Author: Emily M. Danforth
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/emily-m-danforth/page,15,568862-plain_bad_heroines.html
Then Harper said, “Actually, my grandpa says you should never show up anywhere hauling a sack of I’m sorrys and I just did. But now if I apologize for that I’ve added another sorry, so there’s no fixing it.”
By now Heather and the others were also standing, but they just leaned across the table to bestow their greetings. Someone’s camera app flashed at them. This surprised Merritt. It seemed too obvious for the crowd. But then she wondered if it was part of the night’s plan, if the image captured would be strategically placed on some industry-frequented website before Merritt’s group had even finished their sparkling wine.*
“Where’s Annie?” Bo asked as he sat.
“Working,” Harper said. “Do not disturb.” She reached across the table to shake hands with Elaine, and while doing so they said brief nice things to each other. Merritt’s impressions got muddled here, because she was focused on the fact that Harper would be turning to her next and she’d have to say something as well. And why hadn’t she prepared?
It was too late now. “Hello,” Harper said to her, leaning over for a hug.
Merritt wasn’t expecting this—that hearing Harper say hello would make her a little melty, and also quite a lot embarrassed about that meltiness. And she certainly wasn’t expecting the hug, which she returned awkwardly, half standing into it and feeling like a sack of sand while she did.
“I love your hair,” Harper said as they pulled away and she pushed her chair back to sit.
“Thank you,” Merritt said, dazed and very conscious of the other people at their table, and in the restaurant, watching them. Everything seemed to buzz—the table, the wine bottle wall behind them, the air. Starstruck they call this, Readers.
About then the waiter came around to take their order. Merritt went with a pasta, because that seemed easy enough. Harper ordered off menu. When she asked, “Can they do those fries again? The bacon fat ones?” she was answered with an “Of course. For you, always.”
As the waiter took the other orders, Harper leaned close to Merritt, close enough for Merritt to feel the breath of Harper’s words on her face, and said, “I really need to smoke. Wanna come put yourself in harm’s way?”
“Not particularly,” Merritt said.
Harper smiled without teeth. Waited.
“I guess I just won’t stand too close to you,” Merritt said.
“My mother loves that song.”
“I don’t know it,” Merritt said.
“Really?” Harper said. “The Police?”
Merritt shook her head no.
“I think we somehow already found the one thing I know that you don’t,” Harper said as she slid back her chair.
People watched as they stood up from the table. There might have been another phone flash.
People watched as Merritt followed Harper, who clearly had done this before, in a zigzaggy path around the other dining clusters of so-and-so VIPs.
People watched, Merritt hoped they did, as their twosome was separated by a member of the waitstaff cutting between them. Once he was out of the way, Harper grabbed Merritt’s hand until they were out the hidden rear door next to the kitchen. And Merritt let her.
Who does that? And with such ease? Grab the hand of a near stranger and make it feel like an expectation and not an intrusion?
They stepped down into a kind of walled courtyard behind the restaurant. In other towns, in my town and maybe in yours, it would have been just stinking dumpsters and concrete back there, but this was Beverly Hills. There were polished cement squares edged by neat, thin lines of green ground cover speckled with tiny, blue, star-shaped flowers, and the dumpsters themselves were, of course, well dressed, hidden away in a massive modern box of wood and metal. Even more impressive was the wall of herbs—dozens of herbs planted in rows of copper pots, hanging vertically. And despite the dark, there was still SoCal sunbake coming off the pavers, and a kitchen door open to let fresh air in and the busy chatter of staff out.
“This one of your usual haunts?” Merritt asked.
“Smokers have to learn where to do it,” Harper said. She cupped her cigarette to light it, took a drag, held it, exhaled, courteously, over her shoulder and away from Merritt. “Do you want?” she asked. “I have more.” She produced a mashed pack from the pocket of her jacket.
“No,” Merritt said. “I don’t smoke. It’s never occurred to me.”
“Well you should know they’re now saying it might not be good for you.”
