Author: Emily M. Danforth
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/emily-m-danforth/page,13,568862-plain_bad_heroines.html
The smell of smoke from the surrounding fires blew in the patio doors and wafted over to where Audrey sat on the couch.
Shit. The doors were still open.
First she’d been watching clips of her favorite onscreen kisses. Then part of an interview with the writer, Merritt Emmons—not Edmunds. Audrey needed to remember that for tomorrow. Now it was film footage of Manhattan street scenes from 1903, digitized but still scratchy and splotchy, as if infested by bugs. It was unreal to her that such footage existed. That she could sit on her couch in Los Angeles and watch these people from the past avoid getting clipped by a hackney cab while buying peaches from a street vendor. There was something mesmerizing about it, all of them now dead, just trying to get to work, or to keep their hat from blowing off, avoiding the horse droppings near the curb—most of them not even realizing that a camera had picked them up to store them for the future, for Audrey’s own consumption one hundred plus years later.
This black-and-white footage—with its blisters and hop-skips, its shadowed faces—was starting to strain her eyes, but the clip she’d selected still had three minutes to go and Audrey didn’t want to turn it off. She was doing the unreasonable thing that she sometimes did; the superstitious thing she didn’t like to admit to. She’d made a rule about this video: she had to finish it or. Or else. Or something bad. She was in that kind of edging-on-truly-frightened state where staying still and silent seemed best. Where she knew she could give herself over to fear, but that she could also resist if she only put some effort into doing so.
But there was so little daylight left, now. And the room was filled with shadows.
Before she’d turned to the videos, Audrey had read the scene in Merritt’s book where the Brookhants girls told stories about yet another campus quirk: the way shadows lengthened and thickened into shapes, into creatures or specters, or most often, the girls said, into swarms of yellow jackets. Then she’d read the script’s version of that scene.
If they didn’t get too CGI with it, Audrey supposed that it would be both beautiful and creepy—a combination Bo Dhillon was known for.
It could be both. Or it could just be creepy.
The street scene footage ended and Audrey told herself to stop pretending to be scared. The breeze from outside was full of smoke. It was time to close the doors.
She stood, moving her body with resolute intention. She walked the nine steps or so to the doors and slid them shut. Then she locked them and looked out past her reflection to the glitter of pool lights, yard lights, and headlights up and down the lumpy, shadowed hills.
A noise behind her made a catch in her throat.
She turned to look. There was nothing—not that she could see, anyway. It hadn’t been a particularly loud noise—and not one that was immediately discernable to her. It wasn’t the sound of the door opening. That had a security-alarm chime. And it wasn’t something being knocked off a shelf or a drawer being rifled through. It wasn’t human or even animal. It was—
She heard it again. Faintly. For some reason it called to mind the footage she’d just watched, its scratchy movements.
It clicked for her then, what it sounded like, something like dead leaves being blown by the wind. It’s a distinctive noise, one you know when you’ve heard it. It’s best named by an equally distinctive and creepy—it was creepy, she thought—word: scuttle. A thing that spiders do. And rats. And leaves wind-tripping across gravestones in horror movies.
Audrey had heard a scuttle in the otherwise quiet house, a house that she was supposed to be alone in.
Now she felt her pulse speed up as she stood, still and silent, trying to control her breathing.
Carefully, slowly, she looked through the rooms, cursing all the open space and high ceilings, especially the big, uncovered windows. So many windows. Anyone outside who wanted to, who put in a little effort, could see her through those windows, alone in the house.
But what if they weren’t looking from outside? What if they’d already come in?
She listened hard. She heard nothing but her own breathing.
Did it seem too smoky? It was possible, she guessed, that so much smoke had blown in the patio doors, but she hadn’t noticed it beyond the smell. Now it was like the rooms were not quite themselves—distorted, somehow, too full of thick shadow and hazy gray.
“C’mon, Audrey, don’t be a baby,” she said. But she didn’t like that, either. Didn’t like the sound of her voice—which seemed both too loud and too indicative of her fear—in the otherwise empty quiet.
