Author: Emily M. Danforth
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/emily-m-danforth/page,20,568862-plain_bad_heroines.html
(still surprised to see her there)
No.
CLARA
Would you say otherwise?
FLO
Yes.
CLARA
Ha! You wouldn’t. Never to me.
FLO
I would say it. I’m glad you’ve come.
Flo hangs her coat and lights lamps. She knows her way around. There is now a warm glow that better shows the row of large tables down the center and on either side of the space, as well as the citrus trees and other exotic plants.
FLO (CONT’D)
Though I don’t know why you have.
CLARA
That’s not what I gather from the poems you write. On paper you claim to know so many things about me.
FLO
(hesitant)
The paper doesn’t answer back when I write on it.
CLARA
So you prefer me silent? You want only a vessel for collecting your pretty words?
FLO
That’s not at all what I want.
The first pings of hail land upon the building. The girls are uncertain of the noise.
Clara approaches the exterior glass wall to peer outside and more hail hits, louder. She backs away.
CLARA
(delighted)
Hailstones—some like a tennis ball!
EXT. OUTSIDE L’ORANGERIE—NIGHT
Various shots of the hail piling up, hitting the windows.
INT. L’ORANGERIE—NIGHT
A large hailstone hits a glass pane right over their heads; they look up to see the glass crack and furiously spiderweb.
FLO
(grabbing Clara’s arm)
Come under with me!
She pulls the lamp and Clara beneath the center table, where they crouch and then settle into sitting, facing each other, the lamp between. The hail is loud and they listen to it smash against the building, some of the glass cracking but not yet breaking.
CLARA
Will the glass hold?
FLO
I don’t see how.
CLARA
We could leave.
FLO
We should.
They don’t. Hail thuds and pings above and around them and Flo is still holding Clara’s arm. It is intimate and delicious in its thrill.
CLARA
Was this your plan all along?
FLO
Even at Brookhants, the weather doesn’t listen to me.
They huddle and brace during additional crashes and flashes of lightning. A pane cracks, then another, but the glass has yet to shatter.
CLARA
Mmmmmm. It smells of orange blossom.
(beat/raises eyebrows)
Imagine, in L’Orangerie. And it’s so private here, isn’t it? Even if it is a world of glass.
FLO
It isn’t always so private. I’m turned away more than I’d like.
CLARA
The groundskeepers? Oh, Eleanor?
FLO
(coyly shakes her head no)
CLARA
Who? What won’t you say?
They both wince at a boom of thunder.
FLO
Miss Trills.
CLARA
(bored)
Oh yes, Miss Trills and her freesia. Eleanor Faderman says she’s smashed on it.
FLO
Eleanor Faderman has it wrong.
CLARA
Does she?
FLO
(with weight)
Miss Trills and Principal Brookhants.
CLARA
(knows without knowing)
Tell me.
FLO
Miss Trills isn’t smashed on her freesia. Her heart belongs only to Principal Brookhants.
CLARA
(pretending to misunderstand)
I’m sure they’re very familiar friends. Mrs. Brookhants is still a young widow—
FLO
(interrupting)
The young widow of an old man.
(beat)
I’ve heard.
CLARA
A very rich old man. Even so, to then be left out here with all of us, day in and day out—ugh, only imagine it.
FLO
I don’t think she minds.
CLARA
I would.
FLO
(with significance)
I saw them here—together. When they didn’t know anyone was watching.
CLARA
(delighted)
You were spying on them? What a sneak you are!
FLO
(embarrassed)
I didn’t mean to catch them.
CLARA
Catch them?
(beat)
I don’t think you know what you saw.
FLO
(pointedly quoting Mary MacLane)
Do you think a man is the only creature with whom one may fall in love?
CLARA
You know Mary’s book as well as I do.
FLO
I think better.
CLARA
(dismissively)
I think not.
FLO
(again quoting MM)
I feel in the anemone lady a strange attraction of sex. There is in me a masculine element that, when I am thinking of her, arises and overshadows all the others.
CLARA
(continuing that passage and adding another)
“Why am I not a man,” I say to the sand and barrenness . . . certain strange, sweet passions stirred and waked somewhere deep within me.
(beat)
(bravely, as a challenge)
If you saw them as you say you did, tell me what you saw them do—Miss Trills and Mrs. Brookhants?
FLO
Telling you won’t be enough.
It’s evident that both girls know what she means by this, but Flo hesitates, and it seems like maybe the kiss won’t happen.
So it’s Clara who takes the lead. She kisses Flo with certainty—in a rush. But after she begins, their mouths together, her courage dwindles in the reality of the moment and she begins to pull away.
