Author: Emily M. Danforth
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/emily-m-danforth/page,11,568862-plain_bad_heroines.html
Harper’s mom, for her part, was fully supportive. But Shelly didn’t hold much sway with her own parents right then.
Then came January and the start of Harper’s final semester of high school. And since she still didn’t know what she’d be doing after high school, this semester had taken on a terrifying weight to her. She both wanted to get it over with and wanted it to slow down.
Shelly was doing the new year, new you thing she’d done lots of times before and was supposedly getting her shit together, drying out. She’d found a job cleaning rooms at a motel in Butte. But she was also seeing this guy from that job who Harper did not like at all and she wasn’t around much. And when she was, Harper didn’t think her shit seemed so together.
The final straw: her grandparents ran into Harper while she was with Eric at a gas station. For whatever reason—because why the hell not—he’d been wearing pink sunglasses and this cheap, white net wedding veil they’d just found caught in the branches of a tree. Harper’s grandparents wouldn’t even acknowledge her. They pretended not to know her when she said hi, actually turned their faces away and ignored her, which was so absurd and dumb. She made a big joke of it later with Eric, but fuck: it gutted her. When she got home that night, they tried to issue an ultimatum about who she could and couldn’t spend her free time with and what she could spend it doing. If she was to continue living under their roof, that is. This was Montana in 2009 and not Rhode Island in 1902, and yet, astute Readers, this ultimatum wasn’t so far removed from the one Clara Broward’s mother had once issued to her.
And just like Clara, Harper wasn’t having it.
She loved her grandparents as they were, and she hated that they couldn’t love her the same way. And so long as Ethan was fine with his dad, and he was, she really just wanted to finish her senior year in peace. It was appreciably efficient, Harper’s desire (and ability) to compartmentalize her life this way. Call it a coping mechanism if you want to. She called it an asset. At least at that age.
So she went looking for her mother’s brother, Uncle Rob.
“You must be feeling pretty sorry for yourself if you scrounged around long enough to get to me,” he’d told her when she’d asked if she could stay with him for an undefined while. She’d been waiting for him on his concrete stoop, trying not to smoke all her cigarettes as she sat in the dark and cold, her backpack and a scuffed-up wheelie suitcase beside her.
At the time, Rob seemed not at all surprised to pull up in his Camry and find her there waiting for him. Not surprised, but not pleased, either. He’d just gotten home from work and they went in the door together, Rob immediately unbuttoning his blue button-down to expose the undershirt beneath. He liked to keep his house very warm.
Rob did tech support at an area hospital. He’d held his current job for five years, even buying himself this square house with its square of dead lawn. And he paid his electric bill on time, had car insurance and a meager retirement plan. So in Harper’s family he was the success story: the steady, reliable, asshole Rob.
Mostly, she used it as a place to sleep and shower. She had school and the grocery store and the rest of the time there were her friends and their houses, especially Eric’s house and his mom’s red-and-white kitchen. (Harper sometimes got the sense that the Neighhardts didn’t like her very much. Or they didn’t like her as an influence on Eric. They couldn’t see that it was mostly Eric influencing her and not the other way around.)
Rob kept a steady schedule. There was food in his fridge. He did laundry on Sundays. He pulled in the driveway after work like he said he would and got up and left again in the morning, locking the door behind. All of this was something.
But also: sometimes he would come home in a bad mood, or want to show off to his friends, one of whom always made a point of telling Harper she was too hot to end up a lezzie for real. On those nights, he might watch the TV with the volume turned up stupid loud, or be watching porn on his laptop and not trying very hard to hide it.
This was when his small house, which he kept too damn hot—half of the windows painted shut and a kind of vile, carpet-cleaner-and-sour-milk smell spread over its insides—felt the most treacherous to Harper. So she tried not to be there, even if it meant staying out in the gruesome Montana winter wind, wandering around with Eric—if he could get away from his own house, which was trickier for him than it was for her.
