But Audrey shook her head no, told Noel she loved him, and walked along a wall until she found a bathroom crowded with leggy houseplants: the hipster’s Orangerie. She went in, turned the lock, and was startled to see herself in the grimy mirror above the sink. Was it herself she saw, this sallow-cheeked Clara Broward imposter with circles under her eyes? Normcore Audrey Wells meets phantom? She sat almost crying, actually crying, almost crying on the edge of the dirty tub for a good while until someone who lived in the loft grew tired of waiting to use the only toilet and banged on the door, saying, “Can I please shit in my own bathroom, now?”

  When Audrey came out, the number of people at the party had more than doubled and she could no longer spot Merritt among them. She did see Harper leaning against a wall mural of James Baldwin dressed in a 1990s-era white-and-red Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls uniform.* Harper had her sweater sleeve rolled on one arm so that she could show off her yellow jacket tattoo to the willowy person in floral coveralls who was now hanging on her.

  Audrey’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She looked. It was Merritt. No message, only a link. She clicked it with dread. She knew it would send her back to the three of them on that blanket in the orchard: footage captured by some set crasher or even just by Bo’s instructions. She knew it.

  The link did lead to a video. But not to that one.

  Instead, it was of the side-of-the-wall screening of House Mother 2, with Caroline and Bo standing in the frame in front of the projection, smiling, their bodies washed in blue light and their shoulders and hair cluttered with snowflakes. It did look pretty magical, the internet commenters seemed to—for now—agree. And so good that Caroline Wells was cameoing in the movie as Audrey’s mom.

  And so good that it had snowed in Little Compton that night—the only place it had snowed in Rhode Island.

  Audrey felt someone move close behind her. She thought it was just a party shove, the space too full of people. But then that someone touched the small of her back and left their hand there. She turned. It was Merritt, who said, “What’s happening with you right now?”

  Audrey shook her head.

  “Tell me,” Merritt said. “You can say it.”

  Audrey shook her head again. “I can’t,” she said.

  Merritt thought Audrey looked, just now, like she had the whole queer collection of Brookhants ghosts about her: sitting on her shoulders, hanging off her back, curled like toddlers around her legs. “Let’s go back to Brookhants,” she said. “I’ll get Harper.”

  “I can’t do that to Noel.”

  “Really?” Merritt asked. “This is about Noel?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re here right now for Noel?” Merritt asked again.

  Audrey chose her words carefully. “Yes. He’s my best friend and he’s playing a show that Bo agreed to shoot for him. Plus Harper will get it trending. There’s already press there.”

  “Okeydokey,” Merritt said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I guess I’m talking about Noel’s big moment. We should go.” Merritt was all business as she went to find them a ride since she was no longer OK to drive.

  It took another half hour, but eventually someone named Danny drove Merritt and Audrey in Elaine’s car the not-all-that-many blocks over to Broadway, where the Columbus Theatre was, its old-fashioned marquee lit up with red letters: NEWPORTMANTEAU—SOLD OUT! (Merritt and Audrey weren’t sure who Harper ended up riding with. By the time they left the party they couldn’t find her.)

  Concertgoers spilled out the theater’s front doors and pooled onto its sidewalk. Scattered among them were camera crews from various press outlets or maybe hired by production. Audrey and Merritt were spotted immediately, and the camera lenses made a hall of mirrors around them as they entered the lobby. It was a theater from another time repurposed for this one: marble tiles and gilt moldings and a curved ceiling like in a European cathedral, a line of brass-and-glass chandeliers with fixtures shaped like angel’s trumpet flowers.

  And a stained red carpet, spongy as Brookhants terrace moss, beneath their feet.

  Their wrists were cuffed with yellow VIP bracelets as Noel texted to tell them to come backstage, and how, but the lobby was jammed with bodies and they had to pick their way through slowly.

  Audrey felt trapped in the crush of winter coats, the chatter and anticipation about them its own kind of buzzing. She worried she might faint and kept close to Merritt, who now said, unhappily, “Wasn’t enough to beat us over here, she already had time to find the bar.”

