Readers, she said it like maybe it was so. She might as well have been Mary MacLane, standing there, reading from her diary: Oh, my dearest—you are the only one in the world! We are two women. You do not love me, but I love you.

  Actually, maybe not that exact passage, or at least not its final line, because then Harper said back to this woman:

  “I love you, too.”

  And I don’t know, Readers, maybe she did. Maybe she meant it. Maybe Harper Harper loved that girl in the flannel, the girl with the enviable legs. She said it like she meant it, but also like it was something she said and meant a lot. And then she kept moving, while keeping Merritt there beside her, as the crowd thickened around them.

  She’d resituated their closeness, reached her right arm across her own middle and put that hand into Merritt’s right hand so that her left arm, the one with the hand that had been holding Merritt’s, could go around the small of Merritt’s back and she could better steer and shield Merritt with her own body. And when Harper did that, pressed up close against and around her, Merritt wanted, as she had the night before, to turn her head and kiss Harper. There was that Harper Harper magnet pulling them together. And Merritt knew, she knew, that if she did it, Harper would kiss her back. Merritt knew it the way she knew how to tie her shoes, her dad’s middle name, how to flick a light switch. Simpler things, even, more known to her, as if always known to her: how to scratch an itch or close her eyes, how to sneeze.

  And I bet you know, already you know, that Merritt did do it. She turned her head and raised her eyebrows and asked, “Shall we?” so close to Harper’s mouth that she might as well have kissed the words into it. Harper smiled in a nod and Merritt did kiss her, there in the throng of paparazzi. And Harper Harper did kiss her back, as Merritt, heartbeat certain, knew that she would. You’ve seen the videos. You’ve seen the pictures. It looks, in some of those videos, like maybe that decision was Merritt’s answer to Hollywood legs and her query. A kind of smug affirmation of her position. And how did it feel? Like the kiss equivalent of her first ride on Harper’s Moto Guzzi: whirring, fast, and could-be dangerous. She even felt it in the throb of her eyebrow.

  I can tell you, though, that Merritt wasn’t anticipating the cheer from the crowd that went up around them. Who gets one of those for a kiss, other than just-married couples and those prodded into performing on the jumbotrons in sports arenas?

  And because they found themselves in that kiss so easily, I bet you, online viewer, didn’t guess when you watched that clip that this was their very first ever kiss, out in front of Metal Mug, in the pool of paparazzi and #HARPEOPLE, onlookers and tagalongs.

  And I bet you didn’t guess, wouldn’t have known, that this was also Merritt’s first kiss since a two-week trip with some fellow eighth-graders to a university research facility in Upstate New York, where they did STEM work with solar power and Merritt blissed out in her nerdom.

  During that trip, Merritt had broken off with Travis Zienkowski a bunch of times, into the side hallways and dark corners of the dingy dorms they were housed in, and they’d made out elaborately and fumblingly, with more tempo and energy than real passion.

  But still, those sessions had seemed to Merritt, at the time, like the starting point of all that would be soon to come, the kisses of her almost-immediate future. Travis Zienkowski as gate opener.

  Travis wasn’t her first-first kiss, mind you. That had been down-the-street Kathleen, in her upstairs bedroom, while they were not actually playing with Kathleen’s ZhuZhu Pets. And then Merritt had kissed Alexi, a kid she met only once, at her cousin’s wedding in Ohio.

  But Travis, dear Travis Zienkowski and his oversize Adam’s apple and dry hands, his supervillain T-shirts and truly profane sense of humor—Merritt had thought he was the starting gun for all the adolescent kissing to be racing toward her soon.

  Turned out not.

  Turned out that she tuned in to him the way you sometimes—when at a place like Brookhants, say—happen on a radio station for the length of a song, the end of a weather report, and then that station goes static and not only can you not find it again, you can’t find any others, either.

  Instead of a string of Travis Zienkowskis—and Merritt would have been happy for Tawnya and Tara, Timothy and Trevor, T-whatever Zienkowskis, too—she’d skipped another grade and transferred to a different school, one meant to more adequately challenge her. And it was a challenge, it certainly was, not knowing anyone there, especially during that awkward bag of ages.