If Harper had known of Mary MacLane then (she didn’t) she might have seen herself, with Eric, as philosophers of their own peripatetic school—hour after hour spent walking around and talking about their dull, dull life—and the pageant of the Possibilities* in their future. Eric could talk cleverly about anything. Sometimes he quoted his favorite Tumblr accounts verbatim. He was funny and cutting—downright mean, a lot of the time—and Harper liked hearing him go off, especially about people in her own life: her grandparents, Rob-the-Slob. She let him have almost all the soliloquies. He did them better than she did, anyway.
She felt like Eric saw her the way she wasn’t yet but wanted to be, the way she hoped she’d grow into. Other people called her hot, sometimes—creeps at the grocery store, Rob’s friends—but Eric said she was cursed by queer beauty, which he could manage to say in a way that didn’t sound dumb. It made her feel seen. Eric talked about queerness as an asset. She’d never thought about it like that before. Sometimes she thought that she could almost feel her brain learning new ways to think when she was around him. She liked it.
When people asked about what she was going to do after high school, even when Eric asked her, she grew fidgety and agitated, avoided their eyes as she told them that she didn’t know yet, she’d figure it out. She couldn’t admit to these people (pity or doubt on their faces) that her dreams were bigger than whatever lesser option she knew they were imagining for her. Sometimes she couldn’t even admit this to herself. It felt daunting to believe in those dreams. And naive. Picking up hours at the grocery store felt much safer. Slippery, but safer.
But the truth was: she could see a shiny version of her future, without having any clue how to get there. She only knew that how not to get there was to let herself sink into the easier life, the one that was all around her here, beckoning: rolling down its window in the grocery store parking lot and asking if she wanted a ride, if she wanted to party.
She’d been at Uncle Rob’s for five months when the casting call and the movie being filmed in Missoula changed everything forever. One bleak and barren Mary MacLane winter, one that pushed Harper up against the dark void of that other, waiting life—the wrong one, the slippery one. And then a miracle. And then the exact kind of luck that was unfathomable, it was so big.*
There’s no business like show business, there’s no business I know.
Bodies Piling Up. Snow Piling Up. But Where to Place the Blame at Brookhants?
It’s now past time that I pull you back to 1902, Readers, to the angel’s trumpets and glass of the Brookhants Orangerie, where Eleanor Faderman still lay dead and gripping the once-missing copy of Mary MacLane’s book. The copy now again accounted for.
And oh had it ever been accounted for. The unlucky students who found Eleanor had already told their classmates about it, which meant the whole of the school knew. Now, while they waited for help to arrive from town, most of the faculty had come to see for themselves. In fact, a few of them seemed almost as concerned about the presence of the book as they did the body.
And it was up to Principal Libbie Brookhants to do something about that.
Do it now, she told herself. Take it from her now before someone else does, before they all notice. And talk.
Principal Brookhants stood in a swarm of her colleagues, still gathered near—but not too near—to Eleanor’s body. A few were even standing atop the bitten blooms. Some were weeping. All were stricken with horror. Around them fogged the cloying scent of the angel’s trumpet at night.
You must do it now, Libbie told herself, sliding around Miss Lawrence and closer to Eleanor.
Libbie Brookhants was still a relatively young woman and looked it in the flush of her cheeks and the shine of her gingerbread hair. There were, it’s true, the beginnings of crow’s-feet at the edges of her eyes, but only the beginnings. She still looked young enough to be mistaken, on occasion and from afar, for one of her students.
What’s more, she felt young, felt it acutely in moments like this one, with so many other women waiting for her judgment and instruction. She was the youngest of her many siblings, all of them brothers with a surname to uphold. Or better yet, outdo. At the age of twenty-two, she’d married a very old man only to almost immediately become his very young widow. And for the last eight years, she’d been the young principal and proprietor of this school, her school: the Brookhants School for Girls.
“I can’t think how we’ll go on now,” Miss Larson was saying to Miss Hamm as Libbie managed to position herself behind Eleanor.
