But, Readers: fuck those people.

  “Wait here for Bo Dhillon, please,” one of the handlers now says.

  “We’d rather not,” Merritt says. “He’ll catch up.” She turns. Harper and Audrey turn, too—to face the stairs. They again join hands and climb a couple of them. Harper is still struggling with her footing and she’s glad to be between the two of them.

  They climb another few stairs and Audrey says they should probably turn around to pose again.

  “Did you know Mary MacLane was in a movie?” Merritt says as they do. “A silent film. They think it’s been lost to time.”

  “Of course it has,” Audrey says.

  “Men Who Have Made Love to Me,” Harper says, looking at Merritt. “Right? That’s what it was called?”

  “Well look at you,” Merritt says. “I’m impressed.”

  “What about all the women who made love to her?” Audrey asks.

  “Much too queer for the censors of the day,” Merritt says.

  “Too queer to be believed,” Audrey says.

  “Planet Lady Love,” Merritt says. She is smiling, Readers—for real. They all are.

  “I think they expect us to climb more of these, now,” Audrey says. “Bo’s gaining on us, so if we wait, we’re gonna be stuck with him.”

  It’s true that Bo-in-tux is coming fast behind.

  He looks up at them now and waves and grins and they all smile and wave back, but given their position on the stairs, the line of them: it’s like a royal court acknowledging one of their subjects. (Or at least that’s how it looks in the many photos taken of that moment and later shared in various places near and far.)

  Again they climb, hand in hand. Again they turn to pose. But no matter how many times they are asked, how many times they are, in fact, directed by handlers to separate so that they may be captured in individual photos, they refuse to do so.

  “You know why I moved to LA?” Merritt asks.

  “No,” Harper says. “I didn’t even know that you had until a minute ago.”

  “Why did you?” Audrey asks.

  “Somebody once took me on the best date there,” Merritt says. “Like it was so good it was unreal. It couldn’t have been real. Until the end, that is, which was very real.”

  “It was a good date,” Harper says.

  “You know what I think about all the time?” Audrey asks. “You know what I dream about?”

  “The orchard and the snowstorm and whatever else that was,” Harper says.

  “Yes,” Audrey says.

  “Me three,” Merritt says.

  “I can’t get clear for myself if it really happened,” Audrey says. “Because of everything else around it, I mean—everything that wasn’t real.”

  “It happened,” Harper says. She also wants this to be true.

  “What if we hadn’t driven away from it?” Audrey asks. “What if we’d made ourselves stay?”

  “We didn’t,” Harper says.

  “We still could,” Merritt says. “We could try it again.”

  “Brookhants 2: We’re Not Through with You?” Audrey says.

  “Spite Manor is mine.” Merritt says this like it is not at all the thing she’s just said. She tries to turn them around again, in order to climb more stairs. But Audrey and Merritt do not turn with her. “I guess that means the orchard, too,” Merritt says, still facing up the stairs even though she’s the only one of the three doing so. “Though when it comes to land and Brookhants, I think it’s best not to think you own anything—even if a piece of paper says otherwise.”

  “Elaine gave it to you?” Harper asks as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. She knows that Brookhants logic works like this.

  Merritt nods.

  “Jesus,” Harper says. “Fuck.”

  “You just found out?” Audrey asks.

  “No,” Merritt says. “I’ve known for a while. I knew right away, actually. I’m the one who gave permission to finish the film there.”

  “What?” Audrey asks. “Why didn’t you say anything to us then?” She seems a little wounded.

  “I don’t know,” Merritt says. “You saw how I was then. I couldn’t think about it.”

  “Fuck,” Harper says again.

  “Yes,” Merritt says. “That. Can we climb the rest of these stairs now, please?”

  Neither Harper nor Audrey answers, but both turn around and start doing so.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me any of this,” Audrey says, talking across Harper to Merritt.

  “I know,” Merritt says. “I didn’t feel like I could talk about it before.”

  “Before what?” Audrey asks.

  “Before this. Before now, I guess, with the three of us.”

  “What are you gonna do with it?” Harper asks. “It’s so much.”

  “I have no idea,” Merritt says. “I think a lot about bulldozers and wrecking balls and flamethrowers.”

  “Those I would come back for,” Harper says.

  “It’s not the right thing, though,” Audrey says. “That doesn’t feel right to me.”

  “You do have a little headmistress in you,” Harper says to Merritt. “More than a little.”

  “I don’t particularly care for children,” Merritt says. “Plus, do we really think anyone should try to run a school there ever again?”

  “Queer artists’ colony?” Harper says.

  “Old-timey apple picking and haunted hay ride?” Audrey says.

  “For sure that one,” Merritt says.

