Harper and Merritt Go on an Impossible Los Angeles Date

Anybody have money on motorcycle? As in, twenty bucks says Harper Harper was driving a motorcycle that day, and that it would serve as the pumpkin coach for her and Merritt’s Los Angeles dream date?

Because if so, Readers: it’s time to collect.

She had driven some rare model of Moto Guzzi to Bo’s. It’s the kind of bike that people who know about such things, people who care, care about. I am not one of those people, but that bike was a beaut: cream and green, chrome and oil-rubbed leather.

She’d also brought with her a glittery blue helmet for Merritt and a more elaborate black one for herself. She had them propped against the bike’s tires there in Bo’s stuffed driveway. And draped over the seat was a black leather jacket very much like the one Harper wore herself.

“Is this gonna be OK for you?” Harper asked as she bent to retrieve the helmets and hand Merritt hers. “It’s cool if not. I mean it. I’ll get us a car.”

“Oh wow,” Merritt said. “Fuck. OK.” The closest she’d ever been to being on a motorcycle was briefly riding a Vespa as part of a tour group in a hill town in Italy and let’s face it: that wasn’t very close at all. “I should have expected this. Since it’s such a known thing about you.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s your thing,” Harper said.

“Oh, it’s not,” Merritt said. “But today I did sign up for the full Harper Harper experience. Is there even room for us both?”

“There’s room,” Harper said, patting the seat in the back. “This is where you go. But also, we really don’t have to do this. I mean it. I want you to be comfortable.”

“You just need to tell me every single thing I need to know to not get in your way and to keep you alive, by which I mean to keep you keeping me alive. Everything—spare me nothing. Where do my hands go, where do my feet go, how do I sit, how do—”

Harper laughed and said, “I wouldn’t let you get on otherwise. You’re sure?”

“Stop asking,” Merritt said. “Teach me.”

So Harper did.

Once Merritt was seated behind her, but before she had started the engine, Harper leaned back and asked, “Piercing first? Piercing last?”

“It’s your show,” Merritt said. “This is supposed to be your California dream come to life for me.”

“So no pressure, then,” Harper said.

“All the pressure,” Merritt said. “Every ounce of it.” It felt to her like they were escaping, leaving the bungalow of botched auditions in their dust.

And yet somehow, Readers, somehow, taking off with her arms at Harper’s waist, feeling the bike’s whir, its metal churn—feeling it, not just hearing it—latched to their bodies while the wheels roiled beneath them and heat bloomed from the engine, somehow all of that was only the cheese and crackers before dinner, the not-so-memorable opening band before the headliner.

The least of it.

First Harper took Merritt to Metal Mug, a piercing place in West Hollywood. It was bright and modern, its big windows streaming gobs of California sun into the lobby and two fiddle-leaf fig trees in cement pots making the most of that light, their leaves huge and too green to be believed. So while they waited—for no time at all—Merritt dug her sharp thumbnail into a couple of them to be sure. They were not only real, they were now wounded by her: black crescents weeping plant matter.

The place was so smartly designed and sterile that the only vestiges of punk-days-past came from the soundtrack and the staff. When they’d entered The Clash was playing but now, as Sloane, their piercing professional, readied her station, it hopped to Billy Bragg singing “A New England.” Sloane’s own face was an archipelago of metal adornments. You could tell she was pleased Harper had requested her, but she certainly wasn’t gonna go on about it.

“I don’t get to do eyebrows very much anymore,” she said, having selected two so-thin gold hoops from her jewelry case.

“She’s gonna bring them back,” Harper said. “Single-handedly.”

“As close together as you can get them,” Merritt said. She was now seated in a big chair, almost like a dentist’s chair.

“You’ll wear them well,” Sloane said. It felt like the whole thing had just been notarized by that statement: Sloane’s official seal of piercing approval.

“You will,” Harper said, her face closer to Merritt’s ear than it needed to be for her to say it and for Merritt to hear it. Her breath, the soft impact from those words, linked up with the nerves in Merritt’s spine and traveled her length.

Billy Bragg sang, “I saw two shooting stars last night / I wished on them but they were only satellites / It’s wrong to wish on space hardware.”

Soon Harper and Sloane joined him, singing the part about looking for another girl.

And then, because the song was so soon over, Sloane called to someone in some unseen part of the shop, “Ayyy! Mimi! Play that one again.” And hidden Mimi did. And the needle went in above Merritt’s eye with a pressury pinch, not really pain, just sharp pressure releasing a stream of tears but only a couple quick drops of blood, which Sloane didn’t let linger.

She was efficient, in her purple-gloved hands. She was fast. Merritt had barely comprehended the addition of those tiny hoops to her eyebrow, to her face, in her reflection there on the hand mirror they’d given her, when Sloane said, “A few for our Insta,” and she was posing with Harper, their warm cheeks pressed together.

And oh my gawd: Merritt was smiling. Her eyebrow throbbed like she’d been stung there, was being stung there. But she was smiling.