  “And a date,” Audrey said when she also saw what Merritt was seeing: Harper very comfortably chatting up someone in a black-and-gold dress.

  “What else?” Merritt said as she steered them in that direction.

  The person in the dress was Annie Meng. After cursory introductions, Harper explained that she had been in the area—in Boston, actually—and had decided to drop down for the night and probably come to the set tomorrow, too.

  “Well, and since I spent, like, three months making papier-mâché, I thought I should at least see how it got used,” Annie said. “It made me feel like a toddler working with Play-Doh. Turns out wasps don’t really consider my needs when they’re chewing up wood pulp for their nests.”

  “I don’t think they’ve used most of what you made yet,” Harper said. “It comes later.”

  “I didn’t know you were working on the film,” Merritt said, her face a beige wall.

  “Barely,” Annie said, waving her hand as if it was nothing. “Just a few projects Harper thought I was right for. Bo bought three of my paintings last year, so how could I say no when he asked?”

  “How could you?” Merritt said like some robot myna bird.

  “Should we get a drink before we go in?” Harper asked, signaling to the bartender even before anyone had answered her. The night’s two signature cocktails? The Mary MacLane* and The Orangerie, which came complete with citrus blossoms floating on top. Of course it did, Readers.

  Audrey drank hers without thinking. She didn’t want it, really, but one had been passed to her, the glass sweating in her hand, and eventually she brought it to her mouth, and then again, a thing to do. It had the kind of herbaceous aftertaste that made her take another sip to clear it, only to start the cycle again.

  A broad-shouldered member of the security staff approached. He’d been sent to bring them backstage and away from the crowd, who had been alerted to their presence, particularly Harper’s. People were now gathering even more thickly around them, phones up and shooting.

  They weaved through the crowd, sloshing their too-full Mary MacLanes as more security flanked them. Audrey felt like she was slipping in and out of time. There were so many people, their conversations too loud, bodies too close. The knot of dread in her chest pulled tighter.

  Backstage they found Noel with his band. He was in a rust-colored velvet suit and seven pounds of gold eyeliner and he looked about perfect, Audrey thought. She forced a big smile and kissed his cheek and told him to kill it out there. His bandmates were giddy with the size of the crowd, the press, all of them humming with pre-show energy. Foreboding twisted in Audrey’s gut.

  Something bad was about to happen. Was happening?

  She couldn’t feign additional chitchat. Without waiting for anyone else to join her, or even checking to see if they were following, Audrey headed through the nearest doorway (that didn’t lead back to the lobby) and found herself in a different dark hallway, one that eventually deposited her, after a wrong turn, at the front of the theater, to the left of the stage.

  The theater proper was its lobby writ large: a cathedral built for vaudeville acts and silent films, with Greek-inspired frescoes on its arched ceiling and more gilt in its ornate moldings and columns. The main floor was already half full and the balcony was stuffed to capacity. Audrey took one of the front-row-center seats (where Bo wanted her). She was still holding the watery remains of her cocktail and so she reached to set the glass under her chair. While her hand was there, she felt around for some sort of William Castle rigging meant to jolt her at the proper time. There was none. But there was something on the underside of her seat, something that made her fingers curl away in revulsion when they brushed against it. It felt fuzzy, almost like moss.

  Merritt and Harper (and Annie, too) had followed her and they now stood in front of their seats and scanned the crowd behind. “Your mom just came in with Bo,” Merritt said, doing the play-by-play though Audrey hadn’t asked her to. “People are losing their minds.”

  Audrey looked to see Bo guide Caroline onto an elevated platform in the center of the theater, where the camera crew was situated to best film the show. One of the camera crews, anyway.

  “Oh, she sees us,” Harper said, waving in that direction.

  Audrey did not join them in waving at her mother. Instead, she turned back around to face the still-empty stage. Her brain felt gummy and thick. She closed her eyes and tried to let the crowd become a hum. It felt good to close her eyes, but it didn’t work to shut them out.

  Next to her, Harper said, “Look at all these badasses who dressed up.”

  “Brookhants cosplay,” Annie said. “Are they extras?”

