Author: Emily M. Danforth
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/emily-m-danforth/page,10,568862-plain_bad_heroines.html
“I can tell.” While she finished her makeup, he worked on her hair, sculpting the wave she’d made of it into something messier and more interesting. “Aren’t you two just playing with each other, though? Really?”
“Did I tell you her friends gave me shit about this place?” Harper felt a pinch of regret in confessing this to Eric, because while she knew she’d appreciate his commiseration in the short term, she also knew that he would make this more than it was and hang on to it forever.
He was already set to do so. “What do you mean they gave you shit? What kind of shit?”
“Just, when they first came over, a bunch of them were making these comments about how nobody buys lofts in downtown Los Angeles and—I don’t know—gentrification maybe, or that plus it just being tasteless, I guess. I got the feeling they think the whole place is super tacky in all the ways.”
“What the actual fuck?” Eric said. “And you were hosting these people at the time? So they’re literal guests here in your home and they can’t shut their mouths for a minute while they drink your alcohol? Not to mention you’re twenty-four and you bought a house, in cash, with your own earned income, so please go sit on a gold-plated tack, you fucking turd barns.”
“I mean, some of them are fine.”
He wasn’t having it. “Oh, oh—don’t temper it, Harps. I go to school with enough of them. I am intimately familiar with their ilk.”
This rant made her miss him so acutely that it had the effect of a side stich: sharp and sudden. His being there magnified all the months in between when the two of them hadn’t talked like this.
“And so what did your Georgia O’Keeffe do while her megabesties were—” Eric cut himself off when Harper turned around and gave him a surprise hug.
“I love you,” she said into the side of his head.
“Please tell me that you’re playing with each other and it’s not just her playing with you.”
“Come out and haunt me, I know you want me / Come out and haunt me-e-e,” Greg Gonzalez sang from the other room.
“We’re both having fun,” she said.
“So much fun,” Eric said. “A speed train of pleasure. A cruise liner of orgasms.”
Harper let go of him and headed into the bedroom. He followed her, but she stopped there only long enough to grab her black biker jacket from where it was draped over the end of her bed, new and expensive—both the bed and the jacket. “Too much?” she asked him as she shrugged one sleeve on.
“Not enough,” he said. “Nevertheless, you’re a picture.”
She shoved her other arm through its sleeve—and as her hand pushed through the material she felt her fingers brush against something strange near the cuff. Immediately after, with no time even to blink, she felt the sting: a bright flash of pain near the cuticle of her ring finger. “Fuck!” she said as a reflex.
“What?” Eric asked.
Harper kept pushing through the sleeve and her hand emerged along with the buzzing form of a riled yellow jacket. She brought her finger to her face to inspect the now-throbbing red bump there, and the yellow jacket fell to the floor, twitching, one wing bent out of place.
“This fucker stung me.” She bent to look at it and Eric joined her. It made angry, buzzing circles on the polished concrete where it had landed.
“That was in your jacket?”
“In the sleeve.”
“Weird.”
“It really hurts.”
“You’re not allergic?”
She shook her head no as Eric scooted his toe toward it. Harper kicked his foot away with her own. “Don’t kill it,” she said.
“You can’t leave it. It’s irate and out for vengeance. And Annie’s barefoot, isn’t she? Like always since I’ve ever seen her?”
“It’s how she paints,” Harper said. “I have to go.”
“What are we doing about this?” He pointed at the twitching yellow jacket.
“I’ll put it out a window later. I can’t now, I’m late.” She put her throbbing finger back in her mouth and headed out the bedroom door.
“You’ll forget about it,” Eric said, following her. “And then Frida Kahlo’s gonna step on it. I can see it all in slow motion, the inevitable horror to come.”
They emerged into the loft’s open space: living room, kitchen, two walls of brick and two walls of floor-to-ceiling windows, all of it lidded by rafters with exposed pipes and wires. Build a Loft 101, she’d overheard one of Annie’s friends say.