Then Harper took Merritt’s hand, as she had the night previous at Spago—hand in hand with her leading and Merritt following with almost all the willingness to do so that she then possessed—and they were leaving, they were out of there, and as they reached the front of the shop again, up near those fiddle-leaf trees, Merritt said, “I need to pay.” But that wasn’t true, it turned out. Harper had already, or they’d pierced her for free, for the publicity: Harper Harper, valued and frequent patron of Metal Mug. Or perhaps it was a little of both, but whatever it was, there was no money owed by Merritt and no one to pay it to, Sloane and Mimi probably busy hashtagging those pics they’d just taken.

And then they were again outside in the full of that California sun, more of those too-postcard-to-be-true palm trees above them. But in front of them, immediately in front of them, were paparazzi and fans. Some of them were #HARPEOPLE, but others had gathered because they saw other people gathering, something to see. There was a buzzing swarm of humans from Metal Mug’s doorway all the way to the Moto Guzzi and a few squeals, a few gasps—yes, gasps—as they now walked through the swarm. As Harper Harper came into its midst.

Later Merritt learned that Harper had posted their location, likely right as Sloane was swabbing Merritt’s eyebrow with iodine. This meant good attention for the shop, sure, but Harper also knew, had to, what it would do. The chain reaction it would cause. And how fast. Minutes. It had only been minutes since:

Harper Harper @HarperHarper

Getting new hardware for brilliant/gorgeous @SoldOnMerritt @MetalMug so she can be gorgeous X 2.

And people had come to find them, and more would come, still.

“So who’s she, anyway?” one of the paparazzi guys asked, gesturing his ostentatiously oversize camera at Merritt. “Who the fuck’s Merritt Emmons?” He was reading her name from his phone.

“Who the fuck are you?” Harper asked him back.

And he smiled as he said, “I’m the guy who keeps you paying for this sick bike.” She seemed to know this particular jerk, seemed to have an affable thing going with him.

“This the lay of the week?” another guy asked. He was filming them on his phone.

“Of the day,” someone else called, because of course they did.

Now almost all of them, fans and paparazzi alike, had phones and cameras and one iPad too pointed at them.

A woman with endless legs stuffed at their shapely bottoms into black combat boots and sprouting at their shapely tops from denim cutoffs so cut off that their white pocket innards were the lowest hanging fabric on her legs walked toward them. Over the rest of her svelte frame she wore a thin white tank top (no bra) and a green-and-blue flannel shirt, unbuttoned, sleeves rolled. Her brown hair was big and messy, her sunglasses as large as Merritt’s own. She said, as she reached for Harper’s other arm, the arm that didn’t end with a hand in Merritt’s: “Hey, I want a ride on that bike.”

“Only fits two,” Harper said, winking at her. “Next time.”

“Come on,” this stranger said. “Take me instead. I’m better for you. And I love you.”

Readers, she said it like maybe it was so. She might as well have been Mary MacLane, standing there, reading from her diary: Oh, my dearest—you are the only one in the world! We are two women. You do not love me, but I love you.

Actually, maybe not that exact passage, or at least not its final line, because then Harper said back to this woman:

“I love you, too.”

And I don’t know, Readers, maybe she did. Maybe she meant it. Maybe Harper Harper loved that girl in the flannel, the girl with the enviable legs. She said it like she meant it, but also like it was something she said and meant a lot. And then she kept moving, while keeping Merritt there beside her, as the crowd thickened around them.

She’d resituated their closeness, reached her right arm across her own middle and put that hand into Merritt’s right hand so that her left arm, the one with the hand that had been holding Merritt’s, could go around the small of Merritt’s back and she could better steer and shield Merritt with her own body. And when Harper did that, pressed up close against and around her, Merritt wanted, as she had the night before, to turn her head and kiss Harper. There was that Harper Harper magnet pulling them together. And Merritt knew, she knew, that if she did it, Harper would kiss her back. Merritt knew it the way she knew how to tie her shoes, her dad’s middle name, how to flick a light switch. Simpler things, even, more known to her, as if always known to her: how to scratch an itch or close her eyes, how to sneeze.

And I bet you know, already you know, that Merritt did do it. She turned her head and raised her eyebrows and asked, “Shall we?” so close to Harper’s mouth that she might as well have kissed the words into it. Harper smiled in a nod and Merritt did kiss her, there in the throng of paparazzi. And Harper Harper did kiss her back, as Merritt, heartbeat certain, knew that she would. You’ve seen the videos. You’ve seen the pictures. It looks, in some of those videos, like maybe that decision was Merritt’s answer to Hollywood legs and her query. A kind of smug affirmation of her position. And how did it feel? Like the kiss equivalent of her first ride on Harper’s Moto Guzzi: whirring, fast, and could-be dangerous. She even felt it in the throb of her eyebrow.

I can tell you, though, that Merritt wasn’t anticipating the cheer from the crowd that went up around them. Who gets one of those for a kiss, other than just-married couples and those prodded into performing on the jumbotrons in sports arenas?

And because they found themselves in that kiss so easily, I bet you, online viewer, didn’t guess when you watched that clip that this was their very first ever kiss, out in front of Metal Mug, in the pool of paparazzi and #HARPEOPLE, onlookers and tagalongs.

And I bet you didn’t guess, wouldn’t have known, that this was also Merritt’s first kiss since a two-week trip with some fellow eighth-graders to a university research facility in Upstate New York, where they did STEM work with solar power and Merritt blissed out in her nerdom.

