“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.
This was the dangerous thing about coming home and being with family: the collision with her previous self.
Only six summers before, Harper had stepped onto her first set for her first film role of any kind. She had tried, then, to act like she knew it was a fluke, some random one-off chance for her to play movie star, but the whole time she’d held inside her the terrifying—it was terrifying—knowledge that there was hope in this situation she’d dumbly lucked into. Real hope. Hope that it could potentially change things for her forever, if she didn’t screw it up.