CHARACTER
Final Girlsby RIley Sager

Quincy Carpenter

Quincy Carpenter

Quick Facts

  • Role: Protagonist and sole survivor of the Pine Cottage massacre; a media-labeled “Final Girl”
  • First appearance: Chapter 1, in her carefully curated New York City life
  • Occupation: Food blogger (Quincy’s Sweets); projects order and sweetness amid chaos
  • Defining traits: Dissociative amnesia, hypervigilance, compulsive secrecy, latent rage
  • Key relationships: Boyfriend Jeff Richards; “rescuer” turned nemesis Franklin Cooper (Coop); provocateur Tina Stone (posing as Samantha Boyd); fellow Final Girl Lisa Milner; murdered best friend Janelle Bennett; epilogue mentee Hayley Pace

Who They Are

Quincy Carpenter lives as though normalcy can be baked, frosted, and photographed—and her blog proves she’s good at it. But her “ordinary” persona is armor. Ten years after surviving Pine Cottage, Quincy has built a life meant to exclude the past, even as the media’s “Final Girl” myth threatens to define her. She’s caught between rejecting and inevitably embodying The 'Final Girl' Identity: denying the label keeps her safe, yet confronting it is the only way forward. Her arc asks whether identity is something we choose—or something carved into us by violence.

Personality & Traits

Quincy’s psyche is a paradox: she functions with precision and charm, yet she’s a pressure cooker of fear and fury. Her amnesia is both shield and prison. What she hides—especially from herself—shapes her as much as what she performs for the world.

  • Traumatized and hypervigilant: Her days are shaped by Trauma and Its Aftermath—Xanax with grape soda, pepper spray in her purse, a constant scan for threat. Dissociative amnesia walls off the “missing hour” at Pine Cottage, sparing her and imprisoning her at once.
  • Curates normalcy through domesticity: The baking blog isn’t just a hobby; it’s ritualized control. Recipes offer steps, measurements, and predictable endings—everything Pine Cottage denied her.
  • Secretive and deceptive (especially with herself): Quincy steals small, shiny objects and locks them away, a private shrine to compulsion. This literal locked drawer turns the theme of Truth, Memory, and Deception into an object: she’s practicing concealment even in her safe life.
  • Repressed rage that detonates under pressure: From wrecking her mother’s kitchen (Chapter 3) to pummeling a would-be mugger in Central Park (Chapter 18), Quincy’s body remembers what her mind refuses. Each violent outburst is a breadcrumb back to Pine Cottage.
  • Haunted by tarnished innocence: The white dress stained red recurs in flashes—a shorthand for the shattering of safety. Its persistence in her memory suggests she’s not simply fleeing the past; she’s orbiting the moment she was remade.

Character Journey

Quincy begins as a virtuoso of avoidance, insisting she’s not a Final Girl, only a baker with a boyfriend and a nice apartment. The façade fractures when news of Lisa Milner’s death collides with the intrusions of Tina Stone, who poses as Samantha Boyd and drags Quincy toward her buried rage. The Central Park attack is a hinge: Quincy discovers a capacity for violence that feels both alien and intimately familiar, prying loose her sealed memories. When Tina abducts her back to Pine Cottage, the past surges in full: Coop—the cop who “saved” her—was the killer all along. Quincy’s final confrontation reverses the power dynamic of a decade: she kills Coop, not to survive an attack but to claim authorship of her survival. In the epilogue, she seeks out Hayley Pace, choosing mentorship over isolation. Quincy no longer lives by forgetting; she lives by facing—and by deciding what her survival means.

Key Relationships

  • Jeff Richards: Jeff loves the version of Quincy who can pass as healed, and he struggles when the past surfaces in ways he can’t manage. Their relationship charts the tension between a comforting fiction (domestic bliss, tidy recovery) and an unruly truth (trauma, anger, memory). Quincy’s distance from Jeff grows as she stops performing normalcy and begins owning complexity.

