If you’ll allow me to return you now, Readers—as I promised you I would—to Bo Dhillon’s office on the day of the chemistry read, with Audrey still sharing your confusion about this scene unfolding before her. The scene of which she was a crucial part, even if she seemed to be the only one in the room not to understand it. This scene:
“I know you can give us a bang-up Clara,” Bo said from behind his big-dumb desk. He folded a stick of gum onto his pink tongue, whereupon it lay like a stiff piece of cardboard until he closed his mouth and spoke around his chews. “I’m not worried about that.”
“How could you not be worried about that?” Audrey asked. She felt unsteady, and like she couldn’t quite catch her breath. “I mean I know how awful that was. I know.”
“Nah,” Bo said as he waved his hand as if to wipe her concerns out of the air. “We’ll get you the best coach. Somebody who’s worked on other period stuff—I have people in mind. And you’ve still got time to get a handle on her.” He paused, smiling like he knew he was about to confuse her more and relished in it. “What I want to talk about is getting a good Audrey out of you.”
“Audrey’s maybe had enough riddles for today, Bo,” Heather said. She’d slipped back into his office at some point, but Audrey hadn’t even noticed until now.
“Why is that a riddle?” Audrey asked. Her face felt hot while simultaneously her flop sweat was cooling beneath her clothes, leaving her chilled.
By then, almost everyone had left Bo’s house. But Audrey was still there with Gray and Caroline and Noel—and Heather—and Bo was still trying to explain his grand concept, which was improbable enough that she couldn’t quite believe it.
The (admittedly confusing and potentially hokey) gist was this: the movie Bo Dhillon intended to make was both the scripted drama about cursed heroines at a Gilded Age boarding school that Audrey had always thought she was signing up for, and also the docudrama of the three contemporary heroines—Audrey Wells, Merritt Emmons, and Harper Harper—who were involved in making that movie. Something a little like putting all the making-of, behind-the-scenes extras into the movie itself, found-footage style. But better, ideally much, much better, because it would be done under Bo’s artful eye and arrangement, with his distinctive sense of mise-en-scéne and his penchant for films that slowly and deliberately curdled the beautiful into the terrifying, so you couldn’t quite see the seams in between.
“I know we all tricked you and I get you being mad about that,” Bo said. “It was clearly a fucked-up thing to do.” He waited for her to respond.
“Yeah,” she said to the windows behind him. She couldn’t meet his eye.
“Yeah.” He paused again, this time as if searching for the words he wanted. “But I guess my explanation is that I needed to see if it was even interesting to have the three of you alone in a room together. If there was potential there. And if you’d known about this you would have been trying to be interesting, which is not the idea. It’s the opposite of the idea.”
“So you were watching us today?” Audrey asked. “Like, the whole time we were in here?”
“Oh, for sure,” Bo said, not at all embarrassed by this fact. “That was the whole point of today.” He nodded at the large video cameras at the back of the room. “Two of those were running as soon as you guys came in here, and then there are also cameras there and there.” Now he was pointing at the bookshelves and a plant in the corner. “And mics here, here, and here.” He gestured to other objects in other places, one of them on the desk beside him. It looked like a container for holding writing utensils.
“Out front, too,” Noel said. He, at least, did seem embarrassed by these revelations.
“Yep,” Bo said again. “That was great stuff, actually. Much more tension in the meet-and-greet portion than I was anticipating.”
“Merritt doesn’t like me,” Audrey said, shaking her head. She was nine parts embarrassed to one part impressed by his orchestrations.
“Ehhh, maybe,” Bo said. “I’m not sure that’s it.” His smirk was like that of a ten-year-old finally being discovered in the best hide-and-seek spot. “Have you ever heard of Thomas de Mahy, the Marquis de Favras?”
“No,” Audrey said. His question felt like a trap. Another one.
“Riddles, Bo,” Heather said again.
“No, it’s not a riddle,” Bo said. “He was an aristocrat, got caught up in French Revolution drama and publicly executed as a martyr. But he’s most famous now for his last words, which he spoke immediately upon reading his death warrant: I see that you have made three spelling mistakes.” He shook his head to himself, clearly still delighted. “Dude’s about to be offed and still it’s: I see that you have made three spelling mistakes. That’s Merritt. That’s Merritt exactly. It’s not about liking or not liking you.”
“Hmm,” Audrey said. Even if he had a point, she wasn’t convinced by it.
“And that moment between the two of you, out front, read beautifully on camera.”
Audrey didn’t know where to look, or even who to say this to, really, since they had apparently all been in on it. “I feel like such an idiot.”
“Honey, you’re not at all,” Caroline said.
“You’re not,” Bo said fast, swallowing his smirk. “How could you know? Look at all the people I recruited to pull it off.”
Audrey nodded. His explanation didn’t help much. She got conned. But also buried somewhere in there, if she was being honest with herself, she was intrigued by Bo the Magician explaining his tricks. And that curious part of her asked: “So was it worth it? Were we interesting?”
