Plain Bad Heroines: A Novel Read online

  “Let’s do it, then,” Caroline now said to the back of her daughter’s phone. She waited. Nothing. “Aud,” she said, “I’m leaving you.” She opened her car door to emphasize her point.

  At once a yellow jacket flew in through the open door, though its path sent it over the seats and to the rear window. Caroline didn’t notice it because she was looking intently at Audrey, and Audrey didn’t notice because she was looking intently at her phone.

  More specifically, she was looking at the Instagram stories of one Harper Harper, who couldn’t have been more on fire herself right then than if she’d been standing in the flame-filled Hollywood Hills. The Harper Harper—indie-film-darling turned celesbian-megastar-influencer. She was supposedly on a rocket ship to awards season—seemingly any awards season, all of them. The out-of-nowhere actor with enough edge to be authentic and enough talent to make a career for herself. The one who hadn’t been around long enough to have that promise curdle in any of the ways it might. Yet.

  Audrey had been around. Audrey’s mom, Caroline Wells, the newly minted real estate agent waiting beside her, had been around even longer. Eventually that rocket ship would lose its fuel. It did for everyone, except, like, Meryl Streep. Eventually even Harper Harper wouldn’t be so new, her talent seen as so raw and perceptive, or whatever other adjectives the critics were using at the moment. Soon enough, people would tire of her—the projects she chose, who she was or wasn’t dating, what she posted or didn’t post. That especially.

  But not just yet. For the moment, Harper Harper was still on fire.

  And she would be bringing that fire to her new movie, which just so happened to be Audrey’s new movie: The Happenings at Brookhants. Because Harper was attached, it already had buzz. It might even be a chance for her, Audrey Wells, to come out from the creep of her mother’s long shadow and her own childhood name.

  Probably that wouldn’t happen. The role of Eleanor Faderman was small, a part for a minor character actress. Whatever that meant. (Not a lead is what it meant.) But there was some meat to Eleanor, some depth—and she was to have a scene with Harper Harper herself. That might be enough to get Audrey noticed.

  And more than that, there was this: for the last sixteen months, Audrey Wells hadn’t been offered any roles at all. Not one. Not until The Happenings at Brookhants came along. Her transition from preteen to twentysomething actor hadn’t quite been a transition. She was stuck in between, in the nowhere. Audrey and Caroline might have been decidedly B-list, but they did have a Hollywood past. And because of Caroline’s various public incidents, that past was now often thought of as more significant than any of the roles either of them had ever played. (And that was only when anyone was thinking of them at all.)

  Almost certainly this movie, like most movies Audrey had been in, would end up being disappointing. But this was still the short window she loved best: anticipating it. The promise of what the project might be if everything lined up just so and all of the usual things, like script changes or test-audience feedback or, worst of all, her own mediocrity, didn’t fuck it up.

  Of course, Caroline couldn’t know each dip and contour in this particular coil of her daughter’s thoughts, but she could guess at some of them, especially when Audrey tilted her phone enough so they could both watch the feed she was so taken with: a handheld video of a sunburned Harper Harper cannonballing into a teal mountain lake.

  The whole setup was a notch too Instagram perfect to be believed, a few water droplets even landing on the lens. Then came a slow-motion clip of Harper and her little brother having a splash war in the same lake. Then another video, this one longer than the first: Harper dancing on the large deck of a lake house with a woman whose lopsided hairstyle manages to look good even while she bops her head aggressively to pop music. This person (someone Audrey had googled earlier) is Harper’s current girlfriend, Annie Meng: a twenty-five-year-old visual artist who had, the year prior, sold the entirety of her first public exhibition of collages. (Two of them, said the internet, to Oprah.) They keep dancing while strings of twinkle lights blow around overhead and the real twinkle of stars stretches out behind them. And then into the frame comes a woman wearing an apron that says World’s Okayest Cook. She waves a spatula at the camera and mouths the Roxette lyrics. Her hair is thin and her cheeks hollow, but it’s clear that Harper has her mouth and chin. This resemblance is confirmed when the screen shows a series of popping pink hearts and the handwritten caption my mama can dance! Audrey can’t remember ever before seeing Harper’s mother in one of her posts.

