How to Import a Martian into Your Contacts

Merritt and Elaine were in first class on an airplane bound for LAX. Merritt had never flown first-class before, had never been to Los Angeles or even California. Elaine had done those things more times than she could remember. (But in this case, it was the studio flying them and so that was new to them both.)

Merritt had been asked to come to LA to consult on a range of things related to the production. She’d had, at that point, one pleasant enough conference call with its director, Bo Dhillon (a man Elaine had once referred to, admiringly, as Hitchcock’s progeny. Because, well, Elaine). But Merritt hadn’t yet formed much of an opinion on him. She thought his body of work stylish and smart, for horror movies, anyway. (Not really her genre.) And, like most everyone else, she loved that once-viral red carpet clip of him, early in his career, when he’d managed to simultaneously come out and rib a reporter for mistaking him for M. Night Shyamalan: “No, I know, can you even believe there’s two different Indian American dudes who make creepy movies? It’s crazy, right? Two of us! For future reference, I’m the gay one.”

But consult is a baggy and nebulous term people use to mean many, many things. Merritt still wasn’t at all sure what it meant when applied to what she was supposed to be doing for this movie.

What Elaine was doing for The Happenings at Brookhants was nominally more defined. She was, for the first time in her eighty years, the executive producer of a film. As far as Merritt could discern, thus far being an executive producer meant that Elaine wrote checks and got other people to write checks. And, of course, had opinions. And writing checks, getting other people to write checks, and having opinions were three things Merritt had always associated with Elaine, since long before her days in film production.

Almost as soon as their plane lifted from the runway in Boston, Elaine had opened the vent, lowered the window shade, and taken a green silk sleep mask from her handbag.

“Keeping to your schedule, travel be damned?” Merritt asked her. Recently she’d noticed that Elaine often disappeared to nap for several hours in the afternoon. Or at least Elaine did this when Merritt was at Elaine’s house in Rhode Island.

“There is more refreshment and stimulation in a nap, even of the briefest, than in all the alcohol ever distilled.” Elaine pulled the mask’s elastic strap behind her head.

“From whom did you steal that?” Merritt asked.

“Ovid.”

“Oh, that drunk?”

Elaine smiled as she pulled the mask down over her eyes and settled back against her headrest.

“Well you look the part, anyway,” Merritt said.

“I’m told that’s more than half the battle.”

Now Elaine had been asleep for an hour and Merritt had read the first half of Less Than Zero. She’d been working her way through a list of novels set in and around Los Angeles. She felt that there was something too obvious about this exercise, too deliberate, but she had to try something. She was hoping to be inspired, and somewhere over Illinois she thought maybe she was on the verge of that, so she left Ellis’s coked-up characters at yet another house party in the Hollywood Hills and pulled out her laptop and opened her book file.

She was met with the cursor blinking at the end of a note she’d left herself the last time she’d opened this file:

Answered Prayers Answered is a terrifically stupid title. So, so dumb.

You don’t know how to write this book. You don’t even know if you should write this book. Certainly no one else is here for it. It might be wise to accept these as things that meaningfully indicate how unwise this idea is.

Do better!

Love,

your pal Merritt

She highlighted the note and deleted it. Then she stared at her ghost reflection in her now-blank screen. She had to pee, but the light-up thing showed someone was in the bathroom and another person was already standing in the aisle outside it, too.

She closed the file and logged into the plane’s slow WiFi in order to google imposter syndrome. She read six articles, one leading into the next into the next. She did not feel soothed or seen by these articles, not even the one titled: “Your Imposter Syndrome Is Real as Fuck. Now What Are You Going to Do About It?”

Especially not by that one.

Elaine made a kind of gulping noise in her sleep. It was loud and startled not only Merritt, but some of the passengers around them. Then she made another, this one a high gasp.

Worse than these noises was Elaine’s face when Merritt took in its measure: her nostrils flared and her mouth in a twitching grimace, her top lip drawing back to expose a few teeth, including a fang, before sliding down again to hide them. Her teeth were the color of old plaster and they sprouted from gums too red and wet. Had they always looked like this, Elaine’s teeth? The mask covering her eyes emphasized her mouth, made it seem like her whole face.