During that trip, Merritt had broken off with Travis Zienkowski a bunch of times, into the side hallways and dark corners of the dingy dorms they were housed in, and they’d made out elaborately and fumblingly, with more tempo and energy than real passion.

But still, those sessions had seemed to Merritt, at the time, like the starting point of all that would be soon to come, the kisses of her almost-immediate future. Travis Zienkowski as gate opener.

Travis wasn’t her first-first kiss, mind you. That had been down-the-street Kathleen, in her upstairs bedroom, while they were not actually playing with Kathleen’s ZhuZhu Pets. And then Merritt had kissed Alexi, a kid she met only once, at her cousin’s wedding in Ohio.

But Travis, dear Travis Zienkowski and his oversize Adam’s apple and dry hands, his supervillain T-shirts and truly profane sense of humor—Merritt had thought he was the starting gun for all the adolescent kissing to be racing toward her soon.

Turned out not.

Turned out that she tuned in to him the way you sometimes—when at a place like Brookhants, say—happen on a radio station for the length of a song, the end of a weather report, and then that station goes static and not only can you not find it again, you can’t find any others, either.

Instead of a string of Travis Zienkowskis—and Merritt would have been happy for Tawnya and Tara, Timothy and Trevor, T-whatever Zienkowskis, too—she’d skipped another grade and transferred to a different school, one meant to more adequately challenge her. And it was a challenge, it certainly was, not knowing anyone there, especially during that awkward bag of ages.

And then, not so long after that, there was her father and his suicide and whatever it was she and her mother had become together—their particular version of a family. And then there was her homeschooling, which meant a lot of alone time. Which she said she wanted. And maybe she did. But still, she grew, as you well know, prickly. She grew into the majestic saguaro you read before you today. Mostly, she lurked and she hid and she refused to connect. Even more so when her book came out and her brain wouldn’t turn off about it.

Then she took her saguaro self to college and instead of shedding her spines she grew more of them. She grew cactusier by the class, by the interaction, the few she managed, anyway, that one semester. She grew prickly in more than her countenance—even her thinking felt prickly to her—sharp and caustic and not only when applied to others, but when applied to herself.

And so between sweet, profane Travis in that dorm, in eighth grade, and that day in California with Harper, the kiss you all witnessed on your own screens, there had been no other kisses at all.

For Merritt, that is. For Merritt there had been no other kisses.

While for Harper Harper there had been—it seemed to Merritt, anyway—everyone; everyone she might want to kiss ever. Including, that very day, Audrey Wells.

Oh, not the same kind of kissing, to be sure. I’m not conflating. But Harper and Audrey had kissed, and also for a crowd, not even two hours before.

It may surprise you to know that, as they finally reached Harper’s bike, their helmets on, the whir-chug whir-chugging engine going and people mostly clearing out to let them through, Merritt thought of Audrey.

It might have started, that thought, or series of thoughts, a little smugly—a lot smugly: a private comparison of the success of her kiss with Harper and the, nearly exquisite in its awfulness, failure of Audrey’s. But as she again latched her arms around Harper, as they gained purchase over the parking lot and hung a right out into traffic, palm trees aligned along either side of the streets like state-sponsored tourism sentries, those smug thoughts gave way to a feeling of—it wasn’t pity. It wasn’t. It was empathy for her, I guess, a breath of thanks for the kind of remarkable day Merritt was having, and also a breath of regret, truly, for the kind of day Audrey was having. Merritt knew she was. And she also knew that she’d contributed to some of that badness. And Audrey hadn’t deserved it. Not really.

While Merritt was offering Audrey her silent regret, small and useless though it was, Harper cut them through traffic, her bike a knife slicing that stretch of road, until they easily lost the two paparazzi determined to have more of them, even, than they’d already given.

You should know, Readers, that the things that happened next on their date can’t actually all be true. I know that, even as I prepare to tell you about them. I know, with all the good and sound logic of my narrator’s mind, that there were not, there could not have been, the hours needed to do the things the two of them did that late afternoon and evening and into the night, both the tourist stuff (Merritt was one, after all) and the not: the Sunset Strip, the Walk of Fame, rainbow sprinkle ice-cream cones and fizzy water at the outdoor tables of some West Hollywood queer restaurant they only stopped at long enough to be seen licking those cones and drinking those drinks.

Then on to Harper’s childhood friend Eric’s rented bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, because Harper said they haaaaaaaaad to at least stop in. Eric had just started grad school. He wasn’t “in the industry” at all—Merritt was told—but he certainly seemed to know a bunch of people who were. Despite Harper’s promise that he would share embarrassing tales from their past, it was still intimidating for Merritt, walking into that space of shapely, disenfranchised Hollywood types—everyone appearing so lazily stylish, everyone seeming to already know everyone else. But it’s true that Eric was warm, and he did seem delighted to see them: shrieking and smiling and climbing over people on a couch in order to reach them via the fastest route possible so he could bestow hugs and offer drinks.

And, crucially: Merritt was there with Harper Harper. They had come together. This was a fact that seemed somehow both known and readily accepted by the people in that bungalow and it calmed her. Some.

