Later, horrible Charles would say that he’d found great purpose and meaning in the fact of his life being spared that day. By all accounts he used that purpose to idle away his remaining days, spending his inheritance while failing at several half-hearted business ventures and in general behaving like the brutish, moneyed bowl of rancid bowels that he was. This behavior lasted for a period of several years, until he was killed on the maiden voyage of a very big ship that met a very bad end.* But thankfully this story is not about cousin Charles, so let us leave him to his turbid depths.
Death from anaphylaxis is not known to be gentle. There were some signs, in the shape of the smashed undergrowth, in the piles of vomit found nearby, that our strong, young heroines did struggle together for a time.
How long Flo and Clara clung to each other, how hard they might have worked to move beyond the yellow jackets, the nest, is impossible to ascertain—and would, I’m sure, be quite difficult to put into words, even if we did know. Given the sheer number of stings each received—and so many of them to their faces—it couldn’t have been long before they both succumbed to the thickening dark from which they would not wake.
That they might have had the chance, in their final moments, to say just how much they meant to one another, the real desires and textures of their souls, is a most doubtful thing given the horror of their circumstances. What is important to remember, Readers, is that they had said these things to each other before those circumstances befell them.
They were discovered very near to the place in the nest where Clara’s foot had made the tear. There were so many angry yellow jackets still swarming the area, like a buzzing net draped over the whole of the thicket, that the responding Brookhants faculty, and soon after, the Tiverton police, determined that a controlled fire was the only way to get near enough to bring the girls out.
Brookhants students later told stories of flaming yellow jackets making their way from their now-burning nest, through the woods and onto campus, before drowning themselves, bodies hissing, in the fountain in front of Main Hall. Apparently, there were so many singed yellow jacket carcasses floating dead atop its surface the following morning that students began dipping their hands in to take them: death souvenirs. Eventually, the groundskeeper was sent to clear them with a net. Despite this carcass-skimming, the water is said to have soon turned fetid, an oily black algae growing along its sides and surface. So rank was this water, so unclean, that within days the school had no choice but to drain, scrub, and refill the fountain. This, like so many Brookhants stories, may only be the stuff of dorm-room-lights-off legend.
Brookhants students later told stories of flaming yellow jackets . . . drowning themselves, bodies hissing, in the fountain.
But then, stranger things have happened. Even, especially, at Brookhants.
That our complicated, wonderful heroines were found twined together, hands clasped and heart to heart, has never been disputed. But given the time it took to rouse awful Charles and make enough sense of his stupid mutterings to locate them, and then to assess the situation, bring the supplies, and burn the nest—coupled with the number of stings each girl received—it is of no surprise that Flo’s and Clara’s mortal bodies had not fared well.
Any exposed skin was welted: their hands and necks and, the worst, their faces, which were now balloon masks of protruding lips and swollen eyes. Clara’s eyes had been bleeding, the tracks of blood dried down her cheeks. The attack was so severe, so ferocious, that their topography of red hives, a telltale sign of the anaphylaxis, was quite obscured by bruising. The unfortunate students who saw them carried out of the woods—for in their makeshift planning, the officials had forgotten to bring sheets to cover them—said their faces looked like bitten and rotting Black Oxford apples. More than one girl made that comparison.*
I did tell you this story was ghastly.
You might think it an improvement on said ghastliness that within three years of this terrible day, the Brookhants School for Girls was closed, its buildings left empty and wanting for students who would not arrive. But you should also know that before that happened, three more heroines died on the property, each in a most troubling way.
It’s true, of course, that all death is troubling to those of us left alive to bear witness, but certainly among the most troubling of all are the ugly, unexpected deaths of young people just starting to understand who and how they might be in the world. Or how they might remake the world to better be in it.
Perhaps equally troubling are the deaths of older people submerged in deep regret.
Everything else to come in these pages comprises the story of three heroines from the present and more heroines from the past and how they all collided around Brookhants, and a book, and also a book about Brookhants.
I’ll say it again: Brookhants, and a book, and a book about Brookhants.
And who, you ask, am I? The voice telling you to come this way, to follow me? Some hazy apparition with a beckoning hand? A thousand yellow jackets shaped to look like a body with intention, one prone to scatter into diverging paths if provoked?
I can promise you that by the time we reach the end, you’ll know me much better than I’ll know you. (And if I seem to know things I shouldn’t, or couldn’t possibly, well that’s part of our bargain. I’ll cite my research when I can, but when I can’t: I do now ask for your trust in me to fill in the gaps as I see fit. I can see quite a lot from this vantage point.)
Finally, let me say, right up front, how sorry I am about all the potential for puns. I cannot help that the school’s name is Brookhants* and that it’s said to be haunted. Whether it was, in fact, haunted even before Clara, Flo, and the yellow jackets depends on where and how you start the story of Brookhants, and for how many years you’re willing to trace it.
I told you, this is only one way to tell it. And only one place to end it.
And perhaps it hasn’t ended yet.
So let’s begin.
Meet Your Plain, Bad Heroines Three
In the summer of 20— in Hollywood, Audrey Wells watched as her mom, Caroline Wells, used the wipers to try to clear a confetti of ash from their windshield. This left a gray smear across their view, a hazy blotting out that matched the smoke blotting out the California sun.
Now it was like seeing the world through the skin of a ghost.
Los Angeles was on fire: palm trees with flame canopies where there should have been leaves and hillside houses slumped into towers of char like the oversize remnants of those black snake fireworks. One blaze had jumped the freeway and missed their own neighborhood by a mile. For now. The same could not be said for the homes of some of Caroline’s still-new(ish) clients. Caroline Wells: scream queen turned real estate agent.
“And dog food,” Caroline was saying, still messing with the wipers and now the blue spray stuff as well. That did the trick. The ghost skin washed away. “The Chavezes have one of those poodle mixes. He’s bitty,” she added, “so I’ve never been scared of him.” She looked quickly at Audrey and tacked on: “I haven’t.”
“Dog food,” Audrey repeated as she swiped out of Instagram and into her notes app to type it. This was not an item typically found on their shopping lists. Or, like, ever before.