  “Is this Pottery Barn sponcon?” Caroline asked. “I mean I do like the apron. I thought she didn’t talk to her mom?”

  “I guess she does now,” Audrey said. She had started the feed again, the same clips playing one after the next.

  “Good for them for doing the work,” Caroline said. She sounded like therapy speak in a way that made Audrey bristle, but since therapy had saved her, its argot was her default.

  “It’s one edited video.”

  “One more than none,” Caroline said. She turned to really look at Audrey, who was not looking back at her, so Caroline put her hand over the phone screen until Audrey did. “What’s this bringing up for you? Did she post something else about the movie?”

  “Oh my God, it’s not bringing up anything,” Audrey said so quickly that she knew she didn’t sound convincing. She wasn’t convincing. In fact, she’d watched all of these clips earlier, before they’d left the house. Now here she was watching them again.

  “I’m ready, we can go.” Audrey closed the app and dropped the phone into her bag, a vintage crocodile Hermès purchased by her father, the exact kind of reckless gift he liked best to send her when he was feeling guilty about things. (Audrey had twice made arrangements to sell the bag for cash but hadn’t gone through with it either time.) Her father also still held the mortgage on the house she and her mother lived in, even though they were the ones who (almost always) made the monthly payments. Even though he now lived in London. Even though he and Caroline had separated right before her scar-causing incident and divorced right after.

  Caroline fished around in the cupholder—clicks and clacks—and then held her closed fist out to Audrey. “Here.”

  Audrey put out her own open palm and Caroline dropped two crystals into it—one pink, one purple. They were raw and jagged, each about the size of a wine cork.

  “Amethyst,” Audrey said, turning them over and feeling their rough then glassy surfaces against her skin. “And what?”

  “Good,” Caroline said, surprised. “And rose quartz. In your case it’s for balancing energy and bringing calm.”

  Audrey nodded slowly, not necessarily condescendingly but with a deliberate effort to appear to her mother like she was humoring her. Which she was.

  “Whatever helps you to let go of negativity, yeah? And maybe encourages a little self-confidence? I’m not asking you to suck on them, Audrey.”

  “It didn’t even occur to me that that would be an option.”

  Caroline checked her reflection in the rearview, raking her hand through the side of her hair. “You know it’s supposed to be millennials who are way into inclusive spiritual practices—so of course it’s my child who rejects crystals out of hand.”

  “Do you see what’s in my hand right now?” Audrey opened her fist again. There were red indentations along three of her fingers where the crystals had pressed into her skin.

  “Now put them in your pocket.”

  “I don’t always have pockets,” Audrey said. But she shifted in her seat and put them there anyway. And then she said, in a way she hoped she delivered like an afterthought even though it wasn’t, “I would just like to be good in it this time.”

  “Oh, honey—”

  Audrey cut her off: “This one time, I want to be good and I want the movie to be good and I want it to matter. I don’t want to have to make excuses for it.”

  I want, I want, I want, she did not say.

  Before Caroline could try some other tactic meant to assure Audrey, a man called out to them from the parking lot. “OhmyGod. I’m so sorry—I know this is tacky and gauche and we don’t do this in LA but I’m wearing your face right now. Like literally!”

  Caroline hadn’t shut her door since she’d opened it several minutes before and now this person—sweaty at the temples, puffy red beard—was moving even closer to that open-door access while unbuttoning his flannel shirt as quickly as his fingers would do it. “Pleasejustwaitasec,” he said. “I have to show you.”

  “Mom, shut your door,” Audrey said with more panic than she’d later admit.

  Caroline did and hit the lock button, too.

  “No—it’s only my shirt!” the man said, his voice now muffled by the car door, so he sounded like he was talking to them through a soup-can phone. He worked the last button and then flapped his shirt open to reveal the T-shirt he was wearing beneath, which was printed with the movie poster for House Mother 2: She’s Coming for You—the title in a garish, neon-pink font that screamed above the stalking shadow of the House Mother, her gray wig askew, a glinting knife in her hand as she came for the blonde in a bloody nightgown who was running, breasts first, as if into the camera and off the poster entirely.

