Even now she felt a surge just thinking about it.

  The trees that rimmed the emerald lawn before her had begun their seasonal show. Several of the maples had patches of crimson and orange, like fire trying to take hold. For as far as Merritt could see, the sky was blue and brilliant, the sun a melting gob of butterscotch ice cream, though if she’d been at the top of Spite Tower, she would have seen a gauze of clouds building in the distance.

  But she wasn’t at the top of Spite Tower. She was here, in the sun near the fountain, her back warm from the heat of the stone.

  There was that in the air which is there when something is going to happen. Though this fact was beginning to mean very little to Merritt. Things kept happening all the time now at Brookhants. Who could even keep up to write them all down?

  She checked her alerts to read some of the latest posts about problems on set. There were three dozen from today alone. She didn’t bother with them all, especially since most were regurgitations of others.

  Since the news of the near-drowning student swimmer, fans, skeptics, and attention seekers alike had gone to greater and greater lengths to not only crash the Brookhants set but document their attempts at doing so. It had become a thing, a viral thing, even for people who didn’t care all that much about the actors, or the film and the true story behind it, even for people who could have accessed other film sets—in New York or Toronto or LA—much more readily. There’s no explaining it, really: it just hit the exact right combination of factors to make it a thing certain people posted about themselves attempting on their social media feeds.

  There were now two dozen full-time security officers working for the production, and even they couldn’t stop all the crashers. They held it to a trickle but still the trespassers came, by land and by sea. And the more the disturbances were reported online, the more people wanted to see for themselves.

  And they were having no shortage of disturbances on set.

  In fact, right then one of the massive doors to Main Hall banged closed behind her and Merritt turned in time to see Bo coming down the stairs, his face angry. He had his phone on speaker, held up in the direction of his frowning mouth, and as he came closer he shouted into it: “How about you tell them I said right goddamn now? Unless they’re ready to send me a check for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  He was already charging toward the production office set up in the dorm building when he turned around, took in Merritt—her laptop, her place in the sun—shook his head (in what appeared to Merritt as additional disgust), and then turned back around and continued on.

  More of the cast and crew banged out the front doors too, including the first AD and Heather, who seemed to be following along after Bo, though not really in a hurry to catch him. Merritt watched as the script supervisor took off running onto the lawn in a sprint before managing three handsprings and a roundoff, much to the enjoyment of the various crew members who cheered this performance. Everyone was acting like they’d just been let out of detention, except Bo, the beleaguered schoolmarm.

  Merritt brushed at a tickle at the back of her head, something slight twitching her hair. More crew joined the script supervisor in the lawn to do cartwheels, those who could do them, anyway. “See how many grills we can round up,” one of them yelled to someone who jogged off toward catering. “I’m only in if we’re for sure doing lobstah!”

  Merritt brushed at the hair twitch again and this time she thought her fingers might have glanced against something hovering there—something nonhair, like maybe a bug. Like maybe a yellow jacket.

  When Harper walked out the double doors of Main Hall she saw that Merritt was right where Harper had left her hours before: sitting in front of the fountain. This was too perfect.

  Harper pulled off her shoes and rolled her pants—tweed things provided by costuming—to the knees. And then she walked behind the fountain, and, quietly as she could, stepped over and into its cold water. She held a finger to her lips to shush one of the crew before they said something about what she was doing—which would announce her presence.

  The floor of the fountain was slimier than Harper had expected, and the water colder. She stepped slowly, slowly, not sloshing any water because it would make too much noise, until she was behind Merritt. Then she bent over in a silent crouch and, with her mouth right next to Merritt’s left ear, she whispered, “There is that in the air which is there when something is going to happen.”

  “Jesus fuck!” Merritt shouted.

  Harper nearly fell over in her laughing delight.

  “You’re an asshole,” Merritt added, reaching to dip her hand into the water and slosh it at Harper.