Elaine made another strangled noise.

Merritt thought she saw . . . What had Elaine been eating in the airport, trail mix? Or was it . . . Because she thought she saw—

Elaine’s mouth opened, her fang was revealed, a low growl blew out her twitching lips, and yes—Merritt looked closer, could feel Elaine’s sour breath on her face—she had something black stuck up on her red gums, some piece of nut or seed it must be, a black shard.

Had she been eating trail mix in the airport? Merritt couldn’t remember.

The people across the aisle were plainly staring now. A woman with so many large rings on her fingers stage-whispered to her seatmate: “She’s really having trouble.”

Merritt did not want to be the person in charge of this moment but who else would do it?

“Lainey?” She forced herself to touch Elaine’s shoulder, at first with only her fingertips and then with her whole hand, not gripping so much as applying pressure. “Elaine?” She pressed harder.

Elaine was wearing a thin sweater and her skin and bones beneath it felt soft, insubstantial. Merritt pulled Elaine’s shoulder back and forth a few times, worried that she’d do damage even with so slight a move. She’d never had a reason to touch Elaine like this. She’d had no idea Elaine was so frail. Elaine did not wake, but her face eased and her mouth stopped twitching. Her teeth and horrible red gums stayed hidden. As did the black shard stuck there.

“She’s fine,” Merritt said out loud to herself. If the people in the seats across the aisle thought she’d said it for them, then whatever.

She closed her laptop and put it away. She used her phone to check her feeds and soon enough found herself back on Harper Harper’s Instagram. Harper had just, minutes before, posted a story from the flight out of Montana she was on with her girlfriend—a doublie of the two of them snuggled together, both wearing white T-shirts with Gal Pal in black letters across the front, both looking rumpled and cozy for airplane seats. The caption: So cute together it’s .

It felt out-of-body to be looking at that post while on her way to meet this person, both of them in their separate airplanes hurtling through the sky to the same location: Hollywood.

The last time Merritt had enjoyed talking about The Happenings at Brookhants at all, the last time she hadn’t felt wholly like a fake, had been with Harper Harper. And the fact that that was even a thing, that she, Merritt Emmons, had had conversations plural with Harper Fucking Harper was preposterous.

Harper had first reached out three months ago via text, one that arrived unannounced and unanticipated. It just showed up on Merritt’s phone like a signal from an alien planet that she alone had received. (Would hearing directly from a Martian really be any stranger?)

Merritt had gone to campus with her mother that day so she could work in its library. She’d checked out yet another biography of Capote and found a place at a long table to skim an article about his Black and White Ball, a lavish masquerade party he hosted at the Plaza Hotel in New York in the 1960s.^* The intensity of Capote’s vindictiveness was usually so tantalizing to her, but she was bothered by the group of students near her studying for an astronomy exam. She was also bothered by the graduate student—she assumed it was a graduate student, an older student, at any rate—on the chair near the windows who had nodded at her when they’d met eyes looking up from their texts. It was a nod that said I see you—we see each other, here with our books. But Merritt didn’t want to be seen. It made her feel conspicuous, set apart rather than included. Three years before, when she was at the height of her notoriety as wunderkind writer, she’d tried a semester at college, a different one. Supposedly a better one. Tried and failed. She’d dropped out and come home and hadn’t ever gone back. And now she felt like a cheat, an interloper, hanging around this one. (Especially because her mother taught there.)

These students in pairs and clusters, or alone with their headphones and laptops—one of them near her in a fucking U of sweatshirt drinking a green smoothie like she’d been posed by a recruiter to do so—each made Merritt feel this with a greater intensity. They weren’t doing a thing to her, likely they didn’t even notice her save for that one by the window, but they made her itchy and damp in her armpits. She felt rankled by their laughter, their plans to go here or there after class, their homework chatter. In this moment, she hated them.

She got up from the table and went to hide out in the stacks for a while, alone. On the way, her phone buzzed in her jacket pocket. When she pulled it out she saw she had a text from an unknown sender with a 406 area code. She had no idea where that was. She read the message.