  The blonde was then-nineteen-year-old Caroline Wells.

  “I’m a Jules Junkie! We always go when they play the trilogy at Vista. Did you know they do that?” The man now held his eyes so wide open they looked like something you’d draw in Sharpie on the side of a balloon to please a toddler. Jules Coburn was the final girl sorority sister Caroline had played in both House Mother 2 and 3: Now She’s Coming for Me.*

  Caroline lowered her window. “I was there the first time. I did the talk back after.”


  “Oh shit—no, I knew that!” the man said, shaking his head. “Jesus, I saw you there! I’m sorry I’m being so weird. I just—I’m a huge fan, which I know you must hear all the time, but I’m actually wearing this shirt today, and fucking here you are.”

  “I’m glad you showed me,” Caroline said. She opened her car door again.

  The guy now grinned a shy grin, proud that he’d won her over. He even took a step back to show that he didn’t want anything more from her than what he’d gotten. “Jules kicks Sam’s ass. I don’t give a fuck what the neckbeards on Reddit say.”

  “There wouldn’t have been a Jules without a Sam, though,” Audrey said.

  “Right—no, I know,” the man said, peering past Caroline as if he hadn’t realized Audrey was there until she’d spoken. Maybe he hadn’t. “I mean—all respect to Melanie Patrick, of course. I’m counting down the days until my kid is old enough to watch with me. We named her Jules—shit!” He made his eyes big again. “I totally buried the lede! I, like, completely forgot until this second that my kid is named after you. Sort of named after you. You get it.”

  “I do,” Caroline said. “Thank you. That’s a real honor.”

  “Thank you! My husband’s head is gonna explode when I get home. He was the one who was supposed to go to the store today and he bailed. It will drive him crazy for the rest of time that he missed you.”

  “You should definitely get a picture, then,” Audrey said. She leaned around her mother to better see him. “To rub it in.”

  The man smiled at her, but it was to Caroline that he said, “Really? I didn’t want to ask but I mean I did want to ask. Would you?”

  They all met at the back of the car. “Here,” Audrey said, reaching for his phone, “I’ll take it.”

  “You sure?” the man asked, hesitant. “Or we can just selfie it—that’s classic.”

  “You can still get a selfie, but you’ll want at least one that shows your whole shirt. That’s the best part.”

  She took his phone, took several pictures. The man beamed. Her mother beamed.

  Behind them, against the car’s rear window, the trapped yellow jacket smashed itself up and down, up and down, unable to get free.

  In Montana, Harper Harper was out on the deck photographing wildfire smoke through the pine trees while listening to her little brother Ethan tell a long story about a trick he’d pulled on his friends. The story seemed more BS than not, but Harper liked that he still wanted to impress her, especially given how infrequently they saw each other anymore.

  She pulled a crushed package of menthol Pall Malls—the green box—from her back pocket. Seeing this, Ethan interrupted himself to ask, “Can I have one, too?”

  “Sure,” she said, tapping out her own and putting it between her lips before fishing for the matchbook she’d wedged inside the box. “You can have one the way I got my first one.”

  Ethan, being eleven, immediately sensed the con in this offer and wilted his thick eyebrows as he asked: “Which was how, exactly?”

  “Uncle Rob saw me steal some from where Grandma kept them on top of the fridge—and before I could even do anything with them, he surprised me in my room carrying the whole rest of the carton and made me smoke one after another until I threw up.” She struck the match, brought it to her mouth.

  “Did you?”

  She nodded. “I only got through like two or three. Grandma was pissed. At both of us.”

  “I can beat three,” Ethan said. “Let me try. I won’t throw up. I’ve vaped before, anyway. The watermelon kind.”

  “That’s dumb,” Harper said. “Way too dumb a move for a kid like you.”

  Ethan offered the inevitable response: “But it’s not too dumb for you?”

  “It was. It is. I just wasn’t smart enough to know it then. I speak to you now from a place of regret.”