A prep cook, his kitchen whites splattered with many splattery somethings, came out the door, a pair of shears in hand, which he sort of lifted in their direction as a wave before proceeding to cut a mass of herbs from the herb wall. The fresh scents of mint and tarragon lifted up from the snipping of those shears and across the way to Harper and Merritt, mingling, not unpleasantly, with Harper’s cigarette smoke. The streets surrounding them spilled their city noises—a honk here, a car stereo seeping Drake there, people talking about people things as they walked past—into the otherwise quiet space the two of them now shared with the snipping cook, his shears scraping the soft scrape of sharp metal with every scented cut.
There was something about the wall of herbs, the thick waft of its scent and the impossible amplification of those shears, that both of them recognized as unusual and familiar at once. It was something akin to a shared spell of déjà vu, though that wasn’t it exactly. But there was, between them, the whir of some unknown enchantment that had cranked the volume on their senses, and while they were both cognizant of this, they didn’t know how to name it, or quite how to say it aloud to the other, or if it would somehow ruin it to say it aloud. So they did not mention it.
“What’d I miss in there?” Harper asked.
“Me defending Truman Capote and a baby calf appetizer,” Merritt said.
“Fuck,” Harper said. “That’s what I get for showing up late.” She exhaled, tilting her head behind the plume of smoke. “Did Bo tell you about tomorrow yet? Audrey Wells?”
“Who’s Audrey Wells?” Merritt asked.
“She’s an actor,” Harper said. “I’ll let Bo catch you up. He was probably waiting on me to go over it all.”
“So we should hurry back in there, you’re saying,” Merritt said, pretending to start in that direction just so Harper would pull her back.
It worked. Harper grabbed her hand again. “You fail at reading the room.”
“We’re not in a room.”
“You’re even worse at reading the alley,” Harper said. “Fuck.” She put the ring finger of her noncigarette hand into her mouth and sucked before pulling it out again and shaking it back and forth like a dog flicking water from its back.
“Everything OK?” Merritt asked.
“No, it is not,” Harper said. “I got stung by a fucking wasp.”
“Just now?” Merritt asked.
“No, earlier tonight,” Harper said. “It was in my coat sleeve.”
“How strange,” Merritt said. Some small, dark discomfort at this news flicked on inside her. But it was very small and easy enough to ignore.
“Yes, it was,” Harper said. She tongued a fleck of tobacco from her bottom lip and blew it gently away from them. Then she dragged again. The cigarette was smaller, now. It did look fitting, there in her mouth. The cook went back into the kitchen as Harper carefully flicked ash into the supplied receptacle. Merritt didn’t like how even that pedestrian gesture, one associated with something she loathed—smoking—made her fidgety, so inescapably aware of being in the presence of the Harper Harper.
Harper took one deliberate step closer.
Despite what Merritt had said in the restaurant about avoiding Harper’s secondhand smoke, they’d been standing close. Now they were standing very close. Merritt could appreciate how tall Harper was, the long, thin shape of her there in the soft electric light of Spago dumpsterville.
“I’ll show you how weird it really was,” Harper said. “Weirder than you’re guessing. I just got
new ink.”
Merritt couldn’t make sense of those sentences. She wasn’t sure she was supposed to. “Well, I have seen your old ink,” she said. “Actually, I think there’s an Insta devoted just to your tattoos.”
“Promise they don’t have this yet,” Harper said. She flipped her right arm to face palm up and presented it. She was so close to Merritt that she had to bend her long fingers back toward her own body to make her arm fit there in between them, and even then, the back of her hand, the curl of those fingers, rested against the top of Merritt’s sternum.
There, on her forearm, placed within Harper’s famous sleeve of flora and fauna, was a yellow jacket.
It had been rendered in a style that was something like asking Edward Gorey to interpret it. Merritt could tell there were words embedded in its thin wings, as if they were growing there, but she had to lean into Harper’s hand and tilt her head in order to read them:
esse quam videri*
Merritt was not someone who regularly blushed. She was like Mary MacLane that way. But if she did blush, she would have right then. “Does this mean your tattoo artist couldn’t manage Planet Lady Love?”