Gray had been looking at his phone. Now he looked up. “Yes. Decidedly.”
Bo took it from there. “I didn’t even know about whatever this Merritt/Harper thing is until last night. If it even is a thing. But I mean, couldn’t be better, really—and we’ve barely even stirred the pot.” He looked at Heather, practically winked at her. “I mean, better than stirring the pot: we haven’t even added the main ingredient.”
“Who’s the main ingredient?” Audrey asked. She felt like she’d lost her capacity to be surprised.
“Where’s the main ingredient,” Bo said. “Brookhants.”
She stared at him without changing her face.
He kept going. “I mean, I know I don’t need to tell Jules Coburn’s* offspring this, but part of the appeal for a lot of these real-deal horror nerds is the narrative of the curse surrounding the movie.” Bo was animated about this: big gestures, voice full of ambition and excitement. He was also clearly speaking from his wheelhouse. “You know, all the stories that leak from sets about how it felt like something supernatural kept interrupting production, because an evil force didn’t want the movie to get made. People eat that shit up.” He added, “Don’t get me wrong, I eat that shit up.”
“I think we have a little familial experience in that realm, huh?” Caroline said.
“I guess,” Audrey said. She still wasn’t ready to look at her mother.
Unsurprisingly, Gray and Noel now chimed in with their own additions. Location shoots in haunted places, chaos and calamity following particular actors or directors, movies in jeopardy and those never finished or those that perhaps shouldn’t have been (cue a Dracula cackle here): The Exorcist, The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, Poltergeist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, and of course, House Mother 2.*
It should be of no surprise that horror movies tend to collect more of these stories than other kinds of films, even though there are supposedly curses in other genres: The Wizard of Oz and Waterworld and even Superman (some of its earliest versions, anyway). However, it’s obviously scarier (contextually) for a movie about a ghost to supposedly have an authentic ghost on set, or for the devil to mess with a production about, say it with me, Readers: the devil. (Though surely not Mary MacLane’s Devil. That guy’s too busy being charming.)
“So how is this not just The Blair Witch Project, though?” Audrey asked. “Or Paranormal Activity? Or any of the other found-footage stuff?”
Heather laughed at that question with particular relish, though Audrey hadn’t intended it as pointed so much as genuine.
“Not you, too!” Bo groaned and leaned back in a huge stretch, his shirt riding up in front, which exposed a fold of fuzzy belly. He resituated himself, pulled his shirt back down, and said, “I mean, a lot of the recent found-footage stuff is tired, I hear you—shaky cam and a bunch of jump scares. But Blair Witch is the better analogue here anyway because of its meta making-a-movie thread. And listen, nobody loves Blair Witch more than me. I cut my teeth on that movie. I saw it six times. I mean, I’m talking back-in-the-day six times, like in a movie theater in a mall.”
“Only six?” Noel said.
Bo chucked a pad of Post-its at him. “I think it’s very fair to call it formative. OK? The Blair Witch Project will forever hold a formative place in my cinema psyche. But a crucial difference here, as you might recall, is that they’re only pretending to make the documentary about the witch in that movie. It’s not its own viable, stand-alone thing, it’s just part of the fictional plot—that witch is a fucking fake. We’ll actually be making our scripted movie based on a very real, nonfiction curse.” He picked up one of the sides from his desk and shook it around at them. “And we’ll be making it as a film that could hold its own were we asking it to. Flo and Clara will get their due. But while we’re doing that, we’re gonna do this other thing, too. And then my job is to figure out how to cut those things together without ruining either of them.”
“Or both of them,” Heather said.
“Always the champion for my cause,” Bo said.
“You should tell her what you mean by stir the pot,” Noel said rather solemnly. “I mean, what we’ve already done.”
“I was gonna do that, Noel,” Bo said. “Thank you.” He was still trying for affable, but it had just cracked. It was clear he didn’t especially love this guy telling him what to do, and probably wouldn’t have gone along so easily were he not in salesman mode. He ran his hand over his moustache a couple of times. “Listen, Brookhants will give us plenty to work with. I was out there a few months ago and it’s unreal how beautiful and enchanted, I guess, it is.” He glanced at Heather quickly, looked away. “Everywhere you point your camera, there’s something better to shoot.”
“But,” Noel said loudly.
Bo gave him a back off and let me do this look. “We will have a few things in place to get you three talking or reacting.” He sensed, rightly, that Audrey was bothered by this admission. She had stiffened into a starched-shirt posture.
“This will not be anything over the top, Audrey,” Bo added, like he thought he shouldn’t have to. “Nobody will be chasing you through the woods with a chain saw.”
“Just maybe with a cursed book,” Noel said.
“Dude,” Bo said. “Give it a rest a minute, yeah? I’ve got this. I don’t need you to do the subtitles.”