This is Harper Harper. You probably know by now that I’ll be playing Flo in your movie. (I hope you do!) I asked Bo for your number so that I could call with some questions I have about her. This is me texting to see if it’s alright with you if I do that. Think you can spare a few minutes for an actor trying to get it right?

(reckoned I’d go to the black hole of voice mail if I didn’t ask first)

Merritt read the text again and again. She looked over her shoulder and through the stacks to the surrounding rows to see if anyone was watching. Something about receiving it made her feel like she was on camera. But there was no one around.

She read it again.

Harper Harper (if this was really her) had texted the word reckoned. Also, she’d written your movie when they both knew calling it that was like pretending the Weather Channel was in charge of a hurricane. And if it wasn’t her, if it was maybe some assistant who’d written it, well, why write it like this? What was the angle?

Merritt typed out a response. Deleted it. Tried another. Deleted that one, too. She thought it would almost certainly look thirsty to respond right away but she also had some sense (or hope) that just then Harper Harper was somewhere in the world looking at her phone and awaiting Merritt’s answer.

She settled on this:

Hi. I’m very glad that Harper Harper is playing Flo in the movie but of course I have no way of knowing that you’re her. For all I know you’re just some undergrad who got my number from my mother because she thinks I should make more of an effort to connect with people my own age.

The reply came in seconds.

Bwaahahahahaha. Just a sec and I’ll prove it

Merritt waited, her blood whirring with anticipation, which she told herself was not embarrassing because it was just the uncontrollable thing her body was doing in this moment. She was tired of being embarrassed by the things her body did or did not do without her conscious input in the decision.

And then her phone lit up with a new text. This one was a pic of Harper Harper, the Harper Harper, in tight white jeans and a loud, black-and-pink, palm-tree-printed bomber jacket over a cropped T-shirt. She was grinning her signature grin beneath one of the many slouchy beanies Merritt had seen her photographed in many times before. But the crucial items in the photograph were the two things she was holding up in front of her—a copy of Merritt’s book, dozens of page marker flags sticking out from its edge, and a handwritten sign:

You should really make more of an effort to connect with people your own age.

Damn. Merritt liked her too much already. Already she did. For several moments she thought about what to respond with and then texted:

You’ve sufficiently convinced me (killer jacket) but I’m in a library at the moment and it’s no place for talking. Could you call me in an hour when I’ve had the chance to get back to my house?

Harper’s yes please! reply came while Merritt was already texting her mother to tell her that she was going home and she’d see her there. She ran-walked the two miles or so, her head full of a new appreciation for the spring-green trees spreading their limbs overhead, this even though she and her mother had just driven under them on the way to campus. That short trip ago she’d felt nothing at all for these same trees.

She arrived home with enough time to make herself lemon-honey tea and settle in with her laptop on the porch swing, something her father had installed in the weeks before he killed himself. It was uncomfortable to Merritt when she considered how readily she now marked time this way, how every event in her history seemed to plant itself only in proximity to his suicide. She’d gotten her hair cut the day before he did it. That big limb fell from the sycamore in the backyard two weeks after he’d done it. He had taken her flea-marketing three weekends before he’d done it. (They’d bought the moth-chewed Hudson’s Bay blanket with the colored stripes.)

That porch swing was really just another of her father’s mostly unsuccessful attempts to make their imposing Victorian seem cozy and welcoming, which he never quite had. But now it was also somehow linked to the chain of his death, linked to the other thing he’d done. The forever thing.

After Merritt discovered her father dead in their garage, after that gaping wound of a thing, Merritt and her mother had tried to see if they could maybe talk their way into—well, if not understanding it—at least getting a handle on how they felt about it.

This was what the therapists they saw had recommended, and they’d both tried, really tried, to do what was asked of them. They had talked about it in support groups and individually with therapists, and also the two of them together with therapists, and together without therapists, in offices and in the car on the way to places, on stools at their kitchen island, even on this very porch swing. They’d spoken about their guilt over not recognizing some warning sign that his depression had deepened so acutely. And then about how there just aren’t always signs, at least not great blinking arrows that say BEWARE NOW, SAVE HIM FROM HIMSELF—and that yes, yes, he had been happy and kidding around with everyone at the barbeque the weekend before he’d done it. They agreed on that. He certainly seemed happy. There was a Facebook post with him holding corn on the cob and grinning, wasn’t there?