“We can’t and we won’t,” Miss Hamm said. “It would be indecent to. It’s indecent to even be gathered here.”
Libbie didn’t disagree. She was now within reach of the book, if only she could bend down to retrieve it. But even as they pretended to look away, she could feel the eyes of her colleagues upon her. They were watching her, waiting to remark upon her handling of this moment, waiting to catch her out and place the blame for this—and for Flo and Clara, too—squarely at her feet. Perhaps she should let them. Close the school and . . .
And what? What then?
Libbie had been crying. She’d stopped, now. Mostly. But the water in her eyes bubbled her vision. It made her almost seasick: the crimson book below her puffed like sailcloth and the crowd of grim faces before her as warped and strange as gargoyles stuffed into shirtwaists. All except for Miss Alexandra Trills. Alex, her Alex*—a head, two heads, in some cases—taller than any of the other women in the room and as familiar as ever, even now. Libbie wiped her eyes and held them to Alex’s own until she felt them lock together in silent conversation.
Miss Trills and Mrs. Brookhants were suited to this kind of intimate exchange because of the intimacy of their relationship. It was an intimacy known, while also sometimes deliberately or ignorantly misunderstood, by their colleagues. In the language of the day, Mrs. Brookhants was a young widow and Miss Trills was her devoted companion. Her very, very dear friend. Her confidante.
Her bestie.*
However, Miss Trills and Mrs. Brookhants had no time to find much comfort in their friendship on this night. At least not in this moment. In fact, perhaps it was only more fuel to the fire. For when, emboldened by Alex’s presence at the back of the crowd, Libbie carefully knelt to retrieve the book, the music teacher, Miss Hamm, struck like a coiled serpent:
“And so what is your excuse for it this time, Mrs. Brookhants? Or will you now finally condemn it?” Miss Hamm pushed her way to the front of the unhappy group. She was both the most doctrinaire and the most dramatic of the Brookhants faculty. She pointed a finger at the book as if she were on the witness stand and had been asked to indicate to the court the presence of a murderer. Leanna Hamm did love an audience. “There’s a known wickedness in that book and our girls won’t leave it alone. I don’t think they can. I don’t think they want to.” She spoke this last bit with hushed alarm lacquered over her words.*
The group looked at Libbie for her response. She had not yet removed the book but was still kneeling to do so. She gathered herself before speaking. “We’re all as devastated by this as you are, Leanna. But I won’t pretend the devil himself lives in this book.” She used this as her cue, it was as good as any, and lifted the book from Eleanor’s grip. She was very gentle.
Even still: a few teachers gasped or turned away. But not Miss Hamm.
“It’s every bit as real a culprit as a knife or a jar of poison. It is a poison!” Miss Hamm was now sniffing in indignation. “It poisons the mind.”
“The flowers Eleanor ate are the only poison here,” Alex said as she moved nearer to Libbie.
“And why did she eat them?!” Miss Hamm asked as if Alex had proved her point rather than countered it.
“They were all in that club,” Miss Cullen said quickly, hoping to egg on Miss Hamm, which was Miss Cullen’s way. “We had that group of them reciting it: Kind Devil this and Kind Devil that.”
“Eleanor Faderman was never in that club,” Alex said. “She wouldn’t have been asked.”
Miss Hamm ignored her. “I said at the time we shouldn’t allow it on campus—the book or their awful group.”
“And certainly forbidding something has never before encouraged our students to pursue it,” Libbie said. She now held the book—as casually as possible, given the circumstances—against the folds of her skirts. Alex, ever perceptive to her Libbie’s unstated desires, moved carefully alongside her and took the book from her hand, holding it low against her side, then her back.
“They would go out into the woods, remember?” Miss Hamm said, her excitement mounting now that she sensed others were backing her up.* “And come back feral and rude, full of bad ideas.”
“But that isn’t the same copy, is it?” someone asked from the back. “It’s not the copy we found with Florence and Clara?”
“That copy was previously disposed of,” Libbie said firmly. This was a lie.