  “Careful,” Harper said, steadying herself with one hand on the fountain’s rim in order to step out and down. One of her bare feet landed not on a paver but on a thick scab of the spongy green moss that grew between them. The sensation made her momentarily seasick.

  “Careful why?” Merritt asked, flicking more water still.

  “This particular look doesn’t belong to me,” Harper said, hopping away from the fountain and Merritt’s reach while trying to avoid landing on moss as she went. Atop those tweed pants she wore a tight, ribbed, navy sweater in the style football players of 1902 might have worn, and like those players’ sweaters, hers had a large white letter across its front: B for Brookhants.

  “That look might not have been procured by you, but it absolutely belongs to you,” Merritt said. And it was true, Readers. Harper certainly looked the part. “What happened in there?” She added, pointedly: “Today.”

  “Ghosts in the mics,” Harper said, reaching into her back pocket for her cigarettes and lighting one as she spoke. (The vaping hadn’t stuck, Readers.)

  Merritt raised her eyebrows. Waited.

  “Feedback,” Harper said. “It was these truly bizarre noises—kind of like moans, at one point, but then it was like people talking fast from far away, so you couldn’t really make out the words. They switched out a bunch of the sound equipment.” She yawned, squinted in the sunlight, and took a drag from her cigarette. “Didn’t help.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be able to watch it online any minute,” Merritt said.

  “Probably,” Harper said. “I didn’t notice anybody with their phone out this time, though. Actually, Misha and Renae seemed scared today. Like genuinely scared.”*

  “But not you? I thought you were such a believer?”

  “I don’t know,” Harper said. “I didn’t really notice at first. I was going over this blocking issue with Bo and Audrey and it didn’t seem like a big deal, just standard set-delay bullshit. But then when we all started paying attention, I did think the whispering part was creepy. And that they couldn’t get it to stop, even with everyone trying everything. That was weird.”

  “Did it bother Audrey?”

  Harper thought a moment before she said, “Yeah, I think so. A little. I mean, it was weird.”

  “So that’s it for today? The whole rest of the day?”

  Harper nodded like her head was on a slow bobble. Nodding and nodding, resigned to this perpetual state of delay. Again.

  “That explains Bo,” Merritt said.

  “Did you see him?” Harper asked as she slid down to sit beside Merritt, their shoulders and hips brushing.

  “Oh yes,” Merritt said. “He came storming out.”

  “It’s more than that,” Harper said. “He had a total blowup. That’s probably the part that’ll leak.”

  Merritt looked at her. “Blowup like how?”

  “Like throwing his headset at the wall. Then he kicked over a chair in video village. It was a full-on tantrum.”

  “Cool,” Merritt said. “Profesh.”

  “Yeah,” Harper said. “That’s probably what bothered Audrey more than even the sounds. But I mean I get it, sort of. He can’t seem to get this movie back on track.”

  “Is it possible that’s because he’s chosen the wrong track for it?” Merritt asked.

  “What does that mean?”

  “What do you think that means?” Merritt turned to the side to look at Harper’s face and Harper did the same to her. They held that joined look, saying nothing, until Harper started to smile—until they both did, couldn’t help it.

  “Nerd,” Harper said.

  “Where’s Audrey now?” Merritt asked.

  “Changing.”

  “Not you, though?” Merritt reached to pluck at the sleeve of Harper’s sweater.

  “Never,” Harper said. “When Flo goes andro, I go Flo.”

  “It suits you.”

  “Oh shit,” Harper said. “Was that a compliment? Like a real compliment? I wasn’t even ready. Can you start it again? Let me just get my phone out to capture—”

  “Fuck off,” Merritt said. “What’s the plan for the rest of the day?” These delays had been happening so frequently that the crew members who weren’t busy putting out fires* found other sources of entertainment. They’d played hours-long games of red rover and dodgeball. They’d held a pie-eating contest. For no discernable reason, they’d bought, filled, hung, and bashed to shit four different piñatas.

