“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.”

  “You won’t be starting your day at five if they don’t get the ghosts out of the mics before morning,” Merritt said.

  Nobody answered her.

  They were in the woods now, on the very same route Flo and Clara and stupid cousin Charles had traveled those many years before. Though they’d entered at the mouth of that path, by now they were well down its dark throat, the trees having swallowed them whole.

  And as they moved still deeper into the woods, the scent of rot and soil lifted around them, while acorns fell like sporadic hail, heavy and hard. Above them, branches rubbed and leaves fluttered, sometimes making a sound like walking across old floorboards, others like the swish of rushing in a skirt.

  It was as if the understory cast its own spell upon them.

  And they wanted it to.

  Merritt thought about her book and what she might write in it after this night.

  Harper thought about the call she’d not clicked over to, the call from her little brother, Ethan, when earlier she’d been on the phone with her manager. And she still hadn’t called him back.

  Audrey thought about Bo and how she’d just fucked up his afternoon shoot. It was amateur hour, she knew, grossly unprofessional. She was acting like a disobedient child. A brat. But she really needed a few hours without being looked at. She was having a hard time separating her performances. Even what she’d just done—breaking the rules, asking them to come to the orchard—wasn’t that more a Clara Broward than an Audrey Wells thing to do?

  Whoever the action belonged to, in this moment, it felt good.

  “I should’ve brought water,” Merritt said.

  “I have some,” Audrey said. When she pulled out the heavy bottle—a metal one in green with The Happenings at Brookhants along one side—she also pulled out the six-pack of hard cider and held it up to the others.

  “They’re still cold, I think.”

  “I could kiss you,” Harper said, plucking a bottle from the cardboard carrier.

  “OK,” Audrey said. (Clara said?)

  The three of them looked at each other like there were perhaps other things to say about this, but they did not say those things just then.

  Merritt drank some water, screwed the cap back on the bottle, and then took a cider of her own. Harper used the opener on her keychain to pop the tops, letting them fall to the path as their breadcrumbs.

  On and on they walked and drank, tugging their shirts free of the snagging branches, pulling prickly seed pods from each other’s backs and butts, their mouths fizzing with swallows of sweet, sharp cider.

  At some point, Harper started humming, then singing, the yellow jacket song.

  Just one sting will make us smart.

  With two, we might be brave.

  Three will buzz inside our hearts.

  With more, we’re in the grave.

  After this verse, she stopped singing to ask, “Do you think the girls really let the yellow jackets sting them?”

  “Supposedly three stings was the price of entry into the Plain Bad Heroine Society,” Merritt said. “But I couldn’t ever find any proof. And that song drifted out and away from here once the school shut down, so it’s possible that verse is only an aftereffect—people adding lyrics to fit the story of the curse.”

  “Is there anything growing here they weren’t using to get high?” Audrey asked.

  “This is it,” Merritt said.

  It seemed like they’d reached a stand of overgrown lilac bushes, leggy and buggy, but Merritt knew how to cut through and around them until it was like she’d opened a door and they were standing on the edge of a large clearing, orderly rows of apple trees ahead.

  These moments were charged in a golden light—they had managed, not at all by accident, to arrive at the orchard right as Brookhants tipped over into the magic hour.*

  The Black Oxfords were just as they’d been promised: fat and ripe, shining purple and blue black on the branches, bending boughs with their weight. And on the ground, more apples, felled apples, like jewels in the grass, while above them buzzed yellow jackets.

  Our three heroines might as well have entered an illustration from a fairy tale.

  Except, of course, for the solar lights production had strung between a section of trees. And the ladders leaned against their trunks. And the metal storage containers hulking off to one side of the orchard. They had a Flo and Clara scene to film here in two days. One was scheduled in two days, anyway.

  All around them buzzed yellow jackets, but not like a threat or a warning. Instead, their sound was like the hum of some ancient meditative practice, something to bind them.

  Audrey-Clara felt words that were not her own build inside her. All she had to do was open her mouth to let them out. She did: “Perhaps it was because, in Paul’s world, the natural nearly always wore the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty . . . that he was so moved by these starry apple orchards that bloomed perennially under the lime-light.”

  Harper took her hand and it didn’t seem weird or corny, it seemed just right. So Audrey took Merritt’s hand, and Merritt let her, and then she asked, “Is that from ‘Paul’s Case’?”*