From where she stood, she had a dead-on view over the couch, into the kitchen—the mess she’d left in the island sink still waiting for her there. She decided she’d march over, a firm and in-charge march, pick up the sponge, and finish the stupid dishes. And then, when that was done, maybe she’d let herself call Noel and ask him to come run lines with her. Or she’d call a Lyft and go get some frozen yogurt. Or she’d lock herself in her bathroom, which had only a skylight for its window. Caroline should be home soon, anyway—like any-minute soon. But the thing to do right now was to stop playing statue in front of the sliding door.
So she did. She walked toward the kitchen. And as she reached the couch, got a single step behind it, a girl’s voice, so loud and awful in the quiet, began a terrible song.
Whaaaaaat’s the ra-cket, yel-low ja-cket?
Broooook-hants is your home.
When you get a taste of us—
you won’t leave us a-lone.
Audrey screamed. The voice was undeterred.
Footsteps, footsteps falling fast—
sweets will bring you, too.
And upsetting even one,
will call forth each of you.*
The voice was Merritt Emmons’s, and she was reading (or, more properly, singing) from her book, and it was coming from the fucking Wi-Fi speakers. They were all over the house—turned up loud because Audrey had been playing music earlier that morning.
She spun back around to the couch, to her phone. It was shoved between the top cushions (had she left it there?) and she struggled to free it without making it sink farther between them. It kept sliding down and the awful song played on until finally, her fingers curled around the phone.
Its screen showed—sure enough—that the audiobook of The Happenings at Brookhants was playing from the middle of chapter 3, which made no sense, to pick up there, but neither did the fact of it playing at all.
She tapped Pause. Merritt Emmons’s thin voice cut off midword.
But now it was too quiet in the house. Such a cliché, but in this case, Readers, please allow it. Audrey scrolled to a playlist, music that was subdued but not too quiet, certainly not too somber or emo. She played it. She turned the volume lower. She already felt better. A little better.
The speakers, that app, had acted strangely before. Not anything like this, of course, but the system sometimes cut out or switched playlists; occasionally sound poured from speakers in locations she hadn’t meant to turn on. She thought she’d seen something online about an Amazon Alexa laughing in the middle of the night for no reason. She guessed this was maybe like that. A creepy fluke. Something to make a story of. Bo Dhillon would like it, probably; if she was presented with the right moment, she might tell him about it tomorrow.
Audrey tried to stand still, to catch her breath and calm her thudding pulse, but the nighttime shadows twitched and flickered around her, and the smoke seemed thicker yet.
She watched the shadows across one of the high walls—thirty-foot ceilings, Caroline liked to say. The shadows seemed to pool and fill and gather themselves into shapes more dimensional than they had any right to be.
Enough. She’d had enough.
She turned on the kitchen lights, all of them, the big brass-and-glass lanterns over the island and the perimeter cans and the under-cabinet lighting, too. This light was bright and strong. Audrey wasn’t sure they’d ever, since moving in, had all of the kitchen lights on at once. She w
ould finish the dishes, there in that intense light. She would run hot water and add more dish soap and clean the stupid juicer really, really well. And by then Caroline would be home.
Would be almost home?
Would be on her way home? Surely.
“Stop it, Audrey,” she said to herself. “Stop it. You’re not a nine-year-old. It’s an audiobook. Grow up.”
She leaned her elbows on the island and texted Noel a quick summary, explained that she was freaking herself out alone with her script and her demon speakers. Even though his reply wasn’t immediate, she felt better having sent it—the sense of perspective that came from making fun of her fear.
She tried to hold on to this perspective as she went around the island to the sink side, opening the lower cabinet door as she bent down for the dish soap, shutting the door, rising back up. And that’s when she saw that something was wrong with the dishwater.
There was something—there were, in fact, many somethings—floating in the sink.
She looked closer. It wasn’t juicing scraps.
It was—they were—yellow jackets.