They also talked about Merritt’s mother’s guilt that Merritt had been the one to find him that day. Merritt had been dropped off early when an after-school event had been canceled at the last minute. And Merritt felt guilty about that, too. She somehow felt guilt even on behalf of her father, who surely assumed her mother would be the one to find him, though would that really have been better? Different, yes, but better? They talked about their anger at him, oh it burned hot, and their sadness for him, and their anger at themselves. They talked about the person he’d been, how he’d been with each of them, and how they shouldn’t let the memory of his death eclipse all the other memories they had of him. They talked about grief, how thick a fog it could be, how hard to see or even to imagine anything beyond it. They used a lot of metaphors and analogies: the ecosystem of grief, the journey of grief, the black box of grief.

And maybe some of this had made them feel better for a while.

But then this other thing happened where, because they’d done all that talking at the time, it felt like they’d used up their allotted words on the subject and it would somehow be wrong to now use more. There was, of course, a hideous hole where her father had once been, but the strange part was that it was hard not to feel like somehow they had contributed to making that hole. Because even now, five—could it really be five?—years later, she didn’t actually feel all that much better about it. Not really—not enough—but what could possibly be left to say on the subject?

Whatever it was, they weren’t saying it to each other anymore.

There on her father’s porch swing, Merritt imported Harper’s number, or at least the number Harper had texted from, into her contacts and paired it with a sexy pic of Harper she’d pulled off the internet. That small act made Merritt feel powerful. She thought that was probably worth examining later as potentially pathetic, but for now she relished the feeling. And then a neighbor drove by and honked hello at her. And then there was an incoming call: Harper Harper on her screen.

Merritt felt her heart wind up again, staring at the image, her phone buzzing. She thought about letting the call go unanswered. She thought about this for long enough that she could tell Harper was surprised to hear her answer.

“Well hey,” Harper said back in that kind of countrified affectation Merritt had heard in her movies—all of which she’d watched by then. I mean, there were only three of them at that point if you didn’t count Harper’s fifty-four-second cameo in that superhero universe one, and Merritt did not. “I thought maybe I’d scared you off.”

“Takes more than that,” Merritt said. “Where’s four-oh-six?”

“What’s that, now?”

“Four-oh-six—your area code?”

“Oh shit, yeah, it’s Montana. I never changed it on this phone. I like the reminder.”

“Reminder of?” Merritt asked as she pushed back on the porch swing until she was on her tiptoes and could feel the strain of the swing’s chains. She stayed like this, the swing wedged behind her, feet planted. She didn’t want to let go yet.

“Where I come from, I guess. God, does that sound really simplistic?”

“No,” Merritt said.

“I don’t know—”

“So there were way too many page markers sticking out of my book in that picture you sent,” Merritt said, cutting her off. “Please tell me that each of those doesn’t stand for a question you have for me.”

Harper laughed. “Almost,” she said. “I mean, pretty much.”

They talked for more than an hour that afternoon. Eventually, Merritt used her laptop to scroll through pics of Harper, posts about her, while they spoke. It made the whole exercise that much more surreal. Here’s Harper Harper on a screen, looking Garbo glamorous in a slick white suit. But also, here’s the folksy Harper Harper on the phone with her, asking her about Flo’s relationship with her mother.

She’d done her homework, like she said. She’d read Merritt a passage from The Happenings at Brookhants and then ask about it. At first, Merritt thought she just wanted pointers, her thoughts about how Flo might sit or gesture or eat a piece of fudge. Eventually, though, she seemed to want to talk more about these girls as girls—about who Flo and Clara were (in real life, she kept saying) and how, through her research, Merritt had come to know them. Harper seemed especially interested in what boarding school or college life would have really been like for young women of Flo and Clara’s day. That was one of her words: really.

Also: typically.

Also: commonly. She kept emphasizing these words to make her point.