  “I feel better knowing that it’s yours now,” Harper says. Is this true?

  “I’m not sure that I do,” Merritt says.

  “We should go in,” Audrey says. They’ve reached the top of the stairs. They’ve actually been there for a while. They look at the glass doors but don’t move toward them. And then there is a commotion behind them, down the stairs, back on the carpet at the rope line.

  They turn, in a row, to find tuxes and gowns scattering. Bo has his hand pressed up to his neck. The camera faces are turned away from everyone else currently on the carpet and directed at him, their lenses glinting. The white lights wrapping the trunks of the palm trees have been turned on and a breeze blows the smell of ocean and smoke and blossoms through the crowd, which is murmuring and pointing at Bo.

  “He just got stung,” Harper says, watching Bo continue to cup his neck and try to joke it off. She knows this to be true without anyone confirming it, but someone, a Cannes handler coming fast up the side of the stairs, does confirm it.

  “A wasp—just now,” she says, looking at Harper. “I’m going for ice.”

  “You can both hear the buzzing,” Audrey asks. “Right?”

  “A yellow jacket,” Audrey calls after her.

  Bo turns and looks up the stairs at the three of them. He shrugs. It’s a cross between What, me worry? and something more genuine, something like Did this just happen?

  “Now let it sting you twice more,” Merritt yells down at him. “That’s how you get hiiiiiiiigggghhhh!”

  Audrey, Merritt, and Harper laugh. Bo can’t hear what she’s said. Or at least he pretends that he can’t. He turns back to the camera faces.

  The red carpet stretched out before them could be a clown’s tongue or a river of blood. It could also be a rain-soggy red carpet at a movie premiere. There are things floating in the air around them that might be pollen or yellow jackets or snowflakes. Or Hollywood fairy dust.

  Merritt sneezes. And again. Photos of her midsneeze will wind up on many more pages than necessary.

  “You can both hear the buzzing,” Audrey asks. “Right?”

  Harper and Merritt nod. They all squeeze hands. They have to go in now. Because what else?

  “I have read of women who have been strongly, grandly brave,” Harper says as they turn toward the doors.

  “Sometimes I have dreamed that I might be brave,” Merritt says.

  “The possibilities of this life are magnificent,” Audrey says.*

  Acknowledgments

  Oh, Readers, where to begin when my gratitude for those who helped to make this big, queer novel is so deep and wide? When this book wouldn’t exist without the support of everyone from the lifeguards at my neighborhood Y, who (usually) managed to stay awake to watch over my early-morning lap swims—a meditative time during which I sorted plot elements—to the antiques dealers who sold me sapphic stereo cards and flower dictionaries, ostensibly for research, but also for sheer delight?

  To my agent, Jessica Regel, who sat with me at a sticky dining table in a rented ski condo filled with my loud (and tipsy) family members, a snowstorm outside, and who told me to stop hemming and hawing and to write this book exactly as I thought it should be written, even if that meant complicating a lot of other things. Jessica, thank you for your years-long belief in my words. (Also, thanks for sharing twin bunkbeds with practical strangers and for being so damn chill about it.)

  To my tireless editors, Jessica Williams at William Morrow and Carla Josephson at Borough: thank you for seeing the much better novel in that monstrous early draft and for pushing me to write and revise toward that end. I’m so glad we figured out, together, how to fill the holes while staying true to my weird vision. This book was so improved by your careful attention and good humor along the way.

  Sara Lautman, thank you for sending that first hello and how are you email all those years ago, and for sticking with this unwieldly story during all the years since. (I know how slow I work, especially when compared to your usual output.) When I wasn’t sure what this novel was, or what it could be, I felt so lucky to have your illustrations there to help inspire me. (And we got our map!)

  I have so much gratitude for the brilliant teams at HarperCollins US and UK that work so diligently, and with such good cheer, to make books and authors shine: Julia Elliott, Leah Carlson-Stanisic, Ploy Siripant, Ryan Shepherd, Shelby Peak, Eliza Rosenberry, Liate Stehlik, Jennifer Hart, and Kelly Rudolph at William Morrow; and Fleur Clarke, Ann Bissell, Isabel Coburn, and Holly MacDonald at Borough Press.

  I am in debt to my early readers for their thoughtful notes and questions and their creative insights and enthusiasm. Thank you to Marissa Neilson, Carrie Shipers, Malinda Lo, and Alessandra Balzer (who took a chance on a very different version of this novel back when it was just a few pages and who, for a time, helped to guide it). Thanks, too, to Rebecca Rotert and Timothy Schaffert, who let me vent and kvetch and who gave me back such calm understanding and wisdom (and jokes!) in response.

