How to describePlain Bad Heroines?
The excerpt below reveals more details about the macabre private school deaths.
Maybe you think you already know this story because of the movie made of it.
Credit: William Morrow
Not so, but youll discover that soon enough.
For now, let me acquaint you withVespulamaculifrons: the eastern yellow jacket.
If youre imagining some do-gooder honeybee humming about the pastel pages of a childrens book, dont.
Brookhants students later told stories of flaming yellow jackets…drowning themselves, bodies hissing, in the fountain.Illustrated by Sara Lautman
Eastern yellow jackets are aggressive when provoked, relentless when defending their underground home.
(But then, dont we all?)
In this case theyouwas Clara Broward and my God was she ever in love with Florence Flo Hartshorn.
And more than that, it was humming with the trill of yellow jackets.
And itwashot, the day humid and grayone of those overripe summer days that sometimes linger into fall.
A life about to end.
Twolives about to end, careful Readers.
We know that the year was 1902, and the state the tiniest in the nation: Rhode Island.
We know that the Brookhants fall term had been in session for six weeks.
Cousin Charles had been the one tasked with driving Clara to campus.
The important thing to know is that Charles and Clara were arguing as they arrived.
As, it seems, Charles was expecting of her.
She then asked where she could find Flo.
Several of those students, including a third-year, Eleanor Faderman,* told her to try the orchard.
They told her thats where Flo had been headed earlier.
- Remember this name.
During these moments, stupid Charles still stewed behind the steering wheel, his great engine chugging.
But he did not then pull down his goggles and drive away from campus.
Instead, he watched Clara.
Watched, disbelieving, each step she took away from him and toward the tree line.
And then she disappeared completely into the dark mouth that was the paths entrance.
Thisis where the onlooking classmates begin to differ in their accounts.
Some later insisted that Clara knew her knuckle-dragging cousin had left the car to chase after her.
Others said she didnt know, hadnt seen.
And Clara herself could never say again.
Flo herself solved the problem of unsuitable womens clothing by wearing the castoffs of her older brother.
But then Flos mother was a sculptor, and her friends were all artists, most of them European.
She liked to find ways to flout convention and usually supported the same instincts in her daughter.
(When, Readers, she was remembering to remember that she had a daughter.)
(She was cousin Charless favorite aunt, after all.)
Even before what happened happened, Brookhants students had plenty of stories about those woods.
The woods were haunted, the students said.
The orchard,with Flo,and with Flos hands and mouth, too.
Its worth mentioning that some of the Brookhants students also had stories about Flo and Clara.
And there were others, many others, who admired them.
A few who probably envied them.
Maybe this small but not insignificant group was even afraid of them.
From Plain Bad Heroines Emily M. Danforth 2020.
Reprinted courtesy of William Morrow, HarperCollins Publishers.
