“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’?”*

  “Yes,” Audrey said. “I read it because you told me to.”

  “I didn’t know you had,” Merritt said.

  “I read all the things you told me to read to prep,” Audrey said.

  “Yes, but you memorized it,” Merritt said.

  “I didn’t mean to,” Audrey said. “It stuck.”

  Together they walked through the orchard, dropping hands only when they’d decided to stop and spread their blanket. Harper used one of the ladders to climb into a tree and select apples for them, which they tried greedily—taking one bite and tossing the rest for the yellow jackets, and then doing it again because they could. They were rich in apples.

  The three of them lolled on the blanket. If you were above them, filming, say, you’d have seen that their bodies made the figure of a broken star: Harper’s head resting on Merritt’s lap and Audrey’s head on Harper’s stomach.

  The daylight drained quickly now, and what was left of the sun over the trees gilded their crowns—and when the wind blew their leaves tossed that gold around and made it glint.

  “Is it really stupid for me to say that it feels like everything that isn’t in this orchard has disappeared?” Harper asked. “Like if we walked back through those bushes right now it would all be smudged black, like somebody had erased a chalkboard and left streaks from what was there before?”

  “No,” Merritt said.

  “It’s not stupid at all,” Audrey said.

  “Do you think this is what Flo and Clara did here before they died?” Harper asked.

  “Yes,” Merritt said.

  “And more,” Audrey said.

  “Fucking cousin Charles,” Harper said.

  “I think I feel the sorriest for Alex, though,” Audrey said. “Or maybe for Libbie.”

  “For Libbie?” Harper asked. “You’re kidding.”

  “I mean sort of,” Audrey said. “It’s not like marrying Harold saved her reputation anyway—everybody just thought she was like a weirdo gold digger, especially when he died right away. His family hated her. Her family was creeped out by the whole thing. And she’s stuck running a school she doesn’t want to run in Rhode Island.”

  “Yeeeah, I dunno,” Harper said. “Alex still gets the bulk of my sympathies.”

  “You know what I used to think about when I came here?” Merritt asked as she twisted strands of Harper’s hair. “How close Clara was to her home—at least to her summer home. I mean, she probably could’ve swum there if she was desperate. But Brookhants might as well have been France, the way she lived here. I mean the way she gave herself permission to live here.”

  “Was it Brookhants or Mary MacLane that gave her permission?” Audrey asked.

  “Or Flo?” Harper added.

  “Yes,” Merritt said.

  “What I can’t get over,” Harper said, “is how Mary MacLane gave all these girls a model for thinking the things they thought, and then a few years later she took it back. I mean, what the fuck happened to her?”

  “She grew up and the world was hard and her fame didn’t fix it,” Audrey said.

  “She didn’t take it all back,” Merritt said. “She just—”

  “She later called lesbianism a warped predilection,” Harper said.

  “Yes,” Merritt said. “Despite that, she also continued to have relationships with women. And men.”

  “I want a T-shirt with Warped Predilection on it,” Audrey said.

  “Now I do, too,” Harper said.

  “You know she died in obscurity?” Merritt said. “Basically. Broke in a rooming house in Chicago.”

  “You know what’s funny about that?” Harper said. “My grandparents are significantly more OK with me being a dyke now that I’m earning money from it.”

  “That’s not why you’re earning money,” Audrey said.

  “I mean—” Harper said.

  “So you’re saying you see that as a win for rainbow capitalism?” Merritt asked.

  “I’m saying it’s a win for me,” Harper said. “I guess. Unless I think about it for too long.”

  Audrey sat up. “Wait, I have a toast,” she said, reaching into her bag for the next three ciders since they’d already finished the others. Harper opened the bottles and passed them along until each had one in hand.

  “To Mary MacLane and cultivating our elements of badness,” Audrey said. They drank. It was unreasonable how reasonable this behavior seemed to them.

  This world where they’d spread their blanket, this moment beneath the heavy apple boughs, in the golden light, was too beautiful by half. And it would not last. And our three heroines knew this.

  It was Merritt who said, “I just really want to kiss you.” She paused and then: “Both.”

  The answer they gave her was instant and shared. They smiled and slid closer, bunching the blanket between them as they did. And then they let her kiss them, and then they kissed each other.

  You shouldn’t think that the fact that it all felt like a dream made it somehow unreal. It was only more real this way—the last of the honey light in Merritt’s hair, glinting her eyebrow rings like a wink, the scent of Harper’s cigarettes on her clothes and the rich, earthy scent of apple rot around them; their mouths, when pressed together, as if still buzzing with cider fizz even though they’d already swallowed and set down their bottles in order to leave their hands free.

  Not a one of them was personally familiar with the logistics of arranging three bodies for pleasure, but there was something so easy and right in the way they fit together, in the feel of a hand beneath a shirt and a thigh between two legs and a mouth on a neck, a mouth on a stomach, a mouth on a mouth on a mouth. It was not at all silly to them, but it wasn’t at all serious, either. It just was: pleasure.

  The yellow jackets snapped about them, flitting and hovering, their buzzing both a sound and a feeling. The only feeling, right then.

  They were but a few steps into their desire, as if they’d entered the ocean up to their knees and were still gauging the waves, waiting for the best moment to dive in headfirst, when the solar lights strung about the trees twitched on above them.

  Harper noticed this. And in noticing this, she noticed something else. “I think it’s snowing,” she said.

  It could not be. They thought she must’ve misread the flutter of yellow jackets or parachute seeds. She wanted to see snowflakes, but surely it was only the drift of pine duff kicked up by the breeze—which now came to them heavy with the scent of wood smoke.