  “I think just fans,” Harper said.

  Audrey felt compelled to look. She couldn’t say why, only that it was part of this. It was all part of this. She opened her eyes and again turned around to see. There were several pockets of people in period costume, puffed sleeves here, a boater hat there. Even coming down their own aisle, three smiling women who might have stepped out of a John Singer Sargent painting: skirts and shirtwaists with lace trimmings at their high necks, fitted jackets cinched with belts of the same material, their hair in simple chignons.

  The one wearing a toque perched atop her head like a tilted cake took the seat next to Audrey, nodding hello as she did.

  “You nailed the look,” Merritt said to the woman. “That hat’s a dream.”

  “I would dress like this every day if I thought I could pull it off,” the woman said.

  “You could,” Merritt said.

  Audrey felt like she wasn’t even there between them as they spoke. She didn’t want to be.

  The houselights dimmed, just as they do at every concert ever, but it still sent whoops and shouts up from the crowd. Kelsi, the band’s drummer, walked onstage and settled at her kit.

  “You’re not really going to sit for Newportmanteau,” Merritt said, leaning her mouth close to Audrey, her breath hot and wet and a little bit gross in her ear. “Are you?”

  Audrey stood, though she didn’t feel inside her body as she did. Her view of the stage had been lower. Now it was higher. She let Merritt take her hand. Why not? Who cared? None of this meant a thing.

  The shadows at the wings of the stage were twitching. Weren’t they? Was it something they were doing with the lighting? If they kept this up the whole show she’d throw up. She knew she would. It was like a strobe light but for shadows: hopping and blinking and making her sick.

  Next to her, the three women in period costume whispered something to each other. They were talking about her. Audrey could feel their eyes on her. She chanced a look, to scowl at them. Didn’t they know it was rude to stare? The one on the end, farthest from her, could she be one of those from that night at the convenience store? Who stole the boat to chase them? She might be. Harper knew her name. She’d talked to her the most. It was her, wasn’t it? She’d dressed in a disguise to fool them. But Audrey wasn’t fooled.

  Why did the red stage curtains look dipped in black ink and still wet with it? They didn’t. They didn’t. Ignore them.

  Something was happening. It wasn’t about to happen. It already was.

  Noel did a series of slides and glides to take his place onstage, as if he was ice-skating across it. He’d perfected these moves since Audrey had seen him do them last. Kelsi ticked off the count and they started their first song and it was loud. So loud. Audrey thought she should have recognized it but for her fumbling brain and God it was loud. Did Noel sound OK? She thought he must, the crowd seemed into it, and he looked the part, but it was hard for her to tell. Their guitars were screaming at her and those shadows in the wings kept sputtering. Camerapeople emerged from them to capture these moments from all the angles. The song went on and on and shouldn’t she know these lyrics? Harper was jumping up and down like she was on a spring and Audrey could still feel the eyes of the trio of women beside her. Why wouldn’t they look at the stage like they were supposed to? The band’s fucking playing, idiots. Look at the band! They’re the ones on the stage wanting to be looked at.

  What were the lyrics? It was Noel’s mouth that was open, but it was Mary MacLane’s words coming out: I am not strong. I cannot bear things. I do not want to bear things.

  Audrey would learn, later, that Newportmanteau’s set list that night was comprised of covers, like usual, but they were not the band’s usual covers. Instead, they were all songs about ghosts or curses.*

  Harper leaned across Merritt to shout at Audrey over the song, “They sound awesome tonight!”

  Audrey nodded in response. Was there something in Harper’s grinning tooth gap? Something that shouldn’t be there? Maybe just some bit of flower deposited from her cocktail. Or something worse: a stuck worm; a string of seaweed. Audrey swallowed bile. Merritt’s hand now felt funny in her own, like something was pressed between their palms that wasn’t their skin. It was—

  The song ended and the crowd lost it. The strength of their applause seemed to surprise even Noel. It was too much, ravenous and pounding. A camera on a rig panned the stage in a wide arc. Audrey looked up to watch its path and noticed the gilt molding that edged the ceiling tremble with the noise. Didn’t she see it tremble? Maybe it was only another hollow trick of Bo’s: Styrofoam meant to come crashing down on cue.