“You sure?”
Bo paused pointedly, staring hard at Noel with his mouth partially open and his shoulders pushed forward in a kind of boxer-at-a-post-weigh-in-press-conference hunch. When it seemed clear that Noel wasn’t going to chime in again, Bo relaxed and said to Audrey, “Think stuff like sound effects or props, you know, maybe we add some fog to the trees.”
“OK,” Audrey said, unsure.
Heather shook her head and said, “If we’re coming clean, let’s go the distance.” She smiled at Audrey like a parent attempting to explain away the bad behavior of their child. “Some of it will absolutely scare you, we hope. That’s the point. But it’s nothing that will put you in any kind of danger.”
“Of course not,” Bo said as if even the insinuation was distasteful.
“But it might feel really personal,” Noel said. “Especially because it will mean you’re never really alone when you think you’re alone. Not while you’re there.”
“Not true,” Bo said. “Bathrooms and bedrooms will be off-limits entirely.”
Audrey ignored Bo and looked at Noel, trying to decipher his meaning. Something in his expression made her understand without really understanding. “What did you do, Noel?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “They asked me, it wasn’t my idea.”
“I told him he had my blessing, honey,” Caroline said.
“Last night . . .” Audrey said, still knowing without knowing.
Noel half sang, “Whaaaaaat’s the ra-cket, yel-low ja-cket?”
“You’re an asshole,” she said. She shook her head, felt a blush rise up her neck.
“It’s just an app,” Noel said quickly. “It gave me remote access to your phone. I really thought you’d figure it out sooner.” As an afterthought, he added, “Gray asked me to do it.”
“I was only the messenger,” Gray said, his hands up.
“How did you do the yellow jackets?” Audrey asked, feeling stupid, just so stupid, but also relieved. “Oh my God—were you in our house? I thought I heard something but I couldn’t—”
“I wasn’t,” Noel said. “I swear to you. I wasn’t there. I installed the app to play the book—earlier, I mean, when I had your phone. I didn’t have anything to do with the yellow jackets.”
Even as Audrey looked in her mother’s direction, Caroline was already saying, “Me either, honey. None of us planned for the bugs. It was a fluke.”
“Or part of the curse,” Gray said.
“Wouldn’t that be something?” Bo said.
Audrey looked around his office, still trying to avoid eye contact. Again, there was that vintage House Mother poster of Caroline mocking her from the wall. She couldn’t let herself believe any of them, not right as they were admitting that they’d all been in on this together. Also, because a big part of her really wanted the yellow jackets in the sink to be just another piece of the setup.
“Wait, were you filming me last night, too?” She knew the answer and it was bad. This was all bad.
“Just with our own security cameras,” Caroline said, as if this was somehow not an invasion. “I didn’t let them add any others—I only shared the footage with him. That’s all.”
They had cameras in the living room, in the kitchen, one that caught the front yard, and another the driveway. Bo would have seen all the angles of her terror.
He seemed to sense that his pitch was getting off course. “Listen,” he said, “I know this is a ton to take in, but the thing to focus on here is that it worked, right? It was an effective method of eliciting a stellar performance.”
“I wasn’t performing,” Audrey said.
“Fair enough,” Bo said. “But now you know.”
“That it’s all fake, honey,” Caroline said.
“Exactly,” Bo said. “Just like anything else on a set. So, I mean, Heather’s right, you’ll still have moments of genuine fear, because you won’t know the specifics of what we have planned for you, but you won’t be, like, incapacitated by it because you’ll be in on the larger operation.”
“But you can’t let on that you are,” Heather said.
“Right,” Bo said. “That is the crux of it.”
“And you’re saying Harper and Merritt really don’t know?” Audrey said. “About any of this?”
“Not until after we wrap,” Bo said. “If we can keep it going for that long. Big if—knock on wood.” He actually rapped his knuckles on his desk.
“How is that even legal?” she asked. “I mean, is it?”
Heather took this one. She seemed very ready to. “Rhode Island allows for one-party consent in all video recordings unless they’re taken in places where a person can reasonably expect privacy—changing rooms, bathrooms, locker rooms.”
“So I would be that consent?” Audrey asked. “The one party?”
“No,” Bo said quickly. “That’s not—don’t look at it that way. We’re all getting recorded all the time, every day. Brookhants already has security cameras running 24/7, that’s before we even get there to add ours. Harper and Merritt will know eventually, Audrey—just not out the gate. We need to let things marinate out there a while.”
Audrey had piles of questions about how this could possibly work, how Harper’s contract could even allow for it and what it would look like in the day-to-day, how they could keep it a secret for so long—or if they should do such a thing, even if they could.
What were the ethics of being one of the magicians if you were doing tricks for people who didn’t know that they were not only at your show, they were in it? They were part of the act?
But that afternoon she asked only one of those questions. It was the question that had been blinking before her since Bo had started his explanation: “Why not pick Harper for this? She’s the better actor and the name.”