“OK, but c’mon,” Harper said after Merritt had spent several minutes telling her all about the Brookhants yearbooks Merritt had gotten from Elaine and their chronicles of various girls-only dances and girl-girl Valentine’s Day events. “Be real with me—what about all the stuff about the courting rituals or whatever? With the lockets of hair and everything?”

“You’re saying you don’t give your admirers lockets of your hair?”

“Not recently, no.”

“You should start. I think it would be very well received—at least until you ran out of it.”

“Stop with the jokes,” Harper said. “Answer my question.”

“What even is your question?”

“I’m just trying to get, like, a baseline of what was expected of these girls then. I know how it happens in your book, but I mean, so, like, lots of girls were openly crushing on each other and making a thing of it, not hiding it? Like, was it typical to act like this while away at school? For most girls—not just Brookhants girls? Or was there something in the water there?”

Online, Merritt had landed on a Harper Harper fan Tumblr (one of many)—fuckyeahharperharper—and was watching a GIF of her settling in for an interview, just some random footage captured while they were setting up.

The whole of it is Harper turning toward someone off camera and grinning her signature grin while simultaneously tucking some hair behind her ear. Then a hand, an arm, slips into the shot and clips a microphone to her collar. That’s the GIF, the whole thing—Harper grinning and tucking and being mic’d, grinning and tucking and being mic’d, grinning and tucking and . . . forever. This particular incarnation had 23,266 notes. It also had a string of attached commentary.

“Hello?” Harper said.

Merritt had been momentarily gifnotized. She pulled out of it and said, “They had the best slang for it back then. Much better than ours: smashes. Spoons.”

“I mean we do use smash,” Harper said, sounding even through the phone like she was smiling that particular smile of hers. Merritt had seen so much of this same face in her internet searching that she’d already begun to think of it as HRF—Harper Resting Face.

“Not quite the same intentionality. Not ‘I want to smash this girl.’ More like ‘I’m smashed on this girl.’”

“I get it,” Harper said. “But, like, how many spoons were there, though?”

“Oh my God, you’re not gonna let this go,” Merritt said. “Young women elaborately crushing on each other, especially while away from their families for the first time, all grouped together at these schools out in the middle of nowhere, cut off from all other social spheres while they came of age romantically and physically, emotionally, was exactly as common an occurrence as I made it seem in the book. I’m talking typical, your word, for, like, I don’t know—what, you want a fake number? How about sixty-five percent of a given student body? Probably more.”

“No way,” Harper said.

“Yes way,” Merritt said. “But also, it was largely seen as, like, emotion for emotion’s sake—or worse, some romantic ideal, like playacting courtly love. Also, it was understood as something these girls would absolutely put aside once men were again in sight. It was, like, campus tradition, not personal defect.”

“It’s still kind of bananas to think of, though,” Harper said. “Way back then? I mean, not to be too modern or whatever, but it all seems pretty fucking queer to me.”

“Sure,” Merritt said, “if you were a well-to-do WASP from New England whose parents sent you off to school and you wanted to experience a few years of probably chaste but intense romantic courtship before you ended up marrying a man who would make all of your future life decisions while you birthed him many a baby and raised them up, only to send some off to war and all the others into a system of slavery-enriched US heteropatriarchal capitalism. Then absolutely. It was queer city.”

Again, there was a pause. A longish one. And then, “OK,” Harper said, that smile there across her words again. “I get it. I understand the limits. But also, you know it wasn’t chaste for all of them. Stop being so sour and just admit that Brookhants was Planet Lady Love.”

Merritt did laugh at Planet Lady Love. “They nearly put that on their crest,” she said. “Now it seems shortsighted that Esse Quam Videri won out.”

“What’s that mean again?”

“‘To Be, Rather Than to Seem,’” Merritt said. She’d been scrolling the Tumblr, had stopped at another GIF. This one was of a few moments from Harper’s now-famous runaways-sharing-waxy-stolen-donuts-under-an-overpass scene from Every Girl You Know. It was a decidedly unsexy scene in the movie, but you’d never know it from this GIF, which was looped in such a way as to best show off the movements of Harper’s sinewy arms.