  It could not be snow, but it was—slow, fat flakes that took their time on their descent, that made a show of it. The snow looked like confetti or soap flakes, but it was real.

  The sky was dark and thick with clouds and it was snowing over the apple orchard at Brookhants, putting enough of a chill in the air to make Harper look around for her costume sweater and eventually find it near Merritt’s head, off the edge of the blanket atop a mashed apple, where Merritt had tossed it after pulling it from Harper’s body.

  “Was it supposed to snow today?” Audrey asked, looking up into the trees in disbelief, the flakes sticking to her hair for only a blink before melting.

  “There was that in the air . . .” Merritt said. She knew she didn’t need to finish Mary’s words. “It just is. It is snowing. I did want to kiss you.”

  “I wanted you to,” Audrey said. She took in the loveliness of Merritt’s expression and the way the static from the sweater lifted the strands of Harper’s hair. Merritt took in the flush of Audrey’s cheeks and the glow of the lights in the branches and the burn on Harper’s neck from where her sweater had rubbed until she’d pulled it off. Harper took in the desire that still pulsed in her body and the smell of wood smoke drifting through the trees from campus.

  They would remember these things, Readers, for the rest of their lives.

  There was no rush to continue what they’d started, to follow their want to its end point, because it seemed like they would have so much time to do so, for days and weeks to come. And so they caught snowflakes on their tongues and shouted and kissed and twirled and gathered their things, their fingertips and noses and the tops of their ears red and burning with cold.

  “Let’s drive back for movie night,” Merritt said, leading them out of the orchard and toward Spite Manor. They half ran in the dark through the understory, laughing and stumbling and turning to grab at each other as they went.

  The tree canopy blocked the sky and they could no longer tell if it was snowing and so took bets that it wasn’t, probably, or that it wouldn’t be anymore, not by the time they got out of the woods.

  But it was. It was still snowing.

  So they went first to their tiny houses for their coats and gloves and hats and stood in the doorways of each other’s production-stocked fridges to eat handfuls of berries and soft cheese on pretzel sticks and Nutella straight from the jar, ravenous and goofy and googly eyed.

  When they were satiated, they walked to Spite Manor and Merritt alone slipped in the front door. Moments later, she returned with the keys to Elaine’s vintage convertible, saying, “She won’t mind at all. She’ll love it.” And then she backed it out of the garage before getting out again and insisting, with Harper’s assistance, that Audrey drive them.

  And, unbelievably, Audrey said, “Yes. OK.”

  It wasn’t a car built for three, but Merritt and Harper made their bodies fit together on the passenger seat and Audrey, with a few lurches and false starts, drove them through the woods and over to Brookhants, top down, in the flying snow, on the very same road that Alex and Libbie traveled together each morning and night all those many years before.

  Audrey took it slowly, of course, but with much laughing and instruction-giving from Merritt and Harper—and of course with no other traffic on the road to contend with, she did just fine. On and on into the night snow she drove them, the seep of wood smoke and grilling lobsters gaining in strength as they grew closer—that and the blue light of the movie projection glowing weirdly through the trees.

  And then, faintly at first, they heard the song. This was their first clue—and the only one Audrey needed—to guess what was then being shown on the side of Main Hall:

  I got a hold on you tonight.

  “Uh-oh, it’s magic!” Harper sang-shouted—awkwardly standing up in the car as she did, gripping the top of the windshield to steady herself.

  Closer and closer they came to the source of that song. They were through the woods now, the wash of light from the projection revealing bodies in chairs and on blankets on the lawn, bodies being flaked in snow.

  “I can’t believe they’re showing this,” Audrey said, feeling shame in her chest where it didn’t belong, where she didn’t fucking want it to be.

  “I can’t believe we’re getting back during this scene!” Harper yelled.

  The film was House Mother 2: She’s Coming for You. They were arriving during the opening moments of its infamous pool party scene.

  The film, of course, Readers, was House Mother 2: She’s Coming for You. And they were arriving during the opening moments of its infamous pool party scene. The scene.

  Any second now, the twenty-year-old version of Audrey’s mother would take off her bikini top (along with the other women playing buxom coeds) and then spend the next minute and forty-six seconds* bouncing around a blue pool, her breasts shot from every exploitative angle that could be imagined, lit, and captured on film—all while The Cars sang about magic on the soundtrack.

  A few people on the lawn had noticed their approach and waved at them. Harper leaned over and pressed the car horn a few times to say hello back.

  And now, there on the wall of a building on her own film set were Audrey’s mother’s breasts, projected to the size of—

  She didn’t even want to draw the comparison. As her cast- and crewmates drank beer and threw popcorn and shouted, laughing—Don’t look in the filter basket!—Audrey tried not to let the feeling of the orchard drain away. She tried to keep it in her chest, through her limbs—the three of them together, what they’d done and said as real and as their own, as belonging just to them.

  “What’s in the filter basket?” Merritt asked, neck craned toward the projection.

  “Dave’s dick!” Harper shouted. “How have you still not seen this movie?!”

  It was too late.

  The feeling was gone. It was gone for Audrey, anyway. Now there was just this scene.

  She’d never parked a car before, so Merritt and Harper had to yell at her to brake! She managed to do it right before running them into a production trailer.

  “Are you OK?” Merritt asked, touching Audrey’s arm.

  “Sure,” Audrey lied. “Just cold. And I’ve literally never done that before.”

  She wanted to ask if they could turn around and go back to their tiny houses together. Or back to the orchard, even. But she knew it wouldn’t matter if they did. She knew it was over, that it had left them the minute they’d heard the first strains of the song.