“Bingo,” Bo said. “That’s why it can’t be her.”
“Explain that to me.”
Bo was delighted to do so. “Because Harper’s natural, and somehow mostly endearing, instinct is to post every fucking thing that happens to her—which her fans want and expect her to do, by the way—and when she goes to make this movie some spooky shit is gonna happen to her. We’re banking on her sharing it. Harper’s our leak. And she can’t be in on the fix if she’s the leak. I mean she’s good, but she’s not that good.”
“I don’t know,” Heather said, “she might be that good.”
“But why risk it?” Bo said. “This way whatever she posts about what’s going on will be as authentic as anything on socials can be. Otherwise it would just be bought and paid for.”
“Isn’t that a distinction without a difference?” Noel said.
“Who even invited this guy?” Bo said. He was less aggressive than he’d been with Noel before, but he still said it not so much like he was kidding.
“You did,” Audrey said. She wasn’t kidding, either.
Bo went on to explain some of how they planned to pull this off: the hidden cameras and recording equipment strung up in all kinds of places, the plant and body mics, the video drones, the separate crew dedicated to following the three of them around in order to get behind-the-scenes footage that would end up being much more than that. Audrey tuned in and out of his explanation. She felt embarrassed and disappointed, but she didn’t feel this way entirely, or even predominately, because she’d been tricked.
Instead, it was because she felt like her original thoughts about all of this, about being asked to play Clara, had been validated. Of course they had never really wanted her to act in a serious dramatic role opposite Harper Harper. Of course she wasn’t actually good enough for Clara and Clara alone. They’d picked her because they thought she’d be desperate enough to be their pawn, the sucker stooge tasked with making sure the more important leads hit their marks in scenes they didn’t even know they were in. This was the rare case, she’d already decided, where being kept in the dark was preferable, where it meant that you were the more valuable party.
Audrey would have forty-eight hours to make her decision, per the agreement made as she and her group left Bo Dhillon’s bungalow that day. But—in the car on the way to her house, in the kitchen with takeout, Gray and Noel still tagging along, even as Noel scooped dan dan noodles with one hand and pulled up various examples of cinema verité on his phone with the other, and they all tried to voice the potential career benefits of taking the job—Audrey had her mind made up. She was a no. It was a pass. Put her in the back with Lily Strichtfield because this wasn’t the project for her. She even suggested, when Gray eventually said that he really had to be going, that they call Bo now and tell him no deal. Get it over with. She was that sure.
“At least sleep on it,” Gray said, waving his hand over the motorized trash can until the lid flipped open its plastic mouth. “You don’t have to take the full two days, but please at least sleep on it. It’s much too big an opportunity not to do at least that.” He’d started to dump his leftovers when Caroline sped over to stop him, taking the container right out of his hand. “I plan to recycle it, Caroline,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“Yeah, but we compost, too,” she said.
Audrey thought Gray looked rather pathetic in that moment, the trash lid smacking shut next to him, his shirt wrinkled, a dribble of sriracha down its front. She said, “Fine. I’ll sleep on it.” She had every intention of calling him the second she woke up to say, “Nothing’s changed—please tell them no.”
After Gray left, Audrey and Caroline and Noel settled outside on the patio furniture and rehashed it all again, around and back and over. It was impossible for Audrey, now sitting on the other side of the doors she’d had to will herself to close the night before, not to keep thinking of how frightened she’d been and how the two people sitting beside her had helped to pull it off.
“You’re totally sure it wasn’t anything other than the audiobook last night?” she asked. “Like maybe they put a fog machine out here or something? Or maybe Bo got somebody else to do the bugs if you two didn’t?”
“I really don’t think so, honey,” Caroline said. “It was a rushed deal—we weren’t planning this for weeks or anything.” She scrunched up her face—a move she used a lot in the House Mother movies—before asking, “Are you so mad that we helped him? I went back and forth and back and forth, but I didn’t want you to miss out on this because I wouldn’t do my part.”
“I am mad,” Audrey said. She waited a few moments before adding, “Which doesn’t mean I don’t get why you did it. Was the Lily Strichtfield thing fake, too?”
“No, I think she really did back out,” Noel said.
“Smart girl,” Audrey said.
“Maybe,” Caroline said. She hesitated, and then, “It’s an interesting concept, though—isn’t it? I mean I think it is. You’re not even a little bit curious to see how he puts it together?” Caroline didn’t sit still well. She was again out of her seat, pulling the patio table to the right, resituating its chairs. She was always staging things in the house to make them look more like the TV-renovation-reveal house she kept in her head.
“I don’t think it’s as interesting as he’s saying it is,” Audrey said. “Bo’s acting like he’s Orson Welles and he’s inventing some bold new cinematic approach. But he’s not.”
“Right?” Noel said. “I kept thinking that, too. Orson Welles is the perfect example, because he did shit like this ninety years ago.”
