The Players Assemble

The next morning, Harper Harper found herself in the increasingly common position of being the one doing the waiting.

She’d already been waiting, for days, for Merritt to change her mind and come to Brookhants, and now today she was waiting for Bo and Audrey, who were twenty-plus minutes late meeting her to rehearse a scene in The Orangerie.

Harper, never one to stand around, had been helping the crew stationed there unload their trucks. Some of the teamsters hadn’t liked this very much, but they also weren’t used to giving orders to the talent. It wasn’t even nine A.M. and everyone was already sweating off their mosquito spray, Harper included.

She gripped one end of a massive wooden table, a table built for kissing beneath, and carefully walked backward on a narrow path between potted trees and rows of big-bloomed plants intended for placement in The Orangerie.

A crew member named Kae carried the other end. Kae was one of a handful of locals who knew better than the Los Angelinos on crew who had tried, at least at first, to be exclusively organic and handmade about their bug repellent selections, opting for creams that made them smell like cupcakes but did nothing to keep the Brookhants mosquitoes away. Now they were all showering in great clouds of the MAXI-DEET stuff. (Consider the gasoline-and-metal taste it leaves on your tongue part of its charm, Readers.)

One of Harper’s phones dinged in her pocket. Then again. Cell service was shifty at Brookhants, and sometimes a bunch of stalled notifications would land at once.

“You need to check that?” Kae asked. “We can set it down.” The table was heavy. Kae’s forearms strained with its weight.

“Yeah,” Harper said. “Let’s just clear the door.” She stepped backward and down into The Orangerie as her phone dinged again. They set the table down as soon as Kae was also inside the door.

The text was from Uncle Rob. Harper could picture him sitting on his lumpy couch, sending it to her. (Or maybe he’d upgraded that couch since cashing her check.)

He’d written:

Thought you might want to keep an eye on this

Then he’d sent several screenshots from her mother’s Facebook page. It was two hours earlier in Montana, barely seven A.M., but Rob was already up and tattling about the pics that Harper’s mother, his sister, had posted from the party she’d had at her lake house the night before.

Harper used her lurker profile to go to her mother’s page and sure enough, there were more pics posted there and her mom had been tagged in her friends’ images, too: red Solo cups and beer cans and sunburned faces.

And on top of this, her mom was apparently again seeing (or something?) ex-husband Paul, Ethan’s dad. Here he was with his arm around her, and here he was at the grill flipping an ear of corn, and here he was grinning in the Jacuzzi with his pink chest and polarized sunglasses.

The thing is: Harper liked Paul. She’d always liked him, and he’d been sober and steady for years and years, so maybe this wasn’t necessarily such a worrying development.

Maybe.

“I can grab somebody else,” Kae said tentatively. “If you need to be done now.”

“No,” Harper said. “I’m good. Just give me one sec.” She didn’t text Rob, but she did text Ethan to tell him to have a good day at school and also to fish for info on where he’d spent the weekend. She hoped it was with their grandparents. She guessed it probably was: he wasn’t in any of the posted pics. Then she put her phone back in her pocket and together they moved the table away from the doorway and into place.

Harper watched as Kae pulled a green bandanna from their back pocket and wiped their forehead and neck.

“What, are you trying to take my job?” they asked.

“You wanna trade?” Harper said.

“I dunno,” Kae said. “I haven’t actually seen you do much of anything yet, so I don’t even know what I’d be in for.”

“Fair enough,” Harper said. She knew Kae was joking but she could also see how it might seem that way, especially since she and Audrey had spent these past few days rehearsing with Bo away from the curious eyes of the crew. Harper wasn’t sure yet how things were going.

They were going is how.

The beeping of another delivery truck backing up to The Orangerie made Kae say, “Uhhhhhh, how can there be more tables left in the world?”

But the truck turned out to be filled with plants. There were dozens of them crammed together, their leaves and tendrils spilling free, like green hands reaching, as soon as the hatch was lifted. Kae and Harper watched as another crew member situated the unloading ramp—it was steep, the truck was big—and Layla, a greenskeeper,^* started up it with her iPad checklist at the ready.

They continued to watch as Layla’s inspection took her deep into the mass of plants. By the time she reached the back of the truck, she was no longer visible to them. That’s when they heard her yell, “Fuck. This. Shit.”