  “A place of regret and cigarettes.”

  She nodded. Fuck, he was smart. She liked him so much.

  Ethan shook his head like she was a bad spokesperson for her cause—she was—and then reached for the orange soda can on the railing. He was lifting it to take a drink when a yellow jacket that had been tucked inside its open mouth pushed out that sticky entrance and flew up at his face. Ethan shrieked and dropped the can. It fizzed a geyser of orange soda that quickly turned into a pool of orange soda, some also landing on his bare feet. He was wearing only swim trunks.

  “Scared ya, huh?” Harper asked. “You OK?”

  “I’m fine,” Ethan said, already bending to inspect the now-several yellow jackets hopping about their new orange soda pond. “I just hate bees.”

  “That’s not a bee,” Harper said. “It’s a yellow jacket. You’d better be careful running around without shoes on. They’re mean.”

  “I’m mean,” Ethan said.

  “Who’s mean?” Annie asked as she came out the sliding door carrying bottles of beer.

  “Your butt,” Ethan and Harper said together. This had been their big joke for days.

  “You two are very related.” Annie handed Harper a bottle.

  Harper smiled at the comment but also glanced through the open doorway and into the house to see if her mom was up from her nap. She didn’t seem to be. “Do you mind putting this in a mug or something for me? I don’t want to have the bottle out in her face if she wakes up.”

  “Of course,” Annie said, reaching to take back the bottle. “I’m sorry, I didn’t even think about it.”

  “No, it’s fine. Just precautions.”

  They’d been keeping their alcohol in a cooler in their room. It wasn’t like they couldn’t drink, or like Shelly, Harper’s mom, had asked them not to, but . . . It would have been better, Harper knew, if they hadn’t brought the beer at all. But they had.

  “Grandpa still has beer in the fridge,” Ethan said, like he was both reading her mind and tattling at the same time. “Plus, him and Grandma order those number drinks when we go out to dinner.”

  “Seven and sevens,” Harper said, picturing the glasses, pin-striped in yellow and pink, that her grandparents served the drinks in whenever making them at home.

  “You don’t have to hide it,” he said. “Mom’s not gonna explode if she sees it. She’s been doing good.”

  “That’s all the more reason, don’t you think—if she’s been doing good?”

  Ethan grinned at her and she recognized the expression as just like her own minus the tooth gap because Ethan was wearing the braces she’d never gotten. (Because she was the one now paying his orthodontist bills.) Their matching grins made her melancholy, or some feeling of indistinct sadness, and to clear it away she told him to leave the bugs alone and finish his story.

  Harper was right then between projects and on vacation in her home state with Annie, who she’d been seeing for a while in a mostly casual way that was maybe now less casual since she’d brought her there. They were at the place on a mountain lake Harper had bought for her mother as a reward, sort of, for her newly claimed sobriety (third time’s a charm) and their still-recent reconciliation. You’d know this if you were following her Instagram during those days, and if you weren’t: What was your problem? Supposedly everyone was following Harper Harper’s Instagram during those days.*

  Montana was also on fire. Acres and acres of the state—a million, no hyperbole, Readers, a million acres, including a swath of Glacier National Park—burned red orange to black, the sky overcast not with clouds but with smoke that wouldn’t clear. Harper had posted a video where gray ash fell like strands of disintegrating clouds. Lots of someone elses had tagged shots of her and Annie and Ethan delivering bottled water to the overworked fire crews in her old hometown, the place of her previous life.

  In two days, she would be due back in LA to work on The Happenings at Brookhants. She was a producer on this one, which was new and somewhat overwhelming, TBH. Especially because, at least at the moment, Annie at her side holding two coffee mugs of beer—not to mention the lapping lake, the falling ash, her brother trying to show off for both of them by wildly chucking rocks over the railing—was making her life in LA seem very distant. She wouldn’t have particularly minded if everything off the edge of the deck, the whole country over to LA, disappeared in that smoke for another ten days or so and she could stay here and shake lake water from her ears while encouraging her mother to go ahead and turn up the Roxette mix she’d been playing on a loop since they’d arrived.