Caroline was now tossing and retossing the throw blankets onto the chaise longues so they looked more casual in their drape. As she let one flutter into place she asked, “Did shit like what?”
“I mean, not exactly, exactly the same,” Noel said, “but The War of the Worlds, right? That was a radio play before it was a movie, but they broadcast it like it was a news bulletin—they kept interrupting with these fake breaking news alerts. Didn’t some white people even call the police because they thought aliens were attacking?”
“Sounds like us,” Audrey said.
“Even if they did, that doesn’t seem like this to me at all,” Caroline said.
“Really, you can’t see it?” Audrey said.
“I think what Bo’s proposing is more like a William Castle move,” Noel said.
“Oh perfect,” Audrey said, “that guy.”
“Remind me,” Caroline said.
“You know him,” Audrey said. “Dad’s super into him.”
“He was king of the horror movie gimmick,” Noel said. “Especially if it broke the fourth wall. Involving the audience was Castle’s whole thing. So like for The Tingler, which was about this parasite that attached to your spine and fed on your fear, Castle had motors installed on the theater seats so that they shook during certain scenes. And he had this countdown clock come on the screen before the ending of Homicidal—which, like, gave people time to leave the theater before the final scene, if they were just too terrified to watch it. I mean, it was sort of dope in its day, I guess. Entertaining.”
“None of that stuff is really the same as this though, you guys,” Caroline said. She sounded annoyed. She’d moved on to turning the hand crank to raise and lower a striped shade umbrella so that it closed more neatly. “I think you’re both reaching.”
“Not that far a reach,” Noel said. “Bo’s just proposing a twenty-first-century version of it. Even if it’s something as simple as the opening of Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the narrator telling us that the film we’re about to see is the true account of a tragedy, it’s just part of the history of the genre to make the fiction onscreen seem as real as possible to the audience.”
“Yes, because it’s scarier that way,” Caroline said. “This is not a grand conspiracy.” Finally, she had the umbrella how she wanted it, and after one final chop to a throw pillow, she sat back down to survey her adjustments.
“I don’t know,” Audrey said. “In retrospect some of that stuff looks really corny. Castle was like a schlock director. That’s not at all what I thought this movie was supposed to be. I doubt Harper Harper does, either.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t add up, either, does it?” Noel asked. “If she’s producing? She knows something about this. She has to.”
“I don’t know,” Audrey said. “He was so adamant that she doesn’t but—”
“But why would you believe him?” Noel asked. “I mean, why believe him about anything now?”
“That’s a really broad brush you’re both painting with,” Caroline said. “Bo Dhillon isn’t William Castle. He’s not a used car salesman.” She was tracing her chin scar with her fingertips as she turned to Audrey. “We both thought Big Yard, Quiet Street* was so great. Remember? Just original and weird and so good. And you told me Aimee Barambo loved working with him on Five Blocks*—said she’d do it again, first chance she got. And look what that movie did for her.”
“Five Blocks wasn’t like this. It wasn’t built around a gimmick.”
“That’s your word for what he’s trying to do,” Caroline said. “I hardly think it’s Bo’s.”
“I mean, everything about making a narrative film is a gimmick, though, right?” Noel said. “It’s all make-believe meant to trick you into investing in it. Or rejecting the act of investment for one of analysis or abrasion.”
“I don’t need you to be the Kind Devil’s advocate here, Noel,” Audrey said. “You’ve already done that part.”
“He’s right, though, honey,” Caroline said. “That’s all it ever is. Some of the gimmicks are just more subtle.”
“So you both apparently think I should do it, then? This is your endorsement.”
Noel shrugged as Caroline said, “What matters is if you want to do it or not. I just don’t think you should base your decision on a Bo Dhillon track record that doesn’t actually exist.”
“That’s fair,” Noel said.
“I also don’t know why you wouldn’t do it,” Caroline said, standing and immediately turning to wipe invisible wrinkles out of the cushion she’d just been sitting on.
“Really, you don’t,” Audrey said. “After today, you don’t.”
“Yes, really—it’s incredible. It’s an incredible opportunity. Two great parts in one movie made by a real horror auteur.” She threw up her hands. “But you have to want it, not me.”
Her mom was already halfway to the kitchen to look for something sweet when Audrey noticed the folded bit of paper on the seat next to her. It had fallen out of Caroline’s pocket. Audrey used her fingertips to unfold its tiny folds. It was a torn piece of envelope with writing in blue ballpoint: Don’t wait. Your life is now, today.
Audrey looked up from the note to find Noel watching her. She passed it to him, carefully—it was so small that it wouldn’t take much wind to carry it off. He read it and said, “She’s better than a fortune cookie.” He handed the note back.
Audrey worried the paper between her thumb and pointer finger, rolling it into a scroll. “When they delivered her dry-cleaning last week there was a sandwich bag of these stuck over the hangers with a note that said they’d taken them out of the pockets and weren’t sure if we still wanted them or not. There were like a dozen.”