Flo, sensing Clara’s uncertainty, pulls her back, validates this thing they both want. It is not a perfect kiss, but it is true in its intention.
They allow what they’ve done to become real to them before they kiss again.
Our Three Heroines Alone Together at Last
Harper, first into the room, hopped up onto the edge of Bo’s desk—an industrial mass of a desk, wooden slab top with metal legs, solid enough to have been built for the rollicking of a pirate ship or the pound of a butcher’s mallet—and settled herself there, touching the cigarette behind her ear. She would have happily smoked it right then, but this was her job, even if sometimes, like now, it didn’t really seem like one. Bo didn’t like people to smoke in his house. (Bo’s husband Ozzi especially did not like it.) And right then, Bo needed the three of them to be in his office, just as they were. He was counting on her to make this work. And she was counting on herself to make this work. She was, after all, now an officially credited producer: she was supposed to have insights and know-how.
Bo’s office was large, though made smaller by the camera and lighting equipment set up along its perimeter. Audrey sat at one end of a green velvet chesterfield as Merritt headed to a wall of bookshelves. She inspected the spines. “Decorator,” she said to no one in particular, “do be a lamb and stage it to look like I read.”
Harper laughed. “Checking to see if you’re there?” she asked as Merritt slid out a Peter Straub novel, Ghost Story, thumbed its pages in a paper purr, and put it back.
“I’m not,” Merritt answered.
“How do you know already?” Harper asked. “That’s gotta be three hundred books.”
“I know mine,” Merritt said. “It’s not here.”
“That’s because he’s got it on his nightstand,” Audrey said. “Right? Stuffed with Post-its and weird notes in the margins.”
“That’s it,” Harper said, smiling at Audrey for trying with Merritt. “You’re Bo’s own Mary MacLane. He’s obsessed.” She said this last part as reinforcement to Audrey’s kindness.
But Merritt would only have it her way, which was to now look over her shoulder at them while gesturing to the framed, vintage movie poster she was nearest. “This is the one your mom is in, isn’t it?” she asked Audrey. “That’s her?”
Audrey didn’t even have to look. She seemed to have clocked the poster when they’d walked in the room. “Yeah, that’s Caroline giving fright face.”
“Campy,” Merritt said, her nose nearly against the poster’s glass.
“That pool party scene,” Harper said. “It might be what made me gay, if I, like, trace it back.” She studied Audrey’s face. “Sorry, is that fucked up for me to say? About your mom?”
“I mean, it is a thing I’ve heard before,” Audrey said. “Not the make-you-gay part, necessarily, but the formative nature of that scene.”
“Can I ask you something else?” Merritt asked her. “Since we’re on the subject.”
“Sure,” Audrey said.
Harper couldn’t read that sure at all.
“I mean, feel free to tell me it’s none of my business,” Merritt said as she settled into a club chair, “but is there any particular reason you’re not online? I couldn’t find you, anyway. Not at any of the usual haunts.”
“Oh,” Audrey said. “No, I’m not on.” She paused, seemed to be considering something. Then, “Wait, are you asking if that’s because of my mom?”
“Is that why?” Merritt asked.
Harper thought Audrey looked like she was now silently sorting through possible answers, not very excited about any of them: like rummaging through a laundry basket for the least-dirty socks.
She settled on: “It’s why I got off in the first place, but that was a long time ago now—during all the tabloid stuff over the accident. And my parents’ divorce.”
“That shit was fucked up,” Harper said. “I mean, obviously I don’t remember it like you do but, Jesus—that was way too much to try to wade into.”
Audrey nodded. On her face you could see a light turn on in some room from her past. It was there without being a show for them, which is probably why Harper noticed it.
“How old were you?” Merritt asked.
“Fourteen,” Audrey said. “But it basically kept going until I was, like, seventeen, I guess. Anytime she went to rehab or did a red carpet or did anything at all, for a while. Then it stopped.” She tilted her head. “Mostly.”
“Fuck that shit,” Harper said.
“Yeah, and now I—anytime I’ve seriously thought about going back on, or someone tells me I should, it seems not worth it. It all just feels like ads or gossip.” She stopped, seemed worried she’d offended them, and quickly added, “I mean, I know it’s not that way for everybody. Just, I refuse to pay someone to do it for me, but, like, when I’ve tried to dip my toe in, it feels like I’m eavesdropping on people. I hate that. And I hate how constant it is.”
“No, I get that,” Harper said again. “I get all of that. I feel like, even with the trolls, I’ve been able to find my people online and, like, come into my own because I’ve found them. Whereas you were having to hide from people really early.”