There, in the private garden, in the heat bake of early nightfall, hot wind blowing the flowering vines around them, Merritt had a lot more to drink than she usually did—which was really about nothing ever. Harper did not. She was driving and unwavering in her thoughts about sobriety behind the wheel. (Or behind the handlebars, as it were.) She did, however, have a cigarette; two of them, actually. They stayed there for the length of two cigarettes, and Merritt still disapproved, even if it made her a prude, but her disapproval of this essential element of Harper’s existence—that she was a cigarette smoker—was not the order of the evening.

Besides, the smoke from the fires, and the almost-always smog, and the efforts of the late-setting sun had proved to be the exactly right Los Angeles alchemy to wash the whole sky lilac to pink. And how could they not drive off again into that? So they did. Back out into the night and on to other places—places they couldn’t possibly have traveled in the space of those hours—probably not in two or three such nights: the various homes of Harper’s friends, a spin around Griffith Observatory, a taco stand, the Venice Canals, a quick pull-in to the fluorescent white light that rectangled beneath a massive gas station overhang, where they filled the bike’s tank, a prolonged stop on the side of a road so they could watch the fires in the distance before Harper grabbed Merritt a clump of white blossoms from an orange tree, the two of them taking turns mashing them to their noses in mockery and celebration of Brookhants girls of yore.

Smoke (fire and cigarette) and orange blossoms: the evening’s scents.

Eventually, Harper drove them slowly and meanderingly through what Merritt thought was just another random residential neighborhood in Silver Lake, to end them up at another friend’s house, she assumed. But then they made a turn and up the street Merritt could see the glow in the branches without yet understanding what it was she was seeing: the Chandelier Tree.

Do you know about it, Readers? Merritt didn’t. Not before that night. A large part of its magic lies in its location, which isn’t a theme park or even a city park. It’s a big, old sycamore tree with an enormous canopy studded with more than a dozen lit chandeliers, several of them in boughs overhanging the street. And it’s growing in the corner of the smallish front yard of a smallish house in a random LA neighborhood. There’s even a white picket fence.

Harper pulled up to the tree’s wildly painted parking meter, used to collect donations toward the house’s electric bill.

There were a few other people standing around taking pics. These people noticed them and seemed to figure out that it was Harper Harper once she removed her helmet, but they were too cool to make a thing about spotting her. And once they left, there were only the occasional dog walkers nodding hello. Those hellos surprised Merritt but I’m telling you, Readers, the Chandelier Tree engendered warmth and good feelings.

I mean, it was filled with glowing chandeliers with all their attendant chandeliery accoutrements—crystals and bangles and brass. They belonged, of course, in gaudy mansions or hotel lobbies. But instead, here they were outdoors in this random tree. And when the lights were on, the leaves glowed and the branches glowed and they cast shadows, and sometimes those dripping crystals sounded like wind chimes—clinking and tinkling.

Fuck, I hate the word tinkle. What a terrible word. It’s so knowingly, boastfully saccharine. But it is the right word for the sound those chandelier crystals sometimes made.

Anyway, Readers, it was beautiful. The whole thing was beautiful.

And Harper was beautiful showing it to Merritt, pointing out her favorite chandeliers, there from the street below. And Merritt was beautiful being shown it, her face a kaleidoscope of light and shadow as she looked into the branches. And the night was beautiful. The quiet of the street was beautiful. And all of this beauty was so good. And it also came with its own soft ache because they both knew, perhaps better than many others their age, that it was so precarious, so prone to dissipate.

As they stood there, looking up into the branches, Merritt told Harper that she hadn’t been sure before, but now she was: Harper was the perfect John Fante character.

“What now?” Harper asked, keeping her head back and eyes up in the tree.

“Local novelist,” Merritt said. “Screenwriter, too—in like the forties and fifties. I just read his big Hollywood novel: Ask the Dust.”

“Did you read it because you were coming out here?” Harper asked. “Like as research?”

“Yes,” Merritt said.

“I love that,” Harper said, turning her neck so she could look at Merritt and shake her head. “I love that you would do that.” She then ran two fingers along a few strands of Merritt’s hair, the pink strands. “Say again who I am?”

“You’re two characters rolled into one,” Merritt said. “You’re Arturo and Camilla.” She pulled out her phone and searched until she found the exact passage from Ask the Dust. She had it in her notes. It didn’t take long.

She read it to Harper.

Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.

It made Harper laugh, somehow, the strange delight of having Merritt read that to her beneath the glowing canopy of the Chandelier Tree.

Her laughing made Merritt laugh, too. Then Harper took Merritt’s phone and read the passage to her. And then they read it together. They shouted it, screamed it out into the neighborhood around them. They did this like moon-raving maniacs until a man walking by with his two agitated Boxers on a double leash stared long and worriedly enough to bring them back from outer space.

It was impossible then, Readers, for them not to be kissing.

For all of their closeness that night, all of their touching and movement and bike situating, they hadn’t done that again, kissed, I mean, since their first, out in front of Metal Mug. Though I swear to you, Readers, it seemed like that had happened on Saturn during the previous century and not a few hours before, and not more than twenty miles away, from where they now stood beneath the spread of those branches.