“Did she still want them?”
“I don’t know,” Audrey said. “I hung the whole stack in her closet. She didn’t say anything about it to me. For all I know, this could be one of those they sent back in the baggie.”
“If it works, work it,” Noel said.
Audrey smiled at him. “I’m mad at you.”
“I know.”
“Do I do this movie, Noel?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I can see all the ways it could be total shit. I mean, like, for you, on set, but also just as a film. A fucking mess. Like, worst-case scenario, it’s what—one of those ghost hunter reality shows on cable meets gay period piece?”
“Yes,” she said. “In other words: a thing which no one wants.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“What?”
“I just don’t think the guy’s suddenly a hack, either. That doesn’t make sense. And Caroline’s right that his body of work doesn’t bear it out.” He started to say something else, but changed to, “Do you think you’ll regret it if you do it?”
“Right now all I can see are regrets lined up in both directions—regrets for yes and regrets for no.” She made herself ask, “Why do you think he wants me for this? Really?”
“Part of it is because you’re scream queen royalty,” Noel said without hesitation. “To pretend otherwise is stupid. He has to market the thing.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“But I also think it’s because Bo thinks you can do it. He trusts you to deliver both badass Clara Broward and also Audrey Wells, normcore actress-next-door. That is part of it.”
She wasn’t so sure she believed him on this point.
“That’s part of it, Aud,” he said again. “I’m sorry I fucked with your phone and lied about it.”
“Me too,” she said.
“You forgive me?”
“Not yet.”
He nodded. “What about now?”
He went home soon after. Audrey lingered outside in the red wash of sunset and fire haze, chewing on that slip of paper from her mom’s pocket, its sentiment bleeding blue onto her gums. She’d taken Caroline up on her offer to go buy them slices of coconut cake from a vegan bakery they both liked, so now it was only her, alone again and tired and reconsidering her last twenty-four hours, wet axiom mash in her molars.
And then Bo was calling. Audrey thought about not answering, but she did.
As soon as she picked up, like in that moment, he said all of the following: “I think we somehow got too bogged down in the bullshit this afternoon. That’s my fault and I’m sorry. I was trying to save face, and because of that I didn’t do a very good job of explaining why I need to make this movie this way and why I need you in it. Can I try again now?”
“OK,” she said, trying to decide if he sounded sincere or like he was just trying hard to sound sincere.
“So when I was figuring out what to say when I called you”—he was rustling paper around, Audrey could hear that clearly on her end—“I wrote some notes. I was actually gonna send you an email but that seemed cowardly. I’ve got stuff here about docufiction and pseudo documentary and meta horror. I can give you my thesis on the flaws and successes of films like Berberian Sound Studio and Lake Mungo—or we could skip it.”
“Skip it,” Audrey said. “I was just talking to Noel about all of that. Sort of.”
“That guy knows things,” Bo said. He seemed almost nervous.
“He does,” Audrey said. “And he thinks your concept is kind of tired.”
“He’s wrong,” Bo said. Any nervousness—feigned or real—was gone with those two words. “But that’s at least half my fault. Probably more. Listen, I’m pretty sure the problem here lies in euphemisms. I can tell you that Brookhants is special, or has an energy, or is fucking, what—touched or whatever I said earlier. But I’m only doing any of that to avoid saying the word haunted. And I’m not doing it anymore. I think Brookhants is haunted, Audrey. I experienced that when I was there. I swear, I even felt the breath of it when I was reading about it after I left. And I am not some crystal-carrying believer in the paranormal. I don’t give a shit about ghost hunters or séances or whatever. I don’t read my horoscope even though I’d get some real points with my husband if I did. Brookhants is haunted. You can feel that, I mean, like, in your marrow feel it, when you go there. You will feel it.”
He paused, maybe to take a drink of something. Then he was right back in it. “OK, so now’s the part where you don’t laugh. OK?”
“OK,” she said.
“This is you promising?”
“This is me promising,” she said.
“OK. When I was there a few months ago, I went out to the orchard to shoot a little and take photos. There were other people with me—Nick Woodyard, you know him, right, our production designer—and Heather was there, too. But they were still back in the buildings on campus and I was alone when I got to the orchard, which is through the woods and in this clearing where, like, the trees finally open up to sky again. It’s this spring afternoon, warm day. I’ve got my jacket off. I’m looking around, sun on my face and feeling good, shooting this and that—and then it’s like somebody starts lowering a black shade down over my vision. I know how that sounds”—he hurried his speech even more, as if he anticipated her interruption—“but it wasn’t like I just felt some indistinct ghostly presence. And I definitely didn’t see a pair of rotten-faced dead girls in ratty dresses. It was like a blackness was laid over that orchard—and this was on a beautiful, sunny fucking afternoon with fucking apple blossoms blowing around—but I started shivering and, like, tunnel-visioning on the weird fungus climbing up the tree trunks, and this, like, guts-exploded dead robin on the ground near me that was covered in maggots. Probably those things had already been there when I arrived, but now it was like they were the place. Does that make sense? And there was this really messed-up buzzing underneath it all, too—like it was coming from banks of fluorescent lights.”