There were dozens of them. Most of them were dead, their bodies floating atop the green dishwater. Worse were the few that were only just alive, their thin wings and thinner antennae akimbo, their shiny black eyes searching and their bodies twitching as they struggled to find a surface they could cling their sticky legs to.
Audrey took an unconscious step back from the sink, her hand over her mouth to ward off, what? Another scream? A spew of bile? She wanted to run the tap full blast and flick the garbage disposal and whoosh them away into its crunching metal mouth. But to do this she’d first need to reach her hand into that cold green water to pull the sink stop. And there was no way she was doing that.
She couldn’t stay in the room with them, but she didn’t want to go anywhere in the house that the scuttle might have been coming from, either. She FaceTimed Noel on her way out the front door. He answered before she even got to the bottom step outside.
“So I’m freaking out,” she started, and then launched into a recap of her last several minutes as she paced between their two avocado trees. Those trees were Caroline’s favorite thing about the yard.
“Aud, breathe,” Noel said. “You’re making me dizzy.”
Noel was calming. He told her it was all some fucked-up shit and that she should stay outside and on the phone with him until he got there, that he was heading over now. But then, not even two minutes later, there were Caroline’s headlights in their driveway. Audrey hung up and lunged at her mother’s door handle.
At first, Caroline, who was still putting the car into park, seemed to think Audrey had more good news she just couldn’t wait to tell her. But then, as her daughter pulled her into the house, not even letting her grab her things from the back seat, she realized otherwise.
Now the two of them stood in the kitchen and looked down together into the water. “Is it plugged or something?” Caroline asked at first glance, still confused. Then she recognized what she was looking at. “Oh, gross! Yuck.” She used the dish sponge to push through the mucky water, launching a wave of cascading wasp carcasses. “God, there’s so many of them.”
“Don’t touch them!” Audrey said, though she didn’t really know why she felt quite so repulsed. She had never been particularly squeamish about bugs.
“Hey, hon, it’s OK,” Caroline said, taking note of the sharpness in Audrey’s voice and dropping the sponge; it floated like a raft among the bodies while she put her arm around her daughter and squeezed. “Maybe we have a nest of them. Sometimes people get them in their walls.” She scanned their walls for some obvious sign of infestation that of course wasn’t there. “They can be expensive to get rid of, I know.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Audrey said. She was still shivering.
“Audrey, what’s up? Why are you so upset about this? Did you get stung?”
“No, it’s—the whole night it’s been—” She tried to say what it had been, exactly. But now, with her mom in the kitchen beside her, the house felt more like itself, their neighbors’ lights on the hillside brighter and closer, the rooms less smoky. And the wasps in the sink? They seemed smaller and more reasonable a thing to find there. Gross, sure, but not somehow tied to the scuttle, the song.
“Did you leave the patio doors open, honey? Because with all the fruit scraps—you know we actually get wasps in here a lot.”
“No, I know,” Audrey said, feeling increasingly stupid. “They were open.”
“I mean, I killed a couple the other day. I’ve never seen this many at once, but with all this stuff sitting here for hours . . .” Caroline looked again at the sink. “I think they just got too close to the water and drowned.” She had a sudden thought; it blinked on her face and she added, “Or what about the fires? I bet that’s it. I bet it’s something to do with the fires burning up their nests.”
“Probably,” Audrey said without meaning it. “I didn’t notice any coming in, though.”
“Well you wouldn’t have,” Caroline said. “It’s not like they all came in a swarm. You don’t notice one at a time. And if you were already scared.”
Audrey nodded. It could make sense if she let it. “There’s all this yellow jacket stuff in the script. They burn the nest.”
“I know,” her mom said. “You said it was creepy.”
“Yeah,” Audrey said. “And I’m just anxious about tomorrow.”