“At least there’s that,” Miss Lawrence said.
“You’re certain?” Miss Hamm asked in side-eye. “I understood it to be lost. That’s what we were told—that’s what Clara Broward’s own mother was told.”
“I am very sure,” Libbie said. She softened some. “There is more than one copy of this book in existence.”
“It broke sales records, didn’t it?” Alex said. “For weeks it was everywhere.”
“And what a poor commentary on the state of things that fact is,” Miss Hamm said.
Libbie tried to speak now with the firm authority of her position. “If any of you would take the time to read it,” she said, looking pointedly at Miss Hamm, “as I have, you would know that it’s primarily the purity of feeling expressed that our girls are responding to. The author is about their age and so earnest in her passions, so forthright and unabashed. She seems to them like someone who could be their bright-brash friend. Some of our girls even seem to think they could be her.”
“Heaven help us if that’s true,” Miss Hamm said.
“Why don’t we help ourselves instead, Leanna?” Libbie said. “I think we’re quite capable of it. The book is nothing more than a young girl’s diary.”
“Nothing more than a diary?” Miss Hamm scoffed. “Let me ask you, Mrs. Brookhants, did your childhood diary cause a group of girls to make a suicide pact in”—she turned to Miss Mercado to ask—“where was it that I told you?”
“St. Louis, I think it was,” Miss Mercado said, like she was hoping for a gold star.
“I did not keep a diary as a child,” Libbie said.
Miss Hamm ignored her, playing to her crowd. “And now they’ll be telling the same stories about Brookhants and our girls. And they should!” She turned again to Libbie. “We’ve all granted you considerable room to test convention here, Mrs. Brookhants. Time and again I’ve said nothing, even when I thought your educational methods dangerously liberal. Slipshod—”
“Now, Leanna—” Miss Mercado tried to slow her, but Alex was more forceful.
“You’ve granted Mrs. Brookhants nothing, Miss Hamm,” she said. “Not one thing. It is simply not in the realm of your authority to do so.”
Now Miss Hamm was spitting her words. “Since coming here, I’ve excused the goings-on at this school more times than I can count. I’ve made excuses for every sort of accusation imaginable—the things I’ve excused—but you can be sure that I will do it no longer. And I will not be told that a bad book is a good one and pretend to agree.” She gathered herself again. “We’ve failed these girls. Three deaths and we’re to blame. How many more will it take?”
“I don’t—” Libbie began, b
ut again there was no point. Leanna Hamm was too competent a performer to give away the last word.
“I feel very unwell and am going to bed now,” she said, pushing her way back through her colleagues. A few of the others said and did similarly. But only a few. The crowd reshuffled around Libbie, awaiting their instructions.
“I don’t feel as strongly as Leanna does about that book,” Miss Lawrence said. “But it does seem to me, at this moment, rather foolish to waste your breath as its defender.”
“I wasn’t defending the book,” Libbie said. “I was defending reason against superstition.”
“I’m sure that’s what you believe you were doing,” Miss Lawrence said. “Even still, what will you do with the copy you took from Eleanor?”
“I’ll take care of it,” Libbie said. “It won’t be seen here again.”
She meant this.
Much later, once various officials had arrived and questions had been asked and answered—answered primarily by Libbie Brookhants and without any mention of the book—and after Eleanor’s body had been examined by the physician and collected by the undertakers, and after a decision had been made to cancel regular classes for the following day to allow the students the time needed to reflect and begin their mourning, the remaining faculty members, in puff-eyed pairs or groups, also left for their beds. It was now well after midnight and there had been considerable talk of the weather turning bad.
“I think we should stay here tonight,” Libbie said when she and Alex were finally alone in The Orangerie. “Whatever’s left of tonight.” Through the windows they might have seen their carriage waiting, but Libbie wasn’t looking through the windows. Instead, she was staring at the place where Eleanor’s body had been, so many bitten blooms still smashed there. “These need to be removed before morning,” she said, swirling some around with her foot. “Or girls will be gaping at them.”