Audrey knew the sound exactly.
“It wasn’t that anything had actually changed about the orchard, I don’t think. It was that something in that place made me see the orchard differently. It, like, infected me—it got in me. And it got in the photos,” he said, excited, like he was just remembering that detail. “I mean, not like fucking orbs or whatever dumb proof people try to show in photographs of haunted places. This thing, this, like, creeping blackness, it changed the way I looked through my camera. It made me take these dark, really messed-up pictures. It didn’t, like, add anything bad to the scene, you get what I’m saying? It made me the bad thing in the scene—like the conduit or something.”
He paused again, took another drink.
“I wanted to get out of there. Like, I felt bad and sort of scared of myself, and I wanted to go find people and not be alone, but then when I walked back into the woods, almost as soon as I did, the trees were just trees again. I, like, snapped back into myself. But I felt alive, too. Really alive. It was that feeling you get when you’re a kid and you finally come up for air after holding your breath for too long in the deep end of a pool, but now you’ve got, like, that chlorine burn in your nose and at the back of your throat and you made it up and out—you can breathe, go get a popsicle from your friend’s mom or whatever. I ran, like for real ran, back to campus to get everybody to show them, but then when I went back to the orchard with Nick and Heather, I couldn’t make it happen again. And it didn’t ever happen for them while we were there. Or me either. Not again.”
Audrey wasn’t going to say anything in response to this, but it seemed like Bo thought that she was and decided he needed to get in a defense, quick. “But it did happen once. Brookhants is haunted. That’s what I believe. And it’s also the thing I couldn’t bring myself to say earlier today, which I’m sorry about. And Heather is, too—because she was expecting me to do it and I chickened out. I’m still trying to figure out how to, like, come out as believing in this stuff. It’s so fucking embarrassing. I mean, I make horror movies. I’m supposed to know better.”
“People believe in all kinds of things,” she said.
“Yeah and mostly we judge them for it.”
“I believe you,” she said. She wasn’t sure that she did. She wasn’t even sure that he believed—or that there was anything to believe. She just wasn’t sure.
“But . . .” Bo filled the word in for her.
“I still don’t feel like that explains why you have to keep it a secret from Merritt and Harper. Why not tell them this too, like you’re telling me?”
“Because I don’t want three performances,” Bo said. “I want three people having the kind of experience I had without acting like they are.”
“Yeah, but now I know,” Audrey said. “So how does that even work?”
“Well, you will have to give the performance of your lifetime,” Bo said. “That’s what this is: a chance for you to do that with a project worthy of it.” There was no humor in his voice.
“Oh right,” she said. “Just that.”
He spoke quickly again, now fully in pitch mode. “Audrey, listen, break it down with me: Merritt isn’t even an actor, right, so if I did tell her, I’d have to worry about what we’d get from her. She’d be on the whole time—like way on, super conscious of how she was coming across.”
Audrey thought this was probably true, and might have conceded that, but Bo kept going. “But the much bigger concern is that I don’t think Merritt would even agree to do this. In fact, I’m sure she wouldn’t. Which means I have to film first and ask permission later. Once I have a movie to show her, she’ll come around. I know she will. She’s smart, she’s got taste. She’ll respond to the art, even if she balks at the process it took to get it. And I’m willing to sort that out when I have to, because I think she’s gonna lend something crucial to this that we wouldn’t have without her. Especially now, with whatever’s maybe going on between the two of them.”
“OK, fine—even if all that’s true about Merritt: why not Harper?”
“Yeah, so Harper could probably deliver, even if she did know. But what I said earlier about her as influencer is true and we need that—we need her posting every goddamn minute about how haunted Brookhants is. And I still think those posts will be better if they’re coming from someone who doesn’t know that there’s any reason to doubt her experiences as authentic.”
“Or doubt the people she’s having them with,” Audrey said.
“I knew that was your hang-up,” Bo said. “I said it to Heather. You don’t want to be the one conning them, right?”
“It’s a pretty major invasion of their privacy,” Audrey said. “Not even just invasion—exploitation. I mean, it’s gross. I know the whole time and they don’t and we’re all tricking them into being scared and filming that? It’s really fucked up.”
“You get out there, you’re gonna see for yourself that this isn’t a trick. It’s not about it being a trick. I wouldn’t be doing this if it was.”
“But you’re making it a trick,” she said. “You are doing it. What really happened to Lily Strichtfield?”
“I can assure you that hers was not a moral objection. Don’t think she took some phony high road and so you have to, too.”