  Maybe it was made of the paper chambers of a yellow jacket nest.

  Audrey pulled her hand from Merritt’s in order to join in the clapping. She had to do it; she was right up front: Noel was looking at her. But her hands didn’t make the correct sound when she put them together, and wet sludge flew from between them and landed on her cheek. She brought the hand she’d held to Merritt’s to her face. Its palm was smeared with yellow mash. It smelled of rotten apple. Merritt was acting like nothing was wrong, taking a selfie with Harper. Everyone was acting like nothing was wrong. The band was already on to their next song, even as the shadows from the wings skittered out across the stage to claim them.

  Audrey felt swoony, stars and black across her vision. She sat down hard in her seat, only to find the arm of her chair scabbed thick with moss. She jerked her hand away as the woman next to her, the one in the cake hat, leaned down to ask if she was OK. “You seem like you’re really having some trouble,” the woman said, her mouth twisting into a terrible, searching smile.

  “I’m fine,” Audrey said, dropping her eyes from that awful stretched mouth just in time to watch a yellow jacket climb up from inside the high neck of the woman’s shirtwaist and cling its sticky legs along the ruffled edge of the fabric to hum in the air between them. The woman acted like it wasn’t there.

  Another yellow jacket emerged from the cave of feathers on her hat. “If you’re sure,” the woman said, straightening to join her friends.

  Audrey turned around in her chair, hoping to signal to Caroline on the platform. If she could just calm down enough to get her thoughts right, but she didn’t even manage to cast her eyes far enough back into the theater to find her, because for rows and rows back, all the rows, there were smiling concertgoers from the past.

  Not pockets of them. Not a smattering here and there. It was like looking around the redwood table in Harold’s séance panorama: everyone dressed and styled like Flo and Clara and Eleanor and Libbie and Alex and even wretched cousin Charles, too. An audience of Gilded Age phantoms singing along to the screaming song and batting their faces for yellow jackets.

  She was going to be sick. She caught the lurch of it. Swallowed it back and made herself stand. She had to push up on the arms of her chair to do it. As she did, she felt the moss wedge under her fingernails.

  Audrey walked careful steps through the vibrating shadows, one after the next, to the end of their row and out the way she’d entered from backstage, into the dim passage, its walls skinned in gold paper with fuzzy maroon patches, its sconces dead ringers for those in Spite Tower.

  It is a dim, dim light and there’s a treachery in it.

  She made it to where the hallway curved around the stage and pressed her palms against that fuzzy paper to lean forward and spew an arc of vomit up against the wall. Though it didn’t smell of vomit: it smelled of rotten apples. The smell alone made her heave again.

  The music pounded like a pulse through the wall and into her hands and body—the big show happening just on the other side, the show she’d agreed to: the one she’d helped make happen. She felt flushed and put her cheek against the fuzz, closed her eyes.

  At the end of the hallway, she heard someone enter from the theater.

  Someone was walking toward her. Audrey didn’t even care. She wouldn’t even open her eyes to see.

  “Are you OK?” It was Merritt, now right next to her. “Oh,” she added, when she noticed the vomit. “So you’re not.”

  “No, I’m not,” Audrey said to the wall. There was a choke in her throat that embarrassed her.

  “Just breathe for a minute,” Merritt said. “Maybe you should try to sit. I can go get you some water.”

  Audrey opened her eyes at that and said, “Don’t go. I know we have to get back in there, I just need a minute.”

  “We don’t have to get back in there,” Merritt said.

  “Yes, we do.” Audrey closed her eyes again against the thought of walking back into that theater with that crowd. The band had just ended a song and the applause kicked on high. Behind her, she heard Merritt move to the opposite wall and slide down against it.

  When Audrey opened her eyes and turned to look, Merritt was sitting on the floor, looking up at her. She looked like she was settling in. Now Bo would be mad at her about this, too. She was ruining the scene. Had ruined it. Again.