Annie was crouched atop a paint-splattered drop cloth, surrounded by dozens and dozens of thick paper leaves in various stages of green from the color wash she had just finished applying to them. She was wearing the too-big Carhartt overalls she usually worked in, nothing at all on underneath. Even though it had been weeks since they’d started this, that fact still made Harper flush with desire, as it did now: coming into the room to find Annie, her hair up and a brush in hand, a flat white from the espresso machine she’d had sent over cooling on the table nearby, all of this while dressed in the brown uniform that Harper had previously associated with ranchers and winter in Montana, with wet hay stuck on the bib and mud and manure on the hems, and definitely not with seminaked queer painters whose parents owned, it seemed, most of the buildings in downtown Chicago and lived (when they were in America and not one of the other half dozen places they had property) on the top three floors of the most impressive of them.
While Harper took ice from the freezer for her finger, Eric took a bowl from the cupboard and went back into the bedroom and put it upside down over the yellow jacket. He then wrote a note on a napkin, which he placed atop the bowl: Hostile insect enclosed. Remove at own risk.
Harper wrapped a baggie of ice around her finger and then stopped just behind Annie, who had moved over to a table piled with several stacks of The Story of Mary MacLane—the 1902 edition with the red binding she’d collected from eBay and specialty bookshops. Several copies of the book were next to those stacks, already in various stages of undoing—pages removed, shapes cut from those pages: all apple tree leaves. Annie now had scissors in hand and was cutting more.
“I’m going,” Harper said, kissing the back of her neck.
“Jesus, you scared me,” Annie said, still cutting. “I thought you’d gone.”
“These look amazing,” Harper said, looking over Annie’s shoulder at her work.
“Eh—I dunno,” Annie said. “I’m still not sure if the thickness is what they want or how they’ll stand up outside. Or how long they’ll have to be outside. I’m using an ocean of shellac to bind them but, I dunno—have to wait and see.”
“We’re going,” Eric announced as he headed toward the loft’s main door.
“I thought you were staying to keep me company?” Only now did Annie look up from what she was doing, stalled with her scissors midsnip.
“I thought you were, too,” Harper said to him unhappily. But so-chill-unhappily, Readers.
Eric maintained a facial blandness. “It’s just that I haven’t lolled by the pool looking thirsty at all today. And, I mean, isn’t that what I came all the way to LA for? Where are my promised blow jobs?”
“Who promised you blow jobs,” Harper said. “Not me.”
“Those shorts do appear to offer easy access,” Annie said, contemplating them, and Eric in them, for a moment before she turned around, told Harper that she looked hot, and pulled her in for a kiss, scissors still in hand.
“Careful of my jacket,” Harper said. She stood very still until Annie moved herself and the scissors back into her own space.
Annie shrugged. “You show up with a slash down the back of your jacket and people will just think it’s a trend. It’ll be all over Instagram in two days.”
“She’s not wrong,” Eric said as they headed out the door.
Harper knew that what Eric saw was the version of Annie who’d sent over the espresso machine and convinced her to buy the record player. What he hadn’t yet had time to see wa
s the Annie who, when they were passing through a particular neighborhood, might point to a house and say something like: “Let’s move here and live out the rest of our lives in a David Hockney painting.”
And when Harper said back, “Who’s David Hockney?” that version of Annie wouldn’t laugh or shake her head like, Of course you don’t know who that is. She wouldn’t even say, Oh, just this painter, and then not elaborate because it was easier than doing so. This was the way that a lot of Annie’s friends treated Harper: dropping various cultural references and when she didn’t immediately grasp them, dismissing them—and also, it felt like, a piece of her—before moving on.
Annie was someone who wanted to share her excitement. She’d say, “I can’t wait to show you.” And then she would. And not, like, on Google Images on her phone. Next thing Harper knew, she would be on her way to a Hockney retrospective at some museum, holding Annie’s hand as they stood together in front of all those California swimming pool paintings and houses in pinks and yellows and greens, while Annie talked about how Hockney had achieved this or that effect, or how he imbued his work with queer sexuality. And she wouldn’t lecture about it. She wouldn’t perform. She’d talk, effervescent, expecting (correctly) that her enjoyment would spill over.