“I’m saving that for my backpiece—shoulder to shoulder,” Harper said. Then she asked, “So you like?”
“I think you just went and added yet another anachronism to production,” Merritt said. “Flo was, by all accounts, fair skinned and tat-free.”
“I’ll have to get in good with the makeup department,” Harper said.
“I doubt you’ll have any trouble with that.”
They were still standing very close, Readers. Harper had righted her arm, put it back at her side, but Merritt was there in the full strength of her magnetic pull, and also within a kind of bubble of clingy cigarette smell and snipped herbs.
Merritt really didn’t know what to do with any of this, what Harper had shown her, even the fact of Harper standing there beside her like this. But then she didn’t have to say anything because Harper did instead. She ducked her head to achieve optimal eye contact and said, “Did you know that everyone used the same word to describe you to me?” She was not quite smiling but held her face there on the precipice of it. “I mean they’re wrong, I think. I think they are. But they all used it anyway.”
Merritt felt a flutter of panic but shoved it down enough to say, “Sounds like everyone could use a thesaurus.”
“Prickly,” Harper said.
“What?”
“Prickly. I remember because everyone said it about you and I can’t hear it without, like, imagining a cactus—like a legit old-school cactus in a Western with the sunset behind it.”
“Saguaro,” Merritt said. “That kind’s a saguaro.”
“See, and I love that you know that.”
“Those are the exact kinds of things I know,” Merritt said. Prickly wasn’t so bad. Prickly she could deal with.
“Nowwwwww we should probably go back in,” Harper said.
“Do we have to?”
“Yes,” Harper said. “But tomorrow, when we’re done at Bo’s, come out with me.” When Merritt didn’t answer right away, she added, “I promise we’ll do something you can be all kinds of prickly about.”
“I can be all kinds of prickly about anything,” Merritt said, glad to be back in the realm of sarcasm and deflection, sure footing for her. “In fact, I dare you to find an activity that challenges my ability to be prickly.”
“Game on,” Harper said.
It was again Merritt’s turn to say something. Preferably something clever, but she’d used up her stores. The magnetism thing, Harper’s proximity, the enchanted world of the courtyard, it was all eroding her abilities. “Lainey might have something planned for us,” she said. This was an easy lie.
“Whatever it is you’ll skip it,” Harper said, again dropping her face so that it was close to Merritt’s. “I never get to be the one who shows anybody LA. Ever. Everybody’s always showing me. So you have to let me play tour guide.”
“I’m not sure that I have to, have to,” Merritt said.
“I think you do,” Harper said. “I think it’s in my contract, actually.”
“Shouldn’t it be in my contract, then?”
“It is,” Harper said. “It definitely is. You need to read that thing more carefully.”
Merritt might have kissed her. I don’t know. I can’t say, because she didn’t do it. But she might have. I can’t properly explain that might have, either. Who could explain that? Certainly not Merritt. They didn’t really know one another. And Merritt didn’t kiss people she didn’t know. She didn’t even kiss people that she did know. And she was with the Harper Harper, with all the Harper Harper neon about her, in her leather jacket, with her somehow-wave-tossed hair and her chic, badass, but still lemon-soap ways. With her Gal Pal Annie apparently off painting in the night. And Merritt was the unknown, prickly, rapidly aging wunderkind from Connecticut in the perhaps regrettable, trying-too-hard T-shirt and dangling vertebrae earrings.
It was like she’d already breathed in too much of the movie-magic fairy dust that seems to sometimes hover over that town, and now it was in her nose and lungs, the effects of full-on Hollywood hay fever setting in and leaving her sticky eyed and brain fuzzed and on the perpetual edge of something like sneezing. Which, as you know, my dear sneezing Readers, is actually a very vulnerable state: chest muscles compressing, throat closing off, and a powerful rush of air building inside your body.