These kisses beneath the chandeliers were of a different variety than their kiss that afternoon. That kiss had a kernel of show-and-tell to it—of bravado and silliness and parking lot antics. But these kisses were started up by Harper, her fingers firm on the soft skin of Merritt’s chin, tilting Merritt’s head and guiding her mouth to her own sure lips, her smoky tongue and her breath hot like the wind they’d shouted into.

Merritt recognized just what a stale romantic gesture another version of herself would have seen this as: Harper driving her to that tree to then kiss her beneath it.

Of course she recognized that.

But she didn’t mind. In fact, right then she felt ready to embrace every stale romantic gesture she’d ever before mocked. Isn’t that what the swell of a crush is, after all? Recognizing the flush of truth in all the love clichés?

In fact, let me add even another cliché to the mix: she’d never before been kissed like this.

And if the echo of the motorcycle whir in her legs, and the dull throb at her eyebrow, and the remaining scent of orange blossom mashed in her nostrils, and the glow of those sycamore chandeliers around them were all part of making that sentence true, then so what? So be it. She wanted it, and more and more and more besides.

The Vegas-style parking meter at the Chandelier Tree was rigged to take credit cards, and so after they’d kissed and kissed again, Harper gifted it plenty in digital money as their thank-you. And then they were off.

This time they ended up at their final destination: Cinespia and the midnight movie at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Yep, movies in a graveyard—grass and headstones, shaggy palm trees above and bodies all around, the sky only managing a silver dark even then, even that late, because of the light from the screen.

They were showing The Blair Witch Project for the midnight horror feature. Merritt didn’t think about it then—she wasn’t really there for the movie—but now, if she considers that night, it does pinch at her: those young and terrorized filmmakers not quite realizing just how bad things had gotten until it was too late for them to do anything about it. The filmmakers onscreen, I mean, in that movie’s fictional story line. The characters: they’re the ones who are ruined. But the people behind the screen, the people who made The Blair Witch Project? Well they did very well indeed. Laughed all the way to the bank, as they say.

Harper took Merritt’s hand and they meandered the headstones to eventually settle in the grass at the back of the crowd, their view of the screen somewhat obscured by a marble angel. It wasn’t likely they’d be noticed back here.

“Have you seen this before?”

“Once, maybe. I think,” Merritt said, not wanting to talk or watch the movie or do anything more, right then, than continue to lean against Harper in the hot breeze on the lawn and just be. Just be there, at the movies, in Hollywood, with the Harper Harper as her date.

They did that for a while: leaning, kissing. Harper smoked, which she probably wasn’t supposed to do there, but managed all the same. Sinister things happened on the screen. Those poor, unknowing student filmmakers meddling where they oughtn’t. One of the characters mentioned his mom, his mom missing him, hoping that maybe she’d take action to find him, and Merritt all at once thought of her own mother, and Elaine, and of the lateness of the hour.

While Elaine had seemed rather delighted that Merritt had plans to go out with Harper, she must have by then, Merritt knew, been expecting her back at their hotel.

So Merritt dug her phone out of her bag. She hadn’t looked at it since finding the Ask the Dust passage. There were many texts, one missed call: Elaine. Her mother. Elaine. Her mother, her mother, her mother. Elaine.

Just checking in!

Getting a little late and wondering if you’re still planning to stay at the hotel tonight. Just text me to let me know you’re back safe.

Merritt? 4 people have now sent me the same link.

At first, Merritt thought this mass of missed attempts at reaching her had to do mostly with the fact that it was now well after midnight and she’d left Bo’s bungalow hours and hours before—and on the back of a motorcycle to explore a city wholly unknown to her.

But Harper, who’d also pulled out her own phone, now reminded Merritt about the scene they’d caused earlier. The one captured on video. Believe me or not, Readers: Merritt had almost forgotten it in the laughing-gas time that had passed since.

“We’re trending,” Harper said.

“You’re joking.”

“Nope. Well, in limited markets. The queer ones.”

“Explain yourself.”

“Both #KissMeHarper and #PiercingPuckerup. That one’s really stupid. And just #HarperHarper, too.”

“Right—so you’re trending,” Merritt said.

“I’m not kissing myself in this video.”

“You’re not kissing anyone in that video,” Merritt said. “I kissed you.”

“If you say so.”

“There’s an easy way to settle this,” Merritt said. “We’ll go to the instant replay.”

They watched together on Harper’s phone. There were several versions to choose from, and in almost all of them the footage was clear. Those photographers had all been so close to them, and their kiss, when it happened, filled the screen. You could see, well, that it was intentional and enjoyed; you could certainly see the specifics of what they’d done—but Merritt was relieved, she was, to see that it didn’t play as lurid. And that it lasted only a few seconds. It had felt longer to her in the doing.

That relief drained away once they started scrolling the comments.

Most of them, on the particular post they’d landed on, anyway, seemed to be positive, calling their kiss sweet or cute or both. #goals showed up in a few comments, too. And awwwwww. But Harper eventually got to a string of them about how much better she could do than Merritt, about how unattractive and fat and gross Merritt was. And what had happened to Annie or the soccer player or that actress from the superhero franchise? And as Harper continued to scroll, those comments seemed to multiply like Gremlins in water: one begetting another that was even uglier and meaner, and then a still-uglier one after that.