“Yuh-oh,” Kae said quietly to Harper. And then, much more loudly, they called to Layla, “Anything I can do?”

“Yeah, you can find me fifteen orange trees that aren’t dead,” Layla said, emerging from the greenery and starting back down the ramp.

“Are they dead or are they—” Kae started.

“They’re dead,” Layla said. She was already on her walkie-talkie, searching for somebody to help her fix this. Above my pay grade is a phrase she used.

“So you want the dead ones off the truck too or no?” Kae asked, already partway up the ramp.

“Off, I guess,” Layla said, trying to hold the walkie-talkie while also looking at her iPad. “No, leave them on.”

Kae was handing plants down to Harper when Layla changed her mind again. “No, you’d better take them off. This truck isn’t going back to that greenhouse tonight and I can just see somebody trying to say we killed them by leaving ’em on it.” She was already walking toward the gardens to check something else, but she called back, “Just put them in The Orangerie, inside the door—to the left. I’ll deal with them tomorrow.”

“To the left, to the left,” Harper sang, her arms wrapped fully around the heavy pot of a massive sword fern, its leaves blocking most of her view.

“All the dead trees in a pile to the left,” Kae picked up the song.

“Nice,” Harper said.

They plantified the lyrics to other Beyoncé songs as they worked.^* At least until they reached the dead trees at the back of the truck.

“Well these won’t do,” Kae said.

“Somebody fucked up good,” Harper said as her phone dinged again. And then again. It was Ethan, on his way to school (with Grandma) and grumpy because it was Monday morning. Harper asked to see this day’s sneaker choice and he sent a pic in exchange for hers and then she put her phone away, satisfied. For now.

Harper and Kae were each able to carry two trees at once because they were so parched. The trees were even more pathetic once they were off the truck and in the sunlight. Grouped together in The Orangerie, they looked like the Addams Family’s idea of container gardening: a potted forest of brown leaves and stunted fruits faded to ghost colors, dead and shriveled on their branches. Several of them seemed to be nothing more than sticks stuck into the center of a tub of dirt.

Harper took a vape out of her pocket and put it between her lips, inhaled.

“My nephew just got in-school suspension for using one of those in class,” Kae said, rather adorably excited about this fact.

“Yep,” Harper said as she exhaled a cloud. “Me and every other fourteen-year-old you know.” She pulled again and then said, “Only they’re all just getting hooked and I’m trying to use this thing to quit.”

“Is it working?”

“I have no idea. You want?” Harper extended it in her fingertips.

Kae took it, pulled once, exhaled, and said, “Weird. Is that supposed to be cucumber?”

“I think maybe,” Harper said. “I got a variety pack. But really I just want a cigarette.”

“Won’t bother me,” Kae said. “Maybe not in here, though. They told me it almost burned down once already.”

“Oh shit,” Harper said. “Yeah.” She remembered what Merritt had shown her—blooms of char growing right where they’d left those dead trees. The memory of that day in Bo’s office, what had happened out his window, felt sour inside her. “I’ll stick with this for now,” she said, and pulled on the vape again.

Kae used a pocketknife to open several massive bags of potting soil. “We’re filling these,” they said, nodding at a pile of smallish (compared to what they’d just been hauling) planters stacked near them on the floor.

“Cool.”

“Hey, can I ask you something? If it’s not too weird.” They tossed a pair of gardening gloves to Harper before putting on their own.

“Yeah, but only if you make it weird,” Harper said, trying to guess what it would be. Something about someone she’d dated? Or maybe about someone famous she’d worked with or what projects she had lined up next.

Kae slid-heaved a bag of soil over to Harper and, handing her the knife to open it, said, “Is the story about how you were discovered true? Like, that’s actually how it went down?”

“I don’t know,” Harper said. “How do you think it goes?”

The bags were cumbersome, shifting and heavy. Kae gave up on pouring soil out, at least while it was so full. They scooped it with a bucket instead. “Just that you were at a friend’s audition, like not there for yourself or anything—that you’d never even acted—and you met Arden Cleary^* outside smoking and Arden was like, Hey there, movie star.” Kae paused, then added, “And that you didn’t tell your parents until after you’d already shot the whole thing.”

Harper pulled a final time on the vape, then slipped it back in her pocket. “Parent,” she said in her exhale. “Just my mom, but close enough otherwise. I had acted before, though. I was Sneezy the Dwarf in fifth grade. Which was epic.”