This was what Harper liked best about Annie: how excited she got about the things she loved and how much pleasure it gave her to share those things with others.
But Harper was also pretty certain that what Annie liked best about her was that she was Harper Harper—the Harper Harper. Of course, Annie would never say exactly that but, I mean, would they even have met if she wasn’t? Where exactly, in her old life, would Harper have run into Annie Meng, a trust-funded visual artist who showed in galleries around the world and was about to embark on her third gap year? (Gears, Annie called them, as in, One wasted year at Columbia, but now I’m thankfully in third gear.) These people did not exist in Harper’s old life.
Eric was a relic from that old life.
The car they’d sent was waiting in front of Harper’s building. She asked the driver to drop her first.
“I’m late and you can’t make me later,” she said to Eric as she texted her manager to tell him she was finally heading that way. “You’re not even supposed to be here—you’re supposed to be getting to know her.”
“I know her enough,” Eric said.
“You don’t.”
“Will you FaceTime with my mom for a minute?” he asked. “So she can brag to all her friends and I can call it her birthday present?”
As they crept through traffic, Harper did this. She smiled her biggest smiles and mentioned her top-five most exciting recent career things to mention, those sure to most impress moms.
“It’s all soooo exciting!” Mrs. Neighhardt said through Eric’s phone screen. She was on a counter stool in her kitchen, the same white-and-red kitchen from Eric’s house that Harper remembered from high school, and that room, even more than the woman in it now beaming at her, filled Harper with an achy nostalgia.
“Glamorous!” Eric’s mom went on. “It’s very glamorous. We’re so proud of you, honey. And you look beautiful—every single time I see you in a magazine I cut out the picture and save it for you. I have a folder.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Neighhardt.”
“I can tell you both think that’s stupid but wait forty years and you’ll thank me, if I’m still around. You know they won’t even have magazines soon enough. Every single thing will only be on our phones.”
“Phones are the magazines, Mom,” Eric said.
“It’s not the same thing. Not at all.”
While Eric was hanging up with his mom, Harper’s phone buzzed with a different call. It was her uncle Rob, which was unexpected. She didn’t answer.
“You’re getting like the full Scrooge tour,” Eric said when she showed him Rob’s name on her phone’s screen. “When all the ghosts of your past come a-calling. Have you been talking to him?”
“No,” she said. “Not for more than a year.” She stared at the screen, awaiting a voice mail pop-up.
“Oooooh. What do you think he wants?”
“I have no idea,” Harper said and meant it.
“You just gave him a shit ton of money, didn’t you?”
“I gave him thirty grand. But that was last year.”
“Jesus, Harps. I knew you were sending him something but thirty grand is, what, an eighty percent interest rate? You were only there like three months.”
“Five,” she said. There was still no voice mail.
“Three months, five months, same thing.”
“Not to me when I was there.”
Eric didn’t say anything to that.
“You know he hadn’t actually asked me for anything when I sent it. I just did it. And then he took forever to cash it.”
“You should have blocked him right after he did. Debt paid, ATM closed.”
“I don’t think that’s why he’s calling,” she said. “It’s probably something about my grandparents, something he wants me to do for them.”
“You mean buy for them. So Paul and Joan are fine now? Completely cured of their homophobia?”
“I mean, no—not completely. But they’re not stupid. They do understand the correlation between me being a famous lesbian and me being able to buy them a boat, so . . .”
“So they’re pragmatic bigots.”
“Just, you know, baby steps. God, my finger still really fucking hurts.” Harper shook her hand back and forth because the motion made the throbbing quell, but only for as long as she kept doing it. Her baggie of ice was now one of water.
“You wanna bump?” Eric asked, reaching into his back pocket for the aspirin tin.
“No,” she said. “I want the pain in my finger to go away. I don’t want a coke rush.”
“I’m wondering if we wet some down, though—made like a medicated paste?”