  And for the last few days, they’d been filling their ample downtime by screening movies out on the lawn—projecting them on the side of Main Hall as soon as it was dark enough to do so.

  “Movies and a clambake, I heard,” Harper said.

  “Which movie?”

  Harper shrugged.

  They’d been watching, predictably, horror films—or thrillers, supernatural dramas. Creepy stuff. The night before had been Picnic at Hanging Rock. Two nights before: the French film Haute Tension. That one had been scary enough that our heroines had ended up again crashing together after, in Audrey’s tiny house.

  Audrey had been grateful for that—even if she still didn’t get much sleep that night. (Harper did. Enough to snore.)

  Even without sleep, Audrey felt safer, and just generally better, with Merritt and Harper around, especially since their afternoon in the Tricky Thicket. She knew that it was unwise to feel this way, or at least counterintuitive. Things—scary things—were more likely to happen when the three of them were together than when it was just her alone. But she couldn’t help it. She didn’t want to be alone here.

  Right now, she was cutting through The Orangerie on her way back from changing out of her costume. One of the suspended blooms of the angel’s trumpet tree brushed her shoulder as she went along. Another touched the top of her head. The feel of their petals against her was almost like the terrible soft brush of a reaching hand, one that brought the memory of the tea and what happened after she drank it. Harper and Merritt seemed to have decided that they’d all been hallucinating that day at the hot springs, and Audrey was the unlucky one who’d ended up with the worst trip.

  As explanations go, this one was so weak as to be barely plausible. Audrey was fairly certain that the phone production had given her had something to do with the shared delusion that appeared on its screen.

  The day it happened, Harper and Merritt had helped her from her kitchen floor to her bed and then stayed with her as she slept it off. Or they said she slept, anyway. She couldn’t remember—and she still felt so tired when she woke, hours later. But when she checked her kitchen countertop, while it was still broken, it was also still butcher block—solid and true, with nary an exposed yellow jacket chamber in sight.

  Bo had called her later that night and asked if she wanted them to send over a nurse. She said no. She’d vomited, drank a bunch of Gatorade and some lemongrass soup. She was feeling better.

  “You gave us a scare,” he’d told her.

  “That’s funny,” she’d said. “Isn’t that what you want me to do?”

  “Listen, I want you to know, again, that whatever was in that tea he made, it came from Eric, not from us,” Bo said. “We told him that it’s a real-deal angel’s trumpet, but the tree we have in The Orangerie has all the potency modified out of it. Or it’s supposed to.”

  “I don’t know why you would think that’s comforting to me,” she’d said. “I want to believe that whatever happened was because of the tea.”

  “It certainly looked that way on camera.”

  “I really don’t know if I can do this much longer,” she said. “It’s not good for me. I’m not sleeping. I haven’t been.”

  “You’re doing so great, Audrey. Really. What we’re getting is phenomenal.”

  “I’m not sleeping.”

  “Nobody is,” he said. “Do you think you can try to use that? Mine it?”

  “I mean, I don’t know what other choice I have,” she said.

  “I think you can use it. I think it’s all part of this. I mean, tell me if it gets worse, of course—but really, I’m not sleeping much, either. Try to use it.”

  Now, Audrey could see out The Orangerie windows to Merritt and Harper together by the fountain, talking in the sun. She checked her face one last time in the reverse camera on her phone. She’d changed out of her costume dress and corset and wiped clean her full makeup, but she’d left her hairdo—piled and pinned into a kind of faux crop—as it was. That, plus the off-the-shoulder cut of her sweatshirt, made her neck seem extra long, just how Charles Dana Gibson (of Gibson Girl fame) would have liked it.

  She cleared the camera app and opened her texts to reread her afternoon instructions. She had a chilled six-pack of a local hard cider in her bag, along with a blanket, an additional mic pack, and the prize item: the most ornate of the antique talking boards from Spite Tower and the planchette that went with it. She was supposed to now get Harper and Merritt to join her here, in The Orangerie, to use that board. Her backstory being that she’d managed to sneak it out of the tower the night they’d been up there, which no one would buy for a minute. But she did now have it, so . . . That much even Merritt couldn’t deny. And if she tried to argue, well, Bo would like that better anyway.