It’s not a state you want to linger in. You just want to sneeze and get it over with.
Still in this daze, she followed Harper back to their table, where things were a bit awry. Well, not awry at their table proper—in fact, their food was already there—but things were awry elsewhere and those things were being reported on back at their table.
“We were just sending out the search party,” Bo said, smiling in a knowing way that Merritt did not care for.
“What’d we miss?” Harper asked, but Merritt was looking at Elaine, who was on her phone with someone, talking quietly, but still, she was talking on it right there at the table, which was not Elaine Brookhants behavior.
“Life imitating art?” Heather said.
“Oooooooh-weeee-oooooh,” one of the studio people said, doing a purposefully crappy kind of ghostly yodel.
Merritt was trying to catch Elaine’s eye, or her words, but Elaine was turned toward the high back of the banquette and her conversation was too hushed to hear. “Did something happen?” Merritt asked the others.
“Yes,” Heather said. “But not something that can’t be fixed.”
“The moment I go away,” Elaine said, tapping End on her phone screen and looking up at the table. “I do apologize for taking that call. I needed to make sure they’d put it out completely—there was some confusion.”
“Put what out?” Merritt asked.
“The fire, dear,” Elaine said. “At home. Someone set fire to The Orangerie.”
“Shit,” Harper said. “No way.”
Even in her state of confusion, Merritt thought this reaction adorable—mostly because Harper had never even seen The Orangerie.
“Who did it?” Merritt asked.
“They don’t know yet,” Elaine said. “Probably bored teenagers with summer on their hands.”
“Your rebel friends?” Harper asked Merritt.
“I don’t have any friends,” Merritt said. “Rebel or otherwise.”
“My money’s on the ghosts,” a studio guy said as he spooned some sort of sauce over his dinner.
“How much was lost?” Bo asked Elaine.
“That is what I was trying to ascertain. Though I’m still not clear.” Elaine looked again at the screen before sliding her phone back into her purse. “They said they’d send me some pictures, but it’s probably too dark to see much now. There’s no light. They haven’t finished their rewiring and now this has destroyed most of what they had done. What’s been done in the last few weeks, anyway, is apparently
what got the worst of it.”
“Of course it is,” Heather said, rapidly texting someone. “Meaning everything that’s been done for the sets.”
“Again,” Elaine said, “I’m not yet sure how bad it is. We’ll have to wait and see in the light of day.”
“I’m telling you,” the sauce-spreading guy said glibly, “it was Flo and Clara.”
“Were they only in The Orangerie?” Merritt asked. “Whoever did it?”
“Carl didn’t know that for certain yet,” Elaine said. “But that’s what he thinks.”
Carl Eckhart did a little bit of everything for Elaine, from groundskeeping to security. As long as Merritt had known Elaine, there’d been Carl in the Red Sox ball cap with a snow shovel or a pair of hedge trimmers, season dependent, in hand.
“He was off to get his son and a flashlight to do a sweep of the buildings,” Elaine said. “But I doubt there’s anything else to see. I think it was just kids being a touch rotten.”
“Have you had much vandalism there?” Heather asked. “Over the years, I mean.”
“Not much, no,” Elaine said. “Certainly not arson. Every so often someone breaks a window or gets into one of the buildings and spray-paints something.” She took a drink of her wine and then added, “Sometimes a group of high schoolers tries to stage a séance, or who knows what they think they’re doing, out there.”
“Having sex,” Bo said.
“You don’t wind up there accidentally,” Merritt said, ignoring him and thinking of the campus. Its remoteness was one of her favorite things about it. “Now there’s only one road in and it’s not marked—and it starts from her land, anyway.” She tilted her head at Elaine. “And then the gate to the campus proper is locked. And the fence around that part is fifteen feet tall with barbed wire at the top, so unless you have a key, you pretty much have to go in or out through the woods—and that’s a hike. I’m just saying that you have to want to get there.”
“I wonder if it was somebody who knows about the film,” Heather said. “Maybe that was part of the intrigue.”