“I mean, of course.”

Harper cut the seam on her bag before closing the knife and handing it back to Kae. “Hey there, movie star,” she said. “That’s funny.”

“How was it really?”

“Unreal,” Harper said. “Mostly it felt fake. My friend Eric was hyped on this casting call where he said they needed a ton of teenagers to play bit parts—or probably just be extras, in the end—and it was, like, the weekend before graduation and my finals were over so I was like, Bring it.”

Harper scooped the dark soil as she spoke—it smelled rotten, like it had been wet in the bag too long. “It was for an indie that was supposed to shoot in Missoula that summer. Not that at the time I really knew anything about what indie versus any other kind of film meant. But Eric did. He’d been in this regional theater thing and so he was our big high school star, and he really wanted to do it, so I went with him, mostly to fuck around in town while he did his thing. He, like, had an audition piece worked up, a headshot—the whole deal. And it was taking forever, and I wasn’t really that into it. To be honest, I didn’t want to wait in line. I went and saw some people, got my hair cut, bought this rad T-shirt with some graduation money—I was really feeling myself—and then I came back, and he still hadn’t gotten in. And now the people running it were, like, on a break and so I was outside the building where they were doing the auditions and texting with him about how I was gonna ditch him if he didn’t hurry the fuck up, and I ended up bumming a cigarette from the casting director. And then Arden—who I definitely did not know at the time, like, I mean, I’d never even heard the name Arden Cleary, so I’m for sure not gonna know that person was the casting director—and a couple producers came back from wherever they were off getting food. And they were like, What’s your deal? You seem weird.”

“You seem weird?” Kae repeated like they didn’t believe it.

“No, I mean basically,” Harper said. “Unlike everybody else waiting to audition, I wasn’t trying to be anything to them right then, so I stood out more. Do you know what I mean? Because I wasn’t acting like anything. I mean, I think that’s really what it was. I didn’t want to be there, so they were into me. Reverse psychology or whatever. I wasn’t doing anything all that special—”

“Probably didn’t hurt that you’re gorgeous,” Kae said, wadding up their spent soil bag and pulling over another.

“Oh no,” Harper said. “I really wasn’t. Right now you’re looking at the Hollywood version of me, where I can pay somebody to do my eyebrows. Please believe that I looked mangy as fuck that day.”

“I do not believe,” Kae said. “But go on.”

Harper shrugged. It wasn’t true, anyway. Within about forty seconds of meeting her, one of the producers had told her that she had a face built for close-ups. (Even at the time she knew what a cliché that was and because of that didn’t take it very sincerely even though it was offered that way.) “They brought me in the back way with them and I’m texting Eric and he’s like, Whaaaaaaat? The. Fuck. He was pretty mad, actually.” She smiled at the memory. “Then they had me read a couple of scenes. The weirdest thing was they wanted me to smoke.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, they made me, like, sit up on top of the back of a desk chair with my feet on the seat, smoking and talking bullshit into the camera for five minutes.” She scratched at the back of her neck with the glove and could feel the dirt she’d left behind on her skin.

“But like what, though?” Kae asked.

“I don’t know,” Harper said. “Like how I thought of myself or something. How I saw myself.”

Kae was serious, earnest. “How did you?”

“I don’t know,” Harper said, shrugging and feeling like she’d somehow let this story she’d told more times than she could count edge into personal territory. “Just some A-plus bullshit, I’m sure,” she said, dodging. “The whole thing felt like a game. It definitely didn’t feel like it would end up meaning anything real in my life. Even when they took all my contact info and said they were emailing the script and working on connecting me with an agent, I still bought it, like, zero percent. I was mostly worried about whether or not we were gonna have time to go get burritos before we left Missoula.”

There was some small commotion outside The Orangerie, and a couple crew members jogged by, toward the garden, one of them talking loud on his walkie-talkie. Both Kae and Harper watched through the glass as they went.

“Yeah but now here you are,” Kae said.

“Here I am,” Harper said.