“Stop.”
“I’m trying to help,” he said.
“Are you, though?”
Eric snorted from the brass snuff key he wore around his neck, another, he said, antique. He screwed up his face in a wince, one eye watering as he rubbed his nostrils.
“You think it’s maybe time to check in on how often you’re doing that?”
“I’m on vacation.” He snapped the lid back onto the tin. “OK, OK, be honest Sixty-forty? Seventy-thirty? What’s the strap-on breakdown with Annie, for real? Lesbian tops are a myth, right? Like Sasquatch.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“But I’m your idiot. Always, my love.”
* * *
Back before this costume life, back in the not-really-so-long-ago that was her senior year of high school, Harper and Eric had formed the queer bond of being out queers in a place where others weren’t, mostly.* They’d known each other since elementary school, but before coming out, they’d never had cause to confide in each other. They just didn’t have that much else in common. Eric was a GPA-tracking, overachieving (when he wanted to be) type. His mom was on the city council. He did concert choir and competitive speech and drama and already had a college scholarship waiting for him. He’d earned it. And his parents expected it.
Meanwhile, Harper had half-heartedly googled some community colleges in the tri-state area. She kind of liked the dorm options at one in North Dakota. (At least how they showed them on their website, which was probably misleading, she knew.) She had a job at a grocery store four afternoons a week and had thought, quite a lot, about spending at least her first year after high school still doing that job—only hopefully with more hours. This plan felt manageable to Harper. Reasonable. And best of all: largely self-sufficient. Her grandparents would be disappointed, but then she’d been disappointing them a lot that year already.
She’d been living with them (again) since her mom, Shelly, had (again) lost a job due to her drinking. It had been a revoked driver’s license that did it this time. She’d needed to have one as a condition of her
employment and had lied about losing it (due to a series of DUIs she’d accrued). They got behind on their rent, then more behind, then evicted. Ethan went to stay with his dad (who was not Harper’s dad) in Deer Lodge and Shelly and Harper moved in with Grandma Joan and Grandpa Paul, as they’d done a few times before.
Harper’s grandparents had always functioned more as a second set of parents than not. Harper even looked like her mom, a lot like her—the you two could be sisters remark wasn’t far-fetched—at least when Shelly was taking care of herself. Sometimes it seemed to Harper that her grandparents saw her as a chance to correct some crucial parenting error they’d made with her mom. A do-over.
For years, Harper’s grandfather had called her my tomboy with pride. During the summers she’d go along with him when he went junking: helping him to haul things from the muck and weeds of outbuildings and then spending long afternoons in his workshop while he fixed those things for resale. Her grandfather was anything but a showman. Even still, Harper thought his skills were a kind of magic. It’s not everyone who can take a broken hunk of metal that’s been sunk into the ground for years and make it work again. He could.
“This one don’t mind getting her hands dirty,” he’d say when people asked about her tagging along, snapback on her head and dirt on her T-shirt. But tomboy chic had apparently stopped being so charming to her grandparents once she’d reached an age where it didn’t just speak to her haircut or her clothing, but also to who she brought home to their couch on a date—or who she wanted to bring home, anyway.
Harper hadn’t been at all prepared for how personally they’d take her coming out. They weren’t religious and they weren’t political, even if they did watch Fox News. She couldn’t remember them ever having much at all to say about queer people before she said she was one.
And they still didn’t have much to say about queer people. Well, that’s what they said: that they didn’t want to talk about it and didn’t want her to, either. Leave it alone.
But her grandparents’ silence on the issue was confusing, because while they made clear that they didn’t want to discuss it with her, the fact of her being gay now seemed to make them unhappy with every other thing about her too, even stuff they’d let slide before. It was like a kind of eclipse that darkened the whole of her for them: her clothing, her friends, her smoking—which they’d known about for a while. They acted like being around her this way was too much to ask of them. Hadn’t they suffered enough with Shelly? Did Harper really have to go and add this, too? It was selfish, as they saw it, attention-seeking.