  Much love to Ben Chevrette and Scott Humphreys. Thank you, always, for your friendship and support, but in specific: thank you for those long beach weekends. If you hadn’t been so willing to keep hauling that cooler with cheap champagne and stemware across the dunes for literal miles, I might not have fallen so in love with the Rhode Island coastline and its many charms. We’ll always have [name of beach redacted to keep away the summer people].

  Thank you to my former colleagues in the English Department at Rhode Island College for your early support of this novel—and of me—and to the MacDowell Colony for time, space, and those fantastic picnic basket lunches.

  Thanks to every single reader and family member and friend who has asked about this book along the way to get here (when’s it coming?!). I feel so lucky that you’re out there.

  Thank you to my mom, Sylvia Danforth, who is one of the most dedicated and enthusiastic readers I know (three book clubs!) and who, over the long course of my working on this novel, so often fed our dogs and did the dishes, baked muffins, cooked dinners, arranged vases of flowers, and, in general, let me submerge myself in Brookhants for hours on end, and then was always excited to ask me about how things were going once I came up for air. (Even if I didn’t always feel like saying.)

  Last and most and always, to Erica Edsell, my Erica Edsell: my very favorite person ever.

  (Oh, and of course: to Mary MacLane, and not just for what she wrote, but for who she was.)

  About the Author

  EMILY M. DANFORTH is the author of the highly acclaimed young adult novel The Miseducation of Cameron Post. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Montana and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She lives with her wife and two terrible dogs in Rhode Island. This is her first adult novel.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Emily M. Danforth

  The Miseducation of Cameron Post

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  PLAIN BAD HEROINES. Text copyright © 2020 by Emily M. Danforth. Illustrations copyright © 2020 by Sara Lautman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Cover design by Ploy Siripant

  Cover illustrations by Sara Lautman

  FIRST EDITION

  Digital Edition OCTOBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-294287-6

  Version 09162020

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-294285-2

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  * Mary MacLane. The Story of Mary MacLane. Chicago: Herbert S. Stone & Company, 1902.

  The book was originally titled I Await the Devil’s Coming, but MacLane’s editor refused to publish it under this title during her lifetime.

  * Remember this name.

  * The orchard was planted at Brookhants even before the Rash brothers took charge of the land. Black Oxford apples were regionally favored both for cider-making and for their ability to store well for long periods.

  * Did I tell you that Charles had named his car America? I hate him so much.

  * Also remember this name, Readers.

  * I’m not kidding. And no, I won’t draw you like one of my French girls.

  * And many who have claimed to have seen them since have said the same.

  * Don’t come at me, linguists: Despite its spelling it is pronounced “Brook-haunts” and not “Brook-hantz” as in “ants.” This is because that’s how Harold Brookhants’s last name was always pronounced, how Harold himself pronounced it. What would you have me do about it now, so many years later?

  * To refresh your memories: The original final girl from the first House Mother movie, Samantha (Sam) Heywood, was played by Melanie Patrick. This was Melanie Patrick’s first and final film role. She and her boyfriend, actor Mars Rissini (who also appeared briefly in the film), infamously died in a car accident after leaving the House Mother premiere party. Overnight their movie, which had been critically derided, achieved cult-classic status and became an entirely unexpected box office hit of 1987, thus launching the House Mother trilogy and the need for a different final girl in installments two and three—enter Caroline Wells.

  * Or at least 18.6 million of us were.

  * It’s doubtful that anyone reading this hasn’t already heard the story of Harper Harper’s name, but in case you haven’t it seems essential to explain it.

  Harper Harper’s mother, Shelly Harper, was only fifteen when she gave birth to our future celesbian, and she was, the very week she delivered, reading To Kill a Mockingbird in her American Lit class at school.

  And as the story goes (from the lips of Shelly Harper herself, during a podcast interview she did when Harper’s first movie, Dirt Town, was released): Back then I read all the time. I mean, I was a real reader. And that book was one of my favorites because Scout’s such a charmer.

  Interviewer: Did you ever think of naming her—

  Shelly (laughing and interrupting): I know! I know! That’s what everybody says. I know—I could’ve named her Scout. I get it, but I just didn’t—that name didn’t feel right. Harper Lee is the one who wrote the book and that’s what I was wanting to celebrate. Does that make sense? Besides, I was young, so I thought that Marcus and I’d get married someday and then I’d take his last name and so would our daughter, so I didn’t think about it, like, as being a problem or weird because I didn’t think she would be Harper Lee Harper, you know? I thought she’d be Harper Lee Ridgeway. And also, for the record, I like my last name! I’m proud of my family, so why would that even bother me? Two Harpers? So what! And now, I mean, now she’s made it to Hollywood so—