  And then, not so long after that, there was her father and his suicide and whatever it was she and her mother had become together—their particular version of a family. And then there was her homeschooling, which meant a lot of alone time. Which she said she wanted. And maybe she did. But still, she grew, as you well know, prickly. She grew into the majestic saguaro you read before you today. Mostly, she lurked and she hid and she refused to connect. Even more so when her book came out and her brain wouldn’t turn off about it.

  Then she took her saguaro self to college and instead of shedding her spines she grew more of them. She grew cactusier by the class, by the interaction, the few she managed, anyway, that one semester. She grew prickly in more than her countenance—even her thinking felt prickly to her—sharp and caustic and not only when applied to others, but when applied to herself.

  And so between sweet, profane Travis in that dorm, in eighth grade, and that day in California with Harper, the kiss you all witnessed on your own screens, there had been no other kisses at all.

  For Merritt, that is. For Merritt there had been no other kisses.

  While for Harper Harper there had been—it seemed to Merritt, anyway—everyone; everyone she might want to kiss ever. Including, that very day, Audrey Wells.

  Oh, not the same kind of kissing, to be sure. I’m not conflating. But Harper and Audrey had kissed, and also for a crowd, not even two hours before.

  It may surprise you to know that, as they finally reached Harper’s bike, their helmets on, the whir-chug whir-chugging engine going and people mostly clearing out to let them through, Merritt thought of Audrey.

  It might have started, that thought, or series of thoughts, a little smugly—a lot smugly: a private comparison of the success of her kiss with Harper and the, nearly exquisite in its awfulness, failure of Audrey’s. But as she again latched her arms around Harper, as they gained purchase over the parking lot and hung a right out into traffic, palm trees aligned along either side of the streets like state-sponsored tourism sentries, those smug thoughts gave way to a feeling of—it wasn’t pity. It wasn’t. It was empathy for her, I guess, a breath of thanks for the kind of remarkable day Merritt was having, and also a breath of regret, truly, for the kind of day Audrey was having. Merritt knew she was. And she also knew that she’d contributed to some of that badness. And Audrey hadn’t deserved it. Not really.

  While Merritt was offering Audrey her silent regret, small and useless though it was, Harper cut them through traffic, her bike a knife slicing that stretch of road, until they easily lost the two paparazzi determined to have more of them, even, than they’d already given.

  You should know, Readers, that the things that happened next on their date can’t actually all be true. I know that, even as I prepare to tell you about them. I know, with all the good and sound logic of my narrator’s mind, that there were not, there could not have been, the hours needed to do the things the two of them did that late afternoon and evening and into the night, both the tourist stuff (Merritt was one, after all) and the not: the Sunset Strip, the Walk of Fame, rainbow sprinkle ice-cream cones and fizzy water at the outdoor tables of some West Hollywood queer restaurant they only stopped at long enough to be seen licking those cones and drinking those drinks.

  Then on to Harper’s childhood friend Eric’s rented bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, because Harper said they haaaaaaaaad to at least stop in. Eric had just started grad school. He wasn’t “in the industry” at all—Merritt was told—but he certainly seemed to know a bunch of people who were. Despite Harper’s promise that he would share embarrassing tales from their past, it was still intimidating for Merritt, walking into that space of shapely, disenfranchised Hollywood types—everyone appearing so lazily stylish, everyone seeming to already know everyone else. But it’s true that Eric was warm, and he did seem delighted to see them: shrieking and smiling and climbing over people on a couch in order to reach them via the fastest route possible so he could bestow hugs and offer drinks.

  And, crucially: Merritt was there with Harper Harper. They had come together. This was a fact that seemed somehow both known and readily accepted by the people in that bungalow and it calmed her. Some.