A tame example: Since when did HH start volunteering for Save the Whales?

Another: Q: How many dykes does it take to kill my boner?

A: Just the ugly fat one.

Harper flicked fast to her home screen. “Fucking garbage humans with keyboards,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK,” Merritt said, wanting that to be true, but instead feeling much more wrecked by what she’d read than she was willing to show Harper. She kept talking to save face. “You don’t have to protect me from the internet, you know. I’ve been there before.”

Merritt realized who she was saying this to and the unfathomable enormity of what it must be like, daily, to be Harper Harper, Online Public Person. How silly Merritt, with only her tiptoes in fame land, probably sounded to her. How naive. “I mean, not like this, obviously,” she added. “Like with this many people paying attention. I’m just saying that I’ve seen that shit posted about myself before.”

“Then I’m sorry about that, too,” Harper said. “That it’s business as usual just makes it worse.”

“Hashtag no shit,” Merritt said. She didn’t want to be, but she was thinking of all the comments of a similar nature (and worse, probably much worse) that she’d not read, those Harper had spared her from. For now.

It clicked for her, somewhere in there, that some of her missed calls and texts had to do with these videos, with this captured footage of their kiss now bouncing from page to page, click to post. Her mother would have surely seen it by now: Merritt’s pierced face a surprise, their kiss a bigger surprise, and that it was all available for repeated online review and mockery and meme-making the biggest surprise of all.

“I missed a call from Bo,” Harper said then, as much to herself as to Merritt.

Harper’s phone, Merritt had come to realize, was its own self-perpetuating electric storm, her many followers and squad members and employees, old flames and new flames, family too, probably, lighting it up, making it buzz and rattle and whistle and play music, and all manner of other noises, relentlessly, when she left the sound on, which she seemed, wisely, not often to do. Even still, her screen was always ablaze with notifications.

“Does he usually call you so late?” Merritt asked.

“No,” Harper said. “He doesn’t really call me at all. He texts, sometimes.” She seemed to wonder at whatever she saw then, there on her screen. They’d shifted positions and Merritt could no longer read it. Harper typed something back to whomever had made her make that face. “He coulda lost track of time,” she added as she did so. “You work really weird hours on film sets. It’s easy to forget that other people don’t.”

“Yeah but he wasn’t on a set today,” Merritt said. “He was at his house, eating sushi.”

Harper ignored her. “I dunno, I guess I should call him back. It’s gotta be about Brookhants.”

“You’re going to call him right now?”

“Yeah, probably,” she said. “It is pretty weird that he would call me. And you’re right—it’s late.” She said this as though the fact of the hour had only just taken hold for her. “Maybe it’s something to do with the plan for tomorrow.” She scrolled her screen for a while, reading things. “That’s probably it,” she said. “I missed a call from my manager, too.”

“Maybe it’s about who they’re bringing in for Clara now,” Merritt said. She nearly added something ungenerous about bringing in someone better and more equipped for the part than Audrey Wells, but she didn’t. Instead she said: “I think you should put him on speaker.”

“Whaaaaaaat?” Harper said, her HRF back in full form. She liked the idea, Merritt could tell.

“Come on,” Merritt said. “Give me something to remember about this date.”

“You’re saying I haven’t done that already?”

Merritt shrugged. “The question is: Have you done enough?”

Harper stood and reached to pull Merritt to her feet as well. Then they moved even farther away from the crowd, until they were standing against a tall hedgerow studded with yellow flowers.

“If this gets me in trouble,” Harper said, touching Call, then Speaker, “I’m throwing you under the bus.”

“I’ll only pop its tires,” Merritt said.

Harper made an unsure face and then said, smiling, “Because cactus.” She gave Merritt a quick kiss for that, and Merritt marveled at how unreasonably comfortable it was, really, in the span of a single night, to just accept the fact of casual kisses from Harper Harper.

“You’ve been busy,” Bo said as his greeting. “Piercing Pavilion and the Case of the Canoodling Writer.”

Harper laughed. “She’s here with me,” she said. “Like on the phone, I mean. You’re on speaker with us.”

Merritt groaned at her for telling him so soon—or at all.

“I hate being on speaker,” Bo said. But he didn’t actually sound upset about it. “Hi, Merritt,” he said. “I like the eyebrow rings.”

“They look really good on her,” Harper said.

Merritt would be embarrassed for you to know how that compliment made her.

“So, real quick,” Bo said, “as you two are presumably otherwise occupied—”

“We’re at the cemetery,” Merritt said, not intending to explain.

“At the movies, she means,” Harper said after.

“Oh shit,” he said, “I haven’t done that in forever. Good for you. You should soak up all your LA good times while you can because we’re off to Brookhants in two months.”

“You got the rehearsal time?” Harper asked. “All of it?”

“We compromised at a week, not two, but that ain’t bad,” he said, real mirth in his voice. “Gonna make it work.”

“That’s awesome,” Harper said.

“I think necessary is the word,” Bo said. “We’ll need every minute of it.”

“But how, though?” Merritt asked.

“How what?” Bo asked back.

“I mean I thought it was all a scheduling nightmare,” Merritt said. “I thought you had to confirm the role of Clara before you could lock anything in.”