And then she added, “Actually, I think Arden got cold feet about me, at one point. I know she did.” Why was she telling this part? She never told this part. “We Skyped a bunch of times, before we were gonna start filming, and as we got down to the wire, I could tell she was like, Oh shit—what did I do? She asked me to make videos like working my shift at the grocery store or fucking around town with Eric, which is all I ever did anyway. Just on my phone, I mean. Those seemed to reconvince her, but by then I was worried that they’d made a huge mistake.”

“Turns out not,” Kae said.

“I’ve still got them fooled,” Harper said. “For now.”

They finished filling the smaller containers, and Kae showed her where to dump the rest of the soil: into the massive, currently empty zinc planter that would soon^* be holding the angel’s trumpet tree. There were four bags left on the pallet. That amount probably wouldn’t even fill the planter halfway, but it was a start, so the two of them hauled the bags over, knifed them open, and heaved them up to the flat, square lip, in order to pour them in. They’d emptied two bags, and Kae was currently dumping in the third, when Harper noticed that something weird fell out of the bag alongside the soil. Before she could even really comprehend what was happening, it was covered. But then came another weird thing—something of a different size and coloring than the dirt and falling at a slightly different rate of speed, like it weighed less.

There were several of these somethings mixed into the soil.

“Maybe plant matter that didn’t decompose,” Kae said when Harper tried to explain what she’d seen. Kae wadded up the bag they’d just poured and made to grab the last full bag and heave it to the planter’s ledge. “It’s dirt. It’s got a bunch of crap in it. Like actual crap.”

“No,” Harper said. “This was something else. Hold off a sec.” She reached both arms down into the container. She had to rest her hips over its flat lip and let it swallow the top half of her to do this, it was that big. She moved the dirt around with her gloves, fast at first, and then more methodically, until she found one—though she still didn’t know what she’d found. She teeter-tottered back over the edge to a standing position, brushed the thing off with her fingertips, which didn’t work very well because her gloves were too bulky, so she took one of them off in order to do it more gently.

It was round, about the size of a ping-pong ball, and light in her hand. Fragile. She pulled off her other glove and continued to wipe away the dirt. She even blew at some of what remained, which made Kae laugh.

“Buried treasure?” they asked.

“I think it’s supposed to be an apple.”

“What?” Kae asked, leaning in for a better look. Harper tenderly held the thing aloft in her palm like it was the Hope Diamond.

It was an apple: a tiny papier-mâché sculpture painted, rather realistically, to look like a Black Oxford apple. There was even a minuscule brown stem and green leaf at the top.

“You think there’s more?” Kae asked, already leaning over the edge of the planter. Harper did, too. Together the two of them clanged heads as they fished out delicate, papier-mâché sculptures of the following items: a blue flower, another apple, and, oh yes, Readers, a yellow jacket. The second apple had torn and its insides were now exposed. Once Harper cleared the dirt from it, the honeycomb pattern of the paper used to fill it and give it shape was evident: the gray chambers of a wasp nest.

Harper and Kae laid the objects in a row along the lip of the planter. They seemed brighter there, richer, in a line against the zinc edge.

Kae unwadded the soil bag and scrutinized its label. “Maybe they’re for some kind of promotion?”

“What would they be promoting?”

“They’re all garden stuff,” Kae said, flipping the bag over and scanning the back. “Flowers and bees—it’s about their brand.”

“I don’t know. They look too handmade for that. And old.”

“I mean, they’re really beautiful,” Kae said. “I just don’t know what they’re for.” They looked closer, glancing their fingertips over the top of the yellow jacket. Harper had the same impulse. There was something about the pieces that made you want to touch, to covet them.

“Do you think maybe you’re supposed to plant them?” Kae asked. “You know that thing where they embed seeds in paper and you can water it to grow flowers or whatever. They do it with grass and it looks like insulation.” Kae picked up one of the apples, the one that wasn’t torn. “I bet that’s what this is.” They held it up into the streaming light and inspected it for seeds.

It was an apple: a tiny papier-mâché sculpture painted, rather realistically, to look like a Black Oxford apple.

“Maybe,” Harper said. It wasn’t completely unreasonable, what Kae was saying. It was no more unreasonable than finding the things in the first place. But it was obvious too that all of these objects represented Brookhants and its curse.

She pulled out her phone, ignoring its screen of notifications and going right to her camera app. She then took several pics of the sculptures from different angles. Kae was right, they really were beautiful, especially there in a row in the brilliant light of The Orangerie.

Somebody talented seemed to have taken their time making them.