“I think she decided she didn’t want to be the one who sold everybody else out.”
“Not it at all,” Bo said. “You’re wrong. She got scared. She was in until I told her about what happened to me in the orchard. Then she looked the place up and read Merritt’s book and it was a deal breaker for her. Apparently, she’s already a big believer in ghosts. She said—and I quote—I don’t fuck with that stuff.”
“Maybe I don’t, either.”
“OK,” he said. Then he waited like he was expecting her to say more.
She didn’t.
“Listen,” he said. “I have no idea how you personally feel about ghosts. I’d love to hear more if you want to tell me. What I do know is that I made a mess of it this afternoon and so I thought, fuck it, Heather is right: coming clean is the only way. You’re in or you’re not—with all of it. It’s gonna be too many moving parts when we get out there for me not to just cop to it all now.”
“You said this afternoon that I’d know for sure that anything happening to us was fake,” Audrey said. “Like, that it would only be practical effects to get our reaction. But now you’re saying the opposite. You’re saying it’s really haunted.”
“Yeah.”
“So which is it?”
“Both,” he said. “It could be both.”
“Cool.”
“Listen, that’s the truth,” he said. “It’s me playing my one Brookhants hand to my every advantage. I don’t see any other way to approach this.”
“Then how do you know for sure it’s not dangerous out there?”
“I guess I don’t,” he said. “But I do know we’ll have eyes on you guys pretty much every second you’re there. Unless you’re in the bathroom.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t make me feel better.”
He groaned. “For real now, Audrey. Doesn’t any of this sound even a little bit fun?”
“No.”
“Really?” he said. “I mean, I can put on my serious director voice and tell you that you’ll never get another opportunity like this again, but I’d rather lead with our collective sense of wonder. Just step back for a minute from all this minutia about who knows what and consider this: we’ll be out there in New England on the ocean, start of fall, telling curse stories in the haunted woods. I mean, what could possibly be more glorious than that? Don’t life experiences count for anything anymore?”
“I don’t have to go to Rhode Island and lie to a bunch of people in order to have life experiences.”
Bo laughed. “Now you sound like Merritt.”
“She does it much better than I do.”
“I know!” he said, still laughing. “This is why we need her. And hey, and I really don’t mean to hard sell you with this—”
“Yes you do,” she said.
“Yes I do,” he said. “I was talking with Heather and we were thinking it might be something if your mom played Clara’s mom. I mean, it’s like one scene, you know, but the wink of it—you as Clara, your mom as your mom—it might . . .” His words drifted off, his attention clearly grabbed elsewhere. “Ho-leeeee fuck—I think we just got our confirmation that Harper and Merritt are a real thing. Or a thing that kisses, anyway.”
“What?” Audrey was still trying to process the offer he’d maybe just made to cast her mom as Mrs. Broward. He had made it, hadn’t he? Caroline would flip. She’d be so excited.
“Go to Twitter,” Bo said. “They’re trending.”
“I’m not on Twitter.”
“Yeeeeah, but I bet you know how to get there.”
She went. She watched a few versions of Harper and Merritt happily kissing while encircled by fans and paparazzi, Bo offering commentary as he continued to watch from his own screen.
They kissed like it was the only thing in the world for them to be doing in that moment and they were both so totally into that. They kissed like they knew the world would soon be watching them on repeat, and they had two middle fingers and two sets of thumbs up for those viewers. They kissed like they were entirely oblivious to what had just gone down at Bo’s house, this weird and confusing and messy movie project that had now been the centerpiece of Audrey’s own past twenty-four hours.
They kissed and they kissed on a loop.
The anger and envy their seeming obliviousness kindled in Audrey was not at all rational, but there it was, smoking away in the pit of her stomach. And it was this, Readers, that ultimately changed her mind. Bo’s reasoning, his ghost story, his hard sell had helped, no question, though she doubted any of it would have been enough on its own. But now paired with this—
“OK,” she said. She gave him the credit even if it wasn’t entirely deserved: “I think you might have convinced me.”
“I did?” He sounded unsure. “Really?”
“I think so,” she said. “My mom will be so, like—she’ll be beside herself to do this. I know she will.”
“It’s a cameo, Audrey. Caroline can’t be the only reason you say yes.”
“She’s not. I—it’s not about her. I have a lot of questions. I want you to please tell me everything you just told me again, even your orchard story. I’ll probably want to hear it a lot more times after today, too.”
“Sure,” he said. “Right now?”
“Yes, if you have time,” she said. “Explain it all again. How it’s going to go.”
“But, just to be clear, you’re saying you’re in for the whole thing, you and Clara both?” Bo asked. “I want confirmation of your total commitment, here.”
“Yes.”
“OK, so let me tell you the deal about Brookhants,” Bo started. He started again. He told her everything again. And more.
And while she listened, Audrey watched that clip of Merritt and Harper kissing again and again and again.