There was background noise before he answered. He was talking to someone there with him, but Merritt couldn’t make out what he was saying to them.

“Well, that’s why I called,” he said, coming back to them.

“We called you,” Merritt said.

“Before,” he said. “It’s why I called Harper before. I wanted her to be among the first to know, and now you, too, Merritt: we are going with Audrey for Clara. We settled it all up here in the last hour or so, the t-crossing, i-dotting stuff, anyway.”

^*

Clearly, Readers, there were no appropriate words of response to what he’d said. Not for Merritt, anyway. I mean, what he’d told them was fundamentally incomprehensible to her.

So it was Harper who spoke first. “Oh wow, no way,” she said. “Sweet.”

“Audrey Wells, you mean?” Merritt said. “From today.”

“Yeah, turns out we can’t get Audrey Hepburn,” Bo said. “She’s already committed to a different project. Something very grave.” When neither of them laughed, he said, “Come on, you’re in a cemetery: that was astoundingly on point. Yes, of course. Who else? Audrey from today. Audrey Wells.”

“Cool, OK,” Harper said with her requisite ease. “And she’s in for the rehearsals, too?”

“Completely,” Bo said. “One hundred percent.”

“So she must have come back to your house, after we left,” Merritt said.

“Who?” Bo asked. He’d again been talking to someone there with him.

“Audrey,” she said, making sure not to look at Harper because she didn’t want to see the face of concern or annoyance that she was pretty sure Harper was about to make at her. “She must have come back and done a completely different audition than the one she did in your office today,” Merritt continued. “Different than the one we were there for, I mean. Because that one was embarrassing. I mean even to watch it was embarrassing, I can’t imagine having been the person who did it.”

“That wasn’t an audition,” Bo said.

Harper said nothing. Nothing to rein Merritt in. So Merritt leaned even closer to the phone’s speaker, there where Harper had it held between them.

“OK, but so anyway, she came back and she nailed her nonaudition the second time, huh? Gawd, now I wish we hadn’t left so early so we could have witnessed her triumphant second take after the spectacular failure of her first, when it was completely clear to everyone in the room that—”

“Take me off speaker, Harper,” Bo cut in. “Now.”

Harper did, right away, putting the phone to her ear. Now all Merritt could hear was Harper’s end of the conversation, which went: “Yeah, for sure. No, yeah—I know. Yeah.” Silence for a while. Then, “Yeah. OK. Sounds crackerjack. Thank you, Bo.”

It’s important that you understand, Readers, that Audrey’s nonaudition had been, it seemed to Merritt, anyway, so purely awful, so all-the-things wrong, such an epic and total #FAIL, that it had scantly even been discussed after the group of them had filtered from Bo’s office and, briefly, back to the patio. I mean, at least during the time while Merritt and Harper were still there. There was nothing to discuss. There was no need to go on and on about it, reveling in Audrey’s wretchedness.

So instead people had said things like:

Well, change of plans, I guess.

And:

I didn’t think that kiss was ever going end. Hand to God, I thought Bo was gonna have to legit yell cut.

And:

Hey, what about Quenby Birk? You know, redhead? Plays the daughter on that noir thing HBO just did? She’s fantastic. I don’t know about her availability but . . .

This was the chorus that surrounded them as they made for the Moto Guzzi, and there was no need for Merritt or Harper to add to it, especially with their date waiting just beyond the edges of Bo’s driveway—so close—if only they’d go.

And so they had, Merritt assuming there was no need to discuss Audrey Wells as Clara ever again because Audrey Wells herself had silenced that discussion.

Now, in the graveyard, Harper ended the call with Bo.

She looked at Merritt, hard, and said, “That was so fucked up. He’s the director. We still have to work with him.”

“No,” Merritt said. “Not me.”

“Listen, I get that this isn’t your world and you obviously look down on it or whatever,” Harper said. “But it is mine. And what you just did is not how I am in it.”

“What is happening right now?” Merritt asked, waving her hand up and down in front of Harper’s face a few times like you do when trying to test someone’s field of vision. “Are you having some version of soap opera amnesia? You were there today, too! I mean, it was you who she attacked with her mouth, I’d think you’d remember.”

“You’ve got to stop.”

“I haven’t started,” Merritt said. “This decision makes absolutely no sense and it’s infuriating and condescending that you’d pretend otherwise. I mean, if she was, like, a bankable name or whatever, maybe, maybe you could make a case. Or if she’d done some other major part before and just had, like, the most off of off days of all time, fine. But it’s neither of those things. She’s not famous and she’s not particularly talented. The reasons for casting Audrey Wells in this part are zero.”

Harper shook her head, like it almost pained her that Merritt didn’t get it. She scrolled her phone for a few seconds and then said, resigned, “Bo’s actually a pretty smart guy and I think he knows what he’s doing, and he definitely knows what he wants for this.” She stopped scrolling to look at Merritt. “It’s his movie.”

“Really?” Merritt said. “Because just in the last twenty-four hours I’ve been told that it’s your movie, that it’s my movie, now it’s Bo’s movie.”

“That’s what Heather was trying to explain earlier, though,” Harper said. “That wasn’t BS—that’s how this works. It’s everyone’s movie, in the end. If we ever get it made.”