  The staging could be wonderful, sure. The three of them together on a blanket spread across the tiled floor, a shiver rippling through their bodies as they bent over the board and saw its message to them, while cameras, cameras everywhere watched something bad begin to happen. Keep happening.

  As always, Audrey didn’t know what that bad would be, but these arrangements were more elaborate than usual, so she guessed it would be something significant. Something terrifying. But not real, of course. Not that.

  Even as she thought this, Audrey heard a noise like a whisper behind her in the plants. She turned to look but there was no one there but the flowers and leaves. Still, there was a shadow on the far wall she hadn’t noticed before. Maybe a crouching body with a camera? Maybe a crouching body without a camera?

  She didn’t wait to find out.

  She pulled the spare mic pack and the talking board from her bag and shoved them into a nearby planter. Then she took off the mic she’d been wearing and did the same with it. Finally, she turned off her phone completely.

  She started to open the door, and in a moment of pure inspiration, turned around and pulled a cluster of orange blossoms off the nearest tree. She tucked them behind her ear and walked out the door and across to Harper and Merritt so that she could stand in front of them and say, before she lost her nerve: “Can we go to the orchard? We have time.”

  “Right now?” Merritt asked.

  “Oh fuck yes,” Harper said. She reached both arms up so that Audrey would help pull her to standing, which she did.

  “OK,” Merritt said like she was amused. “I’m game.” She shoved her things into her bag and then held both of her arms up, just as Harper had, and the two of them pulled her to her feet as well.

  Audrey spared one look behind her at The Orangerie, thinking maybe Bo would be on the other side of the windows, glaring back at her. He wasn’t. There was no one there at all. No one except for the sunny wash of their own reflections in the glass. And that didn’t count. Right?

  They started off across the wide lawns toward the dark mouth of the orchard path. They didn’t actually link arms, Readers, but they might as well have. They could feel the eyes of the various crew members upon them, and other eyes and maybe lenses, too.

  They were being watched. They didn’t care. They’d made a chain of three.

  “Somebody just posted a new joke,” Merritt said, reading her phone. “What was the lesbian ghost tired of explaining?”

  “What?”

  “That she’s not a lesbian, goddamnit. She’s boosexual.”

  “Boooooooooo,” Harper said. “So dumb.”

  “I’ve got one,” Audrey said. “What’s the problem with a lesbian poltergeist?”

  “What?” Merritt said.

  “After one good fuck, she’ll try to possess you.”

  Harper and Merritt laughed.

  “Are those all on that thread?” Harper asked.

  “Yes,” Merritt said.

  “I have to catch up with that. My own finsta at work,”* Harper said, referring to a comment thread beneath a photo she had posted of the three of them hanging out in The Orangerie, and after Eric (of course it had been Eric) had made a dumb orgasm-phantasm pun, many more lesbian ghost puns had followed.

  “I told Noel,” Audrey said. “I hope that’s OK. He was coming up with a bunch. I can’t remember them all—one of them was something about lesbian bed death. It’s exactly his kind of thing to be into.”

  “For sure,” Harper said. “I’ll add him now.” She pulled out one of her phones.

  “Is he in Rhode Island yet?” Merritt asked.

  “Yeah, they got here a few hours ago,” Audrey said. “They’re staying in this, like, artists’ collective. Who knows with Noel. They might be squatting. He’d love that. I just know the show starts at ten and they’re going with Newportmanteau as their name.”

  Merritt didn’t hide her sneer.

  “Really?” Audrey said to her, taking in the judgment of that face. “This one I like.”

  “God, ten suddenly seems so late when your call time is seven hours later,” Harper said.

  “You’re not bailing,” Merritt said.

  “Never, never ever,” Harper said. “Just making an observation.”