after the accident, and which, it is suggested, may play some nebulous role in her belief in imaginary Clark. Polly’s imaginary version of Clark allows her to displace the “badness” she believes resides within her, relieving some of the pressure of her guilt and self-loathing. Things are touch-and-go for a while as Polly makes her confession—the boat sinks, Jessica’s arm gets broken, and Polly threatens to blow them all up with explosives she has strapped to her chest—but Jessica’s steadfast friendship and repeated reassurances that Polly is a good person help dodge disaster. Jessica makes it to the hospital to get her arm set, Polly gets the psychiatric help she needs to begin healing, and the entire senior class survives the graduation party.  As these Final Friends come to terms with these new revelations and romances, they look toward adulthood with cautious optimism. A new chapter is beginning, one that looks to kick off with a double wedding in Las Vegas later that night: Bubba and Clair publicly profess their undying love for one another, and with Maria’s parents deported while she was hospitalized for her injuries, Nick and Maria plan to get married to keep her from getting deported, too—though they also do seem to really care for each other. Michael and Jessica briefly flirt with the idea of making it a triple wedding, though this does seem a bit premature given that they haven’t even gone on an actual date yet. However it all shakes out, life after graduation looks like it’s going to be just as exciting—though hopefully less tragic—than their wild senior year.  Overall, Pike’s inclusion of topics like racial prejudice, xenophobia, and queerness was progressive for the time in which the series was published and in the larger context of the 1990s teen horror trend. Some of the specific representations may be a bit cringey to a contemporary audience—like The Rock’s initial friction with Nick stemming from him confusing Nick with another tall Black guy who is a drug dealer, and Bill’s distress the night of the party being traced back to his realization that he doesn’t like girls—but these definitely mirror biases and prejudices of the 1980s and ‘90s (and some of which persist today). As far as the characters of the Final Friends trilogy are concerned, however, their friends are who they are, and they love, accept, and support them. They come from a range of backgrounds, see the world from their own personal perspectives, and are sometimes treated differently because of who they are or how they look, but for this central group of characters, their shared trauma and fight for survival transcend all of these differences, drawing them together even when the biases of the wider world want to pull them apart.[end-mark] The post Surviving Senior Year: Christopher Pike’s Final Friends Trilogy appeared first on Reactor.