The planter moved, and many lanterns now garishly lighting her, the full measure of Eleanor Faderman’s undoing was assessed, from the salt paste of dried sweat on her forehead, which matted and coarsened her pale hair so that it looked uncomfortably similar to animal hide, to the remaining bubble crusts of froth on her blue lips.
Eleanor Faderman, her cold body stiff and contorted and still dressed in her nightclothes. Eleanor Faderman, one hand gripping her stolen book. Eleanor Faderman, so many angel’s trumpets dropped around her, on her, smashed beneath her (they learned, when she was carried out), that the ground was more petal than stone, the cloying scent causing headaches in several of the onlookers.
No one had words for this ugliness, an ugliness magnified both by occurring in this place of such beauty and by its nearness to the deaths of Flo and Clara.
After all, Readers, words are only words with word meanings.
Eventually, it was Principal Libbie Brookhants herself who said, “Oh dear God. I think she’d been eating them.” She then carefully knelt and scooped up a handful of angel’s trumpets for the crowd’s inspection. The flowers she was holding were like those hanging from the branches above in every way save one: those in her palm bore clear indications of tooth marks, one or two bites missing from each, the edges of the bites browned with quick decay. The faculty now looked more closely at the blooms on the ground near Eleanor. There were bite marks in most of them, too many to count.
For the second time in a single semester, authorities were alerted, and soon members of the local police force made their way to the Brookhants campus.
For the second time in a single semester, parents were contacted via telegram with unthinkable news about their daughter and her time away at school.
For the second time in a single semester, the same copy of Mary MacLane’s book was found with the dead.
Tinseltown
Audrey Wells was eating an avocado and facon sandwich with her best friend Noel at the Bewildered Hiker in Griffith Park. This was something they used to do a lot.* But first they’d run three or four miles through the park, sometimes scaring each other by pretending to see rattlesnakes because they’d seen one once before.
Sometimes they’d pretend that they didn’t see the celebrities they actually did see heading up to the Observatory and back, or pushing their kids in jogging strollers; but there were also times that they said hi because they knew them, or at least knew them through so-and-so.
Used to be that even the Bewildered Hiker itself could be a little star clogged, though less so since social media made it a thing. Now there were too many tourists hovering around its outdoor tables and positioning their phones to take not-as-discreet-as-they-imagine pics of, I don’t know, fill in your favorite sweaty, trail-climbing, vegan-chili-eating influencer here: ____________.
Audrey and Noel were both on one side of a table, sharing a bench beneath a tree that kept dropping its green seedbud things on them.
“The San BernaDinosaurs,” Noel said that day. “Because dinosaurs.” He was squeezing agave nectar into his iced tea. There was now a small hill of buildup in the bottom of his glass.
“It feels too much like one you’ve already used,” Audrey said.
“We haven’t, though.”
“I know, but it feels like you have.” She brushed green seedbuds from his arm. They’d been talking about band names for what seemed to her a very long time.
Audrey Wells had known Noel Shipler for the entirety of her life. Noel’s father produced the House Mother movies alongside Audrey’s own father (which is how he’d first met Caroline). And years later their families spent Christmas ski vacations together. (Though this was, of course, before Audrey’s parents divorced and Caroline had her difficult period.)
Noel and Audrey were, in fact, in a quintessentially mid-90s music video together as toddlers. It’s one you might remember because of the series of short-lived (and confusing) controversies it provoked. Shot for rock band the Yellow Credenzas’ song “What Your Therapist Told You About Me,” the video’s gimmick is that Audrey and Noel are dressed up like other, more established acts of the day and imitate their more popular music videos—Oasis and Alanis Morissette and Counting Crows, Fiona Apple and Bush. You get the idea: tiny children playacting superstar make believe while alt-rockers sing obnoxiously enigmatic lyrics behind them.
Adorable, everyone agreed, the fans all loved it. Even more so once the trouble started.
That had to do with the video’s closing segment, which mocked (celebrated, the Yellow Credenzas swore) the “Macarena” video. For this portion, Audrey and Noel were both dressed in tiny black suits paired with loud, citrus-colored ties and the fluffy fake eyebrows needed to accurately imitate Los del Rio—the duo who sang the chorus of the “Macarena.”
People might have let that go as charming, but then those scenes were cut together with other scenes where Audrey and Noel were also dressed in the revealing 1990s club clothes and wild makeup of the backup dancers actually doing the Macarena in that famous video, the very feminine backup dancers. Our sweet toddlers nailed the song’s infectious silliness—and the dance, of course that—but, as you might now be recalling, they added one additional element to the mix: a kiss. Or two, really: one while they are dressed as men in their suits and one as women in their shiny hot pants and belly shirts. These are, of course, the most minuscule lip pecks imaginable, the stuff of Norman Rockwell illustrations.
And yet . . .
Because we are a nation of spewing, bigoted asshats, these things were enough to warrant editorials and boycotts and even the odd death threat. Some people claimed that Noel and Audrey had been oversexualized in the video, while others were more concerned about its blatant genderfuckery (though those two camps of complainers sometimes aligned in their disgust). And then there were the random racists who took issue with a black Noel and a white Audrey kissing.
At any rate, soon enough the whole thing was dubbed “that controversial video” that made people angry. It went on to be nominated for Best Editing and Art Direction at the MTV Video Music Awards, among others. (It won, though, only for Viewer’s Choice, and Audrey and Noel—holding hands as they climbed to the stage in matching tuxedos—accepted the statue.*
My larger point here is that Noel Shipler and Audrey Wells have always, since they can remember, had intertwined lives—more loosely strung together during some periods, in tighter knots during others. They have dated. They have hooked up. They have not done those things for a while and have then gone back to doing those things and stopped again.
Put simply, Readers: they text each other first with news. Or they did so for a long time, anyway.
“I’m not completely against Fresnomads. Or FresKnowHow? FresNowhere?” Noel paused, set down the agave bottle, and tilted his glass to check the thickening contents at the bottom.
“I know you get mad when I say this, but maybe you need to move on from California.”
“Not it.”
Noel wrote and produced for all kinds of musical artists, his tastes and abilities wide ranging and his work ethic dogged. (His parents had started him on piano lessons right around the time he starred in that music video with Audrey.) Noel Shipler was talented, but more than that: other musicians liked having him around. They felt both put at ease by his demeanor and legitimately inspired by his suggestions. He had a knack for blending styles in ways that seemed like they shouldn’t work until they did.