“Well, that I know alllllllll about,” Caroline said. “Plus PAD. So, so much PAD.”*
Later, while Audrey sat close, perched on the island counter, Caroline made for them her really good lemongrass soup and told a bunch of stories she’d told Audrey many times before about shooting her first lead role in House Mother 2: She’s Coming for You, and all the practical jokes they always played on each other on set, part of which encompassed a big old house that the production had rented in Pasadena. And Audrey smiled and laughed at the right times, and the events of the previous hour seemed smaller and sillier and less worthy of consideration the further away from them she got.
Especially once the dishwater was drained.
Playing Dress-Up Dinner
Across town from the sink of dead yellow jackets, Merritt was sweating. A lot. Enough that she worried she might smell of it, the rank stink of nervous BO. She was glad that at least it was only Elaine sitting next to her. For now.
They were on one end of a stiff banquette that curved around their table, with Bo Dhillon, Heather the executive producer, and two, for your purposes, interchangeable movie studio people, squished awkwardly around to the other end. It was a tight fit, with all of them brushing thighs and arms. Their table was in front of a glass wall of wine bottles and all around them people in designer clothes ate squid ink pasta and first-of-the-season white truffle pizza (for the grotesque price of $135 a pie).
Now add to that, this: Harper Harper was late.
But at least there was soignée Elaine in her crisp, popped-collar shirt and thin cashmere cardigan, one strand of antique pearls peeking through. Elaine Brookhants is someone who perpetually rides atop the crest of a wave of her own confidence and calm. It’s the kind of assuredness that comes from having always had what Mary MacLane called the Money, and she certainly fit in well there at Spago in Beverly Hills. This is where they were having their dinner: Bo Dhillon’s hammy surprise for Merritt. You can’t make it more than thirty pages in Less Than Zero without someone snorting coke in the bathroom at Spago. (Bo couldn’t deliver the actual restaurant from the novel, the 1980s version, but this was his deliberate nod in that direction, one he said he’d come up with after seeing Merritt’s tweets.) She guessed she was flattered that he’d made the effort. At least a little.
“Not all cheeses need be smoked,” Elaine was saying as she removed the mascarpone from her veal tartare, an appetizer she’d chosen for the table. They’d decided to order drinks and “a bite to fortify us,” (said Elaine, naturally)
while they awaited Harper’s arrival.
“Smoked cheddar, certainly,” Elaine went on. “Gouda and mozzarella, yes. This, no. So easy for these celebrity chefs to forgo taste for theatrics.”
“I think it’s freakin’ fantastic,” Bo said, reaching across the table for another piece. Elaine made a face at that reach, but Merritt was fine with it—he was welcome to her portion. Until Harper got there, she didn’t think she could eat. Maybe not after Harper got there, either.
Not that Bo wasn’t trying very hard to keep things casual. Or maybe he wasn’t trying at all and was always this casual. (Though Merritt doubted it.) Unlike the other studio people at the table, who were all dressed in suits or partial suits—white teeth, intentional hair—Bo was doing, like, a Paul Bunyan–meets–James Dean thing. He wore old-fashioned leather work boots with dark blue jeans. His fitted T-shirt seemed, on first glance, to be standard-issue white Hanes, but was actually the kind of no-label designer tee meant to be recognized by people in the know. (It had one thick, vertical line of green embroidery up from its bottom hem. Merritt had later googled it.)
And then, well, what to say of his hair?
Bo Dhillon had a large forehead—one made larger by his only-just-sort-of-receding hairline. On the sides of his head, his hair was short, neat, but he kept the top longer and parted to the right and back in a kind of oiled wave of Jazz Age nostalgia. You could see the tracks from his fingers in that hair, where he’d raked through it with some expensive, artisanal pomade, no doubt, one made of an unreasonable combination of ingredients: orange oil and beeswax and juniper sap.
Once you left the surface of his head and traveled southward down his temples and to his cheeks, this hair (black veined with silver) exploded into a mutton-stache, one that was only just starting to become unkempt—as if he’d once put effort into maintaining its shape but hadn’t lately. The overall effect was more handsome than not, especially because he had a good smile beneath those whiskers. And he’d been offering that smile quite a lot, asking about their flight and their plans while in town. Stalling for Harper . . .