Harper was captioning her post^* when Bo and Audrey walked in. They were talking in that kind of feigned hush that isn’t actually all that quiet but straining to appear like it’s a whisper—the voice people use for both gossip and genuine alarm.

Audrey wore a striped Oxford shirtdress, a double-wrapped skinny belt at her waist, and pink canvas shoes dotted with gold pineapples. She should have been the picture of effortless summer, but as she pushed her sunglasses up onto her forehead, Harper saw how unhappy she was. She said to Bo, “His mouth looked really bad.”

“It didn’t look great,” he said. “Good thing he had it on him.” He looked at Harper. “Sorry about the wait, we got sidetracked on the way over here—Brookhants strikes again.” He wore denim cutoffs and another of his horror movie T-shirts, this one for The Uninvited.

“What happened?” Harper asked.

“The crew in the garden hit a ground nest,” he said.

“Of wasps,” Audrey added.

“Yellow jackets,” Bo said, raising an eyebrow at her.

“One of the landscapers, like, literally hit it with his shovel,” Audrey said, her eyes wide, “and a bunch flew up at him and stung him in the face and neck. And he’s allergic.”

“Oh shit,” Kae said, stepping into their cluster. “Do you know if it was Marco?”

“That’s exactly who it was,” Bo said, as if noticing for the first time that Kae was there.

“Is he OK?”

“I think so,” Bo said. “Or he will be.”

Audrey jumped in: “Only because he had his EpiPen on him and he injected it right after. Like immediately.”

“He was just telling me about how he’s allergic,” Kae said, turning to Harper. “I mean, just this morning he was telling me, at breakfast.”

“His face is pretty fucked,” Bo said. “They’re taking him to the ER now to get checked out.”

“His lip,” Audrey said, shaking her head. “His top lip looks like it’s a water balloon.”

“That’s so scary,” Harper said.

“It’s for sure losing us time,” Bo said. “They were already supposed to have the garden finished and now they can’t work in there until they get the nest cleared out.” He looked at his phone. “Brookhants keeps on giving,” he said, scrolling. “Whose idea was it to shoot here?”

“I should probably go over that way and see if they need me,” Kae said.

“We’ll be in here for the next hour or so,” Bo said, not looking up from his phone. “Everyone should already know that, but maybe you can be the one to do any necessary reminding.”

“No problem.” Kae made a kind of good luck with this guy face at Harper and Audrey and left.

“These are beautiful,” Audrey said. She’d wandered over to the papier-mâché sculptures and picked up the blue flower. “What are they?” She turned it over in her hand.

“No idea,” Harper said. “We just found them.”

“They’re props?” Audrey asked.

“No,” Harper said. “Like in the dirt. They came out of a bag of soil.” Harper laughed, both at hearing how dumb it sounded and also at Audrey’s reaction face.

“Let’s get to this,” Bo said, looking up from his phone and spinning around, considering the space. “So if we orient ourselves from here,” he said, gesturing to the zinc planter, “Eleanor’s hidey-hole.” He backed up to reconsider, and as he did, knocked his heel into a container holding one of the citrus trees Harper and Kae had just hauled in.

Bo turned to see what he’d run into and took in the cluster of them, flicking one of the skeletal trunks with his fingers. “What’s up with these?” he asked like he didn’t expect an answer.

“They’re dead,” Harper said. “They came off the truck like that.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “We get twenty sticks in pots when it’s supposed to be the Amazon in here.”

“Layla’s on it,” Harper said.

“I don’t even know who the fuck Layla is,” Bo said, texting something to someone in a rather furious way. “Oh, yes I do,” he added absentmindedly, before slipping his phone into his back pocket. “OK,” he said, clapping his hands together hard and again looking up at Harper and Audrey. “The Faderman discovery scene. Flo’s got the—”

“I think we should maybe wait a minute,” Audrey interrupted. “Sorry,” she added quickly.

“What?” Bo was clearly near to reaching his limit of tolerable interruptions.

Audrey pointed behind him. He turned, and they all looked together through the glass at the vintage green Jaguar convertible that had pulled up alongside the building, Merritt Emmons at the wheel and Elaine Brookhants as her passenger. Elaine was now waving in at all of them.

“Well, shit,” Bo said, but he sounded happier than he had all morning. And he was smiling.