“So these sides?” Merritt said. Even though she was the one who’d started this discussion, apparently she was now ending it, too. “What are we doing with them?”
Together they skimmed the pages.
“I’m already so obsessed with this place,” Audrey eventually said. “L’Orangerie. I remember going with my parents to a premiere party or something at the restaurant L’Orangerie. I mean, like, I was really, really little but—”
“You speak French?” Merritt interrupted.
“Oh,” Audrey said, surprised. “Yeah, sort of. I had lessons for years. My dad thought it was important for some reason. I still make a mess of it, though. I learned that the one time I was in France and trying to show off.”
“Huh,” Merritt said.
“I keep trying to learn languages with apps but not committing,” Harper said.
“I don’t think I could do it with an app, either,” Audrey said.
“Let’s hope L’Orangerie’s still standing when it’s time to film there,” Merritt said. Her French was unnecessarily sharp.
Harper remembered. “Oh shit, that’s right. Some asshole set it on fire last night,” she explained to Audrey.
“That’s terrible. What happened?”
Merritt did not respond to these prompts so Harper raised her voice a little and asked, “How does it look this morning, Merritt? Did you hear anything else?”
“Just that it’s a mess,” Merritt said, flipping through her phone and then handing it to Harper. On its screen was a picture of the burned-out middle of The Orangerie: glass walls enclosing a heap of wet ash.
“Oh fuck,” Harper said, the thinnest of shivers along her spine. It was worse than whatever she’d imagined. Though, truth be told, she hadn’t worked that hard to imagine anything about it at all.
“They just took those,” Merritt said. “There’s more. Scroll forward.”
Harper did. There were several shots from various angles, but at the center of each, the soppy mess of charred wood and ash was like the black nest of some horrible thing, empty and awful and waiting for its tenant to return. No one had been hurt in the fire, she knew, and the damage seemed relatively contained. And yet these images were somehow gruesome. Maybe it was the contrast of the ripe green Brookhants lawn in the background, there beyond the glint of The Orangerie’s glass, while in the foreground this black hole of burn and wet almost looked to be alive. The pictures, one after the next, made her feel a little nauseated.
“Can they fix it in time to use it?” Audrey asked, now beside Harper on the desk, leaning over to see the phone screen. “Or will it delay things?”
“No, they say they can fix it,” Merritt said. “Elaine keeps saying it’s not as bad as it looks. But I don’t know who’s telling her that.”
“Who did it?” Audrey asked. “Do they know?”
“I believe the consensus at dinner last night was ghosts,” Merritt said plainly.
Audrey’s face opened up in, was it hope? “Do people really think that?” she asked.
“No,” Merritt said, reaching to take her phone back. “Not really. It was a dumb joke.”
Audrey tried to smile like she was also in on the joke. “Oh, for sure. Right.”
“Do you think it was ghosts?” Merritt asked like Merritt would.
“I guess I wasn’t totally sure,” Audrey said. She was clearly embarrassed, even blushing a little across the bridge of her nose and the tops of her cheeks. “I think I have ghosts on the brain.”
“How’s that work?” Harper asked.
“I’d like to know,” Merritt said.
“No,” Audrey said, blushing harder. “Last night—” She shook her head. “It’s a lot of nothing. It’s dumb.”
“What is?” Harper asked.
“Nothing,” Audrey said, smiling. “Really. It’s nothing.”
“We can’t possibly move on until you tell us what ghosts on the brain means,” Merritt said.
“It’s really not anything,” Audrey said again. “And now I’m embarrassed that I brought it up. There was just a bunch of weirdness at my house when I was reading the script.” She spoke like she was attempting to shrug off what she was saying even as she said it. “Like I creeped myself out, which is a total compliment to your book, but I think it primed me to be willing to believe in the supernatural today or something.”
“So you do believe in it?” Merritt said. “In ghosts?” Her nostrils ever so slightly flared, as if the word itself was malodorous.
Audrey was flustered. “I mean, not like hovering with sheets, but I guess I think I could be convinced, sometimes—at least that places can be haunted. Weird energy. I don’t kno
w.”
“I believe,” Harper said. “And anyway, ghosts don’t care if we believe in them or not—I mean, in order for them to be real.”
“I think the opposite is true, actually,” Merritt said. “Like most things with no scientific evidence to support them, their existence depends entirely on our belief in it. Magical Thinking 101.”
Harper turned again to Audrey. “Ignore her. What happened last night?” She wanted to hear this, which meant that she needed Merritt to stop with her needling.
“It’s kind of about her is the thing,” Audrey said, smiling at Merritt.