  • Franklin Cooper (Coop): For a decade, Coop is her stoic protector, the man who “saved” her life—and the linchpin of her ability to forget. When memory returns, that trust curdles into horror: his protection was a net to keep his secret. Killing him transforms Quincy’s survival from a passive accident of his obsession into an active, self-authored choice.

  • Tina Stone (posing as Samantha Boyd): Tina is both catalyst and dark mirror. By goading Quincy into risk and rage, she strips away the pretense of normalcy, forcing Quincy to see the violent survivor she already is. Tina’s manipulation is corrosive, yet it inadvertently grants Quincy access to truth and agency.

  • Lisa Milner: Lisa represents a possible version of survival—structured, outwardly productive, publicly embraced. Her death jolts Quincy out of hiding and reactivates the Final Girl network. Quincy’s reluctance to accept Lisa’s support early on underscores her fear that identity as a survivor will consume her.

  • Janelle Bennett: In Quincy’s memory, Janelle begins as a cherished best friend, a fixed point of adolescent certainty. When the full night emerges, their bond appears more complicated—jealousy, betrayal, and the messy dynamics that fed the tragedy. Remembering Janelle truthfully is part of Quincy’s refusal to live in comforting fictions.

Defining Moments

These turning points reveal Quincy’s core—and what she’s willing to become to survive.

  • Learning of Lisa’s Death (Chapter 1)

    • Why it matters: Shatters Quincy’s fragile normalcy and pulls her back into the Final Girl orbit. It’s the inciting fracture in the veneer she’s built.

  • The Central Park Attack (Chapter 18)

    • Why it matters: Quincy’s explosive violence surfaces her first clear flashback to Pine Cottage. She recognizes that the “nice girl” is a mask—and that force is part of her survival toolkit.

  • Return to Pine Cottage (Chapter 39)

    • Why it matters: The crime scene becomes a crucible; place and memory reunite. Quincy’s amnesia collapses, allowing her to see herself not just as a victim but as an actor in that night.

  • Remembering the Truth (Chapters 41–42)

    • Why it matters: The protector is the predator. This reversal reframes a decade of safety as captivity and forces Quincy to reject the narrative that made forgetting possible.

  • Killing Coop (Chapter 43)

    • Why it matters: Quincy chooses confrontation over erasure, agency over avoidance. It’s not survival by chance—it’s survival by will, sealing her evolution from denial to ownership.

Essential Quotes

I make no attempts to disguise my scars. I just pretend they don’t exist.
— Quincy's internal thought, Chapter 1

This is Quincy’s credo of curated invisibility: she doesn’t hide the past so much as refuse to acknowledge it. The line exposes the performance of healing—visibility without engagement—as a coping strategy that’s become a trap.

I’m not a Final Girl, I told her.
— Quincy to Lisa Milner, Chapter 3

Quincy’s denial is defensive and aspirational; she hopes that refusing the label will undo its grip. The protest also reveals fear: accepting the identity means accepting its obligations, community, and pain.

Having sex with Him was the only thing that saved my life. I know that now. I knew it all along.
— Quincy's realization, Chapter 40

Here, Quincy confronts how her survival logic was entwined with shame, bargaining, and selective memory. The capitalized “Him” signals a personalization of danger and a rationalization she’s carried subconsciously, showing how self-preservation can warp into self-blame.

You’re a fucking Final Girl. That’s why I went to Jonah Thompson. So you couldn’t hide anymore. So you could finally live up to the name you’ve earned.
— Tina Stone to Quincy, Chapter 25

Tina weaponizes the media to force a reckoning, collapsing Quincy’s private life into public narrative. The taunt is both manipulation and truth: Quincy can’t reclaim power without acknowledging the label she loathes.

I’m his creation, forged from blood and pain and the cold steel of a blade. I’m a fucking Final Girl.
— Quincy's final thought after killing Coop, Chapter 43

Quincy names the paradox of her identity: she was made by violence, but the declaration wrests authorship back from her maker. By embracing the title on her own terms, she transforms a media myth into a personal manifesto.