“I feel certain that you’d have done well at Brookhants,” Merritt said. “All the girls would have asked you to the dance.”

“Mm-hmm,” Harper said. “Only problem with that theory is I never would have gotten in. Unless they hauled their shit all the way out to Montana to hire me as a kitchen maid.”

“How can you know?” Merritt said. “Maybe 1902 Harper Harper would have been a famous stage actress, then on to silent films. You still could have been one of the real greats.” Merritt was just saying that to say it, but it’s not unthinkable. Harper had the it. You know, the it.

“The 1902 me wouldn’t have had the famous writer to be named after,” Harper said. “Harper Lee wasn’t even alive then.”

“Why couldn’t she be named after you?” Merritt said.

Harper didn’t answer that, there was a lull, and though it was really only the first bit of silence between them since they’d started the call, Merritt didn’t like it. She felt like it was the cue she was supposed to interpret as Harper’s polite way of telling Merritt she’d gotten all she needed, thanks. So Merritt asked, “Did you get everything you needed from me?”

“Never,” Harper said. “But I can let you go. I know I’m sort of fangirling you with all these questions.”

“That’s very funny,” Merritt said.

“Why?”

“I mean that it’s amusing to hear you, Harper Harper, use the verb fangirling in relation to something you’re doing to me.”

“I am doing it.”

“Oh, OK,” Merritt said. “I’m just thinking of your own rabid fans and this odd reversal.”

“Now why would you go and say that my fans have rabies?”

“I lurk hard online,” Merritt said. “You doing anything at all is apparently memeworthy—”

“Nah, now—” Harper tried to cut her off, but it was useless.

“Here’s you smoking at a café in—maybe Paris? Is it too obvious to assume Paris? Barcelona?”

“Never been to Barcelona.”

“OK, so smoking in Paris—check. Here’s you drinking a slushee outside a perfectly suburban gas station.”

“Yeah, OK,” Harper said, laughing, “point made.”

Merritt wasn’t done. “Here’s the GIF of you walking with that soccer player whose name I can never remember and you both hop over a puddle only you don’t quite make it. Here’s, like, seven in a row where you just take off a hat or put on a hat. You should read the comments on these. It’s enough to make a lady blush.”

“Not the ladies I know.”

“Ha!” Merritt said. “Tell me, do you know that your fandom’s hashtag is HARPEOPLE?”

“What now?” Harper said.

“Hashtag HARPEOPLE,” Merritt said again. “There’s a subreddit, too.”

“I’ve never heard that,” Harper said.

“Liar.”

“I mean I mighta heard it somewhere,” Harper said, her grin again draped over her words. This felt a whole lot like phone flirting to Merritt, Readers, but judge as you will (because of course you will).

“Well, go on,” Merritt said. “You were supposedly fangirling me.”

“You can’t just point it out like that,” Harper said.

“You pointed it out,” Merritt said. “You used the word.”

“Yeah, but now I’m embarrassed,” Harper said.

“No, you’re not,” Merritt said. “You’re miles from embarrassed. Let’s have it—turn it up.” She was not above being phone flattered by Harper Harper. Would you be? Really?

“I’m just saying that it’s good, what you made,” Harper said. “Like keeping Flo and Clara and the rest of them alive in your book—and known, that’s like a legitimate thing to be proud of, you know, or have define you. I mean who writes a book at sixteen?”

“Other people,” Merritt said quickly, the prickle of shame flicking along her skin like a rash. “Throughout time, plenty of them. Mary MacLane for one.”

“She was nineteen,” Harper said. “You beat her.”

“I had a lot of help along the way, a lot of advice. I didn’t do it alone.”

“I’m not saying you did it alone, nobody does anything alone. I’m just saying that you did do it. You did. Take the credit.”

Merritt felt distinctly uncomfortable for the first time since they’d started speaking. She wondered if she should now say the same kinds of things to Harper, tell her how enormous her talent was, how wonderful it was that she’d be playing Flo and how lucky it made her feel, but she also felt like those things would sound somehow too small or obvious—too sycophantic on the heels of Harper’s own flattery. And so the air again hung silent between them for a few moments until there was Merritt’s mother pulling into the driveway. And since her father had done what he’d done, surprises like this—anything out of the blue as it related to their home life—made Merritt rush to dread.