“Oh not a chance in hell,” Merritt said. “Not mine. Not with her as Clara.”

There was yelling and manic breathing coming from the sound system. Onscreen, the herky-jerky handheld camera captured the filmmakers as they ran, terrified, through the dark woods.

Harper and Merritt stood uncomfortably in the wash of that onscreen terror for a minute or so. Stewing. At least Merritt was stewing, Readers.

Harper was doing a lot of texting or posting. As Merritt watched her thumbs move over her keyboard, her practiced ability, she was additionally rankled by how calm and steady Harper was being about this decision. She was trying to sell it as the professional and necessary response of a serious actor hoping to keep her head down and do her work, presumably so she’d consistently get offered more work. And maybe that was a part of it. But, Readers, Merritt sensed, she just had this back-of-the-brain tickle, that it was something more.

And the longer she considered Harper’s cool calmness, her unreasonable reasonability—those Blair Witch speaker screams more panicked and constant than ever, and Harper Harper so intent on her phone screen and her tap-tap-tapping—the more Merritt knew that she was lying to her.

“When did you find out?” she asked.

“Find out what?” Harper said, convincingly surprised or confused, sure, but she’s an actor so grain of salt and all.

“You already knew they were giving Clara to Audrey,” Merritt said, convincing herself of this even more as she said it aloud. “You didn’t learn about it just now over the phone like I did.”

Harper gave Merritt no real expression to work with, nothing there on her face to read effectively. But she didn’t tell Merritt that she was wrong, either.

“So when?” Merritt asked. “Who tipped you off?” But then Merritt knew. She knew exactly. “Josh the creep, right?”

Harper nodded. “He texted me that it looked like it was going through, they just had to work out some contract stuff.”

“When?” Merritt asked.

“Earlier,” Harper said.

“No,” Merritt said. “Nope. When specifically? Earlier as in when we got here?” She gestured around them. “Or earlier, earlier, as in the Chandelier Tree earlier?”

“Earlier,” Harper said, touching the cigarette behind her ear. Merritt had already come to recognize this as a thing she did often.

“Oh cool—so you’ve let me be the fool all evening,” she said. “So when? Gas station earlier?”

“What does it have to do with you being the fool?” Harper asked.

“Fuck,” Merritt said in an angry one-snort laugh. “Just say it. When did you know they were going with her?”

“At Eric’s thing,” she said. “Out in the garden.”

“The garden—” Merritt said, swallowing. “Of course.”

She remembered, now, that Harper had been on her phone some while they were at the Chateau Marmont, while she smoked there outside and Merritt drank too many drinks too fast and those flowering vines blew around them. Harper hadn’t had it out for long, her phone, and Merritt thought she’d taken it out to get pics of the two of them, which she had also done. It made her cringe with embarrassment to now remember that that’s what she’d thought at the time—it seemed so unbelievably naive.

And so this meant Harper had known about Audrey-as-Clara for hours and she’d not said anything about it to Merritt.

“I knew you would be unhappy about it,” Harper said, explaining even though Merritt hadn’t asked her to. “And I just wanted to keep having this like it was.”

“Having what?” Merritt asked.

“Our date,” Harper said, smiling. Not grinning but smiling. “Whatever tonight has been. I knew you’d be mad after you heard and I didn’t want to bring that into the middle of this.”

Merritt already felt foolish. But now Harper had made her feel immature, too: Harper had been protecting her from this news all evening. She chose her next words carefully. “I don’t know why you were so concerned about my reaction. I think what’s quite clear, in all of this, is that it absolutely does not matter what I think about this decision, or what I think about any presumably disastrous future decisions that might be made about our movie.”

“That’s not true,” Harper said. “Like at all.”

“OK,” Merritt said, as a text from Elaine landed on her phone. Now this is really too late and too long without hearing from you. It’s unkind. Please PHONE IN NOW.

“Don’t you think we should try to let the movie stuff be the movie stuff?” Harper asked. “Business? And then we can have our own thing, too. Our own separate thing?”

“No,” Merritt said. “I don’t. The movie stuff is us.”

“Why?” Harper asked. “How we met doesn’t have to be who we are to each other.”

“We aren’t anything at all,” Merritt said. “Except two people connected to the same doomed movie.”

“That’s just more prickliness,” Harper said. “I’m trying to know you. I want to.”

“Well, you should know that I have to be going now,” Merritt said. “Also, I want to be going now.”

After a moment, Harper said, “This is a really shitty way to end this great night.”

And at that, Readers, Merritt could have offered a truce. She could have agreed with Harper. She could have said any number of banal things, like It is. Or Yep. Or even just a nod. She could have nodded.

Instead, she said: “I wish you were actually the person I thought I was here with before, like, ten minutes ago.”

“Yeah,” Harper said, right away. She seemed to wonder if she should say the next part, and then she did: “I’m sure you do. Come on, I’ll take you back.”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” Merritt said. “I can get where I’m going without you taking me there.” She made a show of opening a ridesharing app on her phone.

“Really?” Harper said. “This is how we’re leaving this?”

“There’s nothing to leave,” Merritt said, still tapping at her phone. “Do drive safe.”