  There, in the private garden, in the heat bake of early nightfall, hot wind blowing the flowering vines around them, Merritt had a lot more to drink than she usually did—which was really about nothing ever. Harper did not. She was driving and unwavering in her thoughts about sobriety behind the wheel. (Or behind the handlebars, as it were.) She did, however, have a cigarette; two of them, actually. They stayed there for the length of two cigarettes, and Merritt still disapproved, even if it made her a prude, but her disapproval of this essential element of Harper’s existence—that she was a cigarette smoker—was not the order of the evening.

  Besides, the smoke from the fires, and the almost-always smog, and the efforts of the late-setting sun had proved to be the exactly right Los Angeles alchemy to wash the whole sky lilac to pink. And how could they not drive off again into that? So they did. Back out into the night and on to other places—places they couldn’t possibly have traveled in the space of those hours—probably not in two or three such nights: the various homes of Harper’s friends, a spin around Griffith Observatory, a taco stand, the Venice Canals, a quick pull-in to the fluorescent white light that rectangled beneath a massive gas station overhang, where they filled the bike’s tank, a prolonged stop on the side of a road so they could watch the fires in the distance before Harper grabbed Merritt a clump of white blossoms from an orange tree, the two of them taking turns mashing them to their noses in mockery and celebration of Brookhants girls of yore.

  Smoke (fire and cigarette) and orange blossoms: the evening’s scents.

  Eventually, Harper drove them slowly and meanderingly through what Merritt thought was just another random residential neighborhood in Silver Lake, to end them up at another friend’s house, she assumed. But then they made a turn and up the street Merritt could see the glow in the branches without yet understanding what it was she was seeing: the Chandelier Tree.

  Do you know about it, Readers? Merritt didn’t. Not before that night. A large part of its magic lies in its location, which isn’t a theme park or even a city park. It’s a big, old sycamore tree with an enormous canopy studded with more than a dozen lit chandeliers, several of them in boughs overhanging the street. And it’s growing in the corner of the smallish front yard of a smallish house in a random LA neighborhood. There’s even a white picket fence.

  Harper pulled up to the tree’s wildly painted parking meter, used to collect donations toward the house’s electric bill.

  There were a few other people standing around taking pics. These people noticed them and seemed to figure out that it was Harper Harper once she removed her helmet, but they were too cool to make a thing about spotting her. And once they left, there were only the occasional dog walkers nodding hello. Those hellos surprised Merritt but I’m telling you, Readers, the Chandelier Tree engendered warmth and good feelings.

  I mean, it was filled with glowing chandeliers with all their attendant chandeliery accoutrements—crystals and bangles and brass. They belonged, of course, in gaudy mansions or hotel lobbies. But instead, here they were outdoors in this random tree. And when the lights were on, the leaves glowed and the branches glowed and they cast shadows, and sometimes those dripping crystals sounded like wind chimes—clinking and tinkling.

  Fuck, I hate the word tinkle. What a terrible word. It’s so knowingly, boastfully saccharine. But it is the right word for the sound those chandelier crystals sometimes made.

  Anyway, Readers, it was beautiful. The whole thing was beautiful.

  And Harper was beautiful showing it to Merritt, pointing out her favorite chandeliers, there from the street below. And Merritt was beautiful being shown it, her face a kaleidoscope of light and shadow as she looked into the branches. And the night was beautiful. The quiet of the street was beautiful. And all of this beauty was so good. And it also came with its own soft ache because they both knew, perhaps better than many others their age, that it was so precarious, so prone to dissipate.

  As they stood there, looking up into the branches, Merritt told Harper that she hadn’t been sure before, but now she was: Harper was the perfect John Fante character.

  “What now?” Harper asked, keeping her head back and eyes up in the tree.

  “Local novelist,” Merritt said. “Screenwriter, too—in like the forties and fifties. I just read his big Hollywood novel: Ask the Dust.”

  “Did you read it because you were coming out here?” Harper asked. “Like as research?”

  “Yes,” Merritt said.

  “I love that,” Harper said, turning her neck so she could look at Merritt and shake her head. “I love that you would do that.” She then ran two fingers along a few strands of Merritt’s hair, the pink strands. “Say again who I am?”