She could see through the windshield that her mother was not alone. One of her colleagues—a slim, man-bunned guy named Anderson—was with her. Neither of them noticed Merritt as they climbed out of her mother’s neighborhood-ubiquitous Volvo station wagon.

“My mother just got home and I have to go,” Merritt said, recognizing how young that no doubt sounded to someone like Harper Harper.

“Me too,” Harper said. “Not my mom getting home but I do have to go. Thank you for this. I already have a clearer sense of things and it was rad just talking to you.”

“You’re very welcome,” Merritt said. “Goodbye.” She immediately regretted that sign-off, regretted not saying that she’d also liked talking to Harper. But it was too late to change it. She’d said what she’d said and that was that and why was her mother home, anyway?

If you walked from the driveway along the path that edged up against the house there was an overgrown holly hedge that blocked your view of the porch, at least until you arrived at its steps.

“Oh, you’re home,” Professor Emmons said with only mild surprise as she rounded that corner. “What happened to the library?”

“I decided I like the porch better,” Merritt said. It was remarkable how quickly her worry over something potentially being wrong could shift into anger.

“Hi, Merritt,” Anderson said. They were both standing in front of her now. “Good to see you.”

She’d met Anderson before, many times. So had her father. They’d all even suffered through a dinner together once. But that was years ago. Merritt hadn’t known her mother was seeing him again, at least in this particular way. Apparently, by coming home Merritt had unwittingly interrupted their afternoon tryst. God, gross.

“You know I don’t like not knowing where you are,” her mother said. “I wish you would have told me you were leaving campus.”

“I did,” Merritt said. “I texted you. Also, I’m twenty-one years old.”

“Oh,” her mother said, ignoring the last part of Merritt’s reply as she inspected the curled leaves on a railing basket of pansies. “I didn’t get it. Somehow, I don’t have my phone. I went to put something in my calendar and realized. Did you see it in the kitchen?”

“No,” Merritt said. “But I wasn’t looking for it.”

“Well, we just stopped in so I could grab it,” her mother said. “Let me run and check.” She slipped into the house.

Now Merritt and Anderson looked at each other.

“Any movie news?” he asked. “Your mom said they’re really involving you. That must be dope.”

“My mother says a lot of things that she thinks sound good.”

“She’s just proud of you,” Anderson said. “She—”

“I’d rather we didn’t speak anymore. Let’s just wait together in unhappy silence.”

He gave her the face she expected, one of surprise tinged pink.

She blinked at him.

Anderson might have been embarrassed to know just how much relief Merritt could see come over him as they listened to her mother approach, her boots across the wood floor of the entryway. “Got it,” Professor Emmons said from behind the screen door. She was holding her phone up, shaking it at them.

“Oh thank gawd,” Merritt said. “I was so worried.”

“We’ve got to run or we’ll be late for the department meeting.” Professor Emmons was now walking back across the porch to the side stairs. Anderson followed a step or two behind.

“Don’t leave on account of me,” Merritt said.

“I think we should do kebabs tonight,” her mother called back without turning around. “Can you get everything prepped and then we’ll light the grill when I get home?”

“Mmmmm,” Merritt said.

“Be sure to cut up those farmers’ market peppers. They’re getting soft. Love you!” Her car door slammed shut.

Merritt realized she hadn’t mentioned the phone call, the hour spent talking to Harper Harper. (Flirting with Harper Harper? Yes. Yes, flirting.) And now she wasn’t sure she would tell her mother about it at all. (She enjoyed being punitive in matters like this.)

In fact, Merritt might have almost let herself believe she’d daydreamed the whole call were it not for the text she found waiting on her phone. Harper must have sent it only moments after they’d hung up.

Thanks again! Talking to you made me really happy. I’m off to a vintage store to find old lockets to put my hair in. You know, for the fans.

Merritt’s response: the fans #HARPEOPLE.

And then she added, before she could convince herself not to:

talking to you made me happy, too