  “You’re two characters rolled into one,” Merritt said. “You’re Arturo and Camilla.” She pulled out her phone and searched until she found the exact passage from Ask the Dust. She had it in her notes. It didn’t take long.

  She read it to Harper.

  Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.

  It made Harper laugh, somehow, the strange delight of having Merritt read that to her beneath the glowing canopy of the Chandelier Tree.

  Her laughing made Merritt laugh, too. Then Harper took Merritt’s phone and read the passage to her. And then they read it together. They shouted it, screamed it out into the neighborhood around them. They did this like moon-raving maniacs until a man walking by with his two agitated Boxers on a double leash stared long and worriedly enough to bring them back from outer space.

  It was impossible then, Readers, for them not to be kissing.

  For all of their closeness that night, all of their touching and movement and bike situating, they hadn’t done that again, kissed, I mean, since their first, out in front of Metal Mug. Though I swear to you, Readers, it seemed like that had happened on Saturn during the previous century and not a few hours before, and not more than twenty miles away, from where they now stood beneath the spread of those branches.

  These kisses beneath the chandeliers were of a different variety than their kiss that afternoon. That kiss had a kernel of show-and-tell to it—of bravado and silliness and parking lot antics. But these kisses were started up by Harper, her fingers firm on the soft skin of Merritt’s chin, tilting Merritt’s head and guiding her mouth to her own sure lips, her smoky tongue and her breath hot like the wind they’d shouted into.

  Merritt recognized just what a stale romantic gesture another version of herself would have seen this as: Harper driving her to that tree to then kiss her beneath it.

  Of course she recognized that.

  But she didn’t mind. In fact, right then she felt ready to embrace every stale romantic gesture she’d ever before mocked. Isn’t that what the swell of a crush is, after all? Recognizing the flush of truth in all the love clichés?

  In fact, let me add even another cliché to the mix: she’d never before been kissed like this.

  And if the echo of the motorcycle whir in her legs, and the dull throb at her eyebrow, and the remaining scent of orange blossom mashed in her nostrils, and the glow of those sycamore chandeliers around them were all part of making that sentence true, then so what? So be it. She wanted it, and more and more and more besides.

  The Vegas-style parking meter at the Chandelier Tree was rigged to take credit cards, and so after they’d kissed and kissed again, Harper gifted it plenty in digital money as their thank-you. And then they were off.

  This time they ended up at their final destination: Cinespia and the midnight movie at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Yep, movies in a graveyard—grass and headstones, shaggy palm trees above and bodies all around, the sky only managing a silver dark even then, even that late, because of the light from the screen.

  They were showing The Blair Witch Project for the midnight horror feature. Merritt didn’t think about it then—she wasn’t really there for the movie—but now, if she considers that night, it does pinch at her: those young and terrorized filmmakers not quite realizing just how bad things had gotten until it was too late for them to do anything about it. The filmmakers onscreen, I mean, in that movie’s fictional story line. The characters: they’re the ones who are ruined. But the people behind the screen, the people who made The Blair Witch Project? Well they did very well indeed. Laughed all the way to the bank, as they say.

  Harper took Merritt’s hand and they meandered the headstones to eventually settle in the grass at the back of the crowd, their view of the screen somewhat obscured by a marble angel. It wasn’t likely they’d be noticed back here.

  “Have you seen this before?”

  “Once, maybe. I think,” Merritt said, not wanting to talk or watch the movie or do anything more, right then, than continue to lean against Harper in the hot breeze on the lawn and just be. Just be there, at the movies, in Hollywood, with the Harper Harper as her date.

  They did that for a while: leaning, kissing. Harper smoked, which she probably wasn’t supposed to do there, but managed all the same. Sinister things happened on the screen. Those poor, unknowing student filmmakers meddling where they oughtn’t. One of the characters mentioned his mom, his mom missing him, hoping that maybe she’d take action to find him, and Merritt all at once thought of her own mother, and Elaine, and of the lateness of the hour.