Tyler and I are recording our TikTok for @faintingheroines in Mulholland Manor’s basement when the footsteps start pacing the floor above us. I look at the ceiling and stutter the slightest bit at the 25-second mark, while I’m saying, “On the Night of the Seventh Moon has mad Loki-the-trickster vibes—not this Loki [image of my man Tom Hiddleston] but this L-L-Loki [image of Loki in an old Icelandic manuscript]—Byronic hero in disguise, trickster housekeeper, mysterious relatives, lying therapist, and the titular night of the seventh moon, a totally made-up Black Forest festival dedicated to Loki.”

We squeeze into what Tyler’s stepmother Julie calls a chair-and-a-half, shoulders and thighs points of heat as we press against each other. I always want to touch him, his shoulders muscled from playing lacrosse, the smooth skin on the inside of his arm, but I’m restraining myself now, holding the book up for Tyler’s iPad. My legs crossed under his mother’s flowered dress, a dress he pulled out of a closet and asked me to wear, the lace on the hem and the neckline itching my skin even though I wear leggings and a camisole under it. When Tyler giggles at the word titular, I feel his laughter in my body too. I roll my eyes. (My BFF Bella would say, “Typical Tyler.”) Normally I’d ask for a redo—but we’re on a strict deadline, because tonight his father and stepmother are having dinner at my parents’ house and they’ll meet for the first time. I’m nervous as it is.

The footsteps reverberate along the walls, up and down the staircases, like the deep heartbeat of Mulholland Manor. They are ghostly, phantom footsteps. Not Tyler’s dad’s heavy footsteps, even when he wears his slippers, or Julie’s light fast footsteps, like a spider picking its way across the ceiling.

Tyler leans in. “This is classic gothic romance. Tropes: falling in love with a mysterious stranger. No fainting at all, sorry folks. I won’t reveal too much because spoilers.” He shrugs. He’s all relaxed on camera in his 1980s The Clash concert tee (“As if he even listens to The Clash,” Bella would say). He points to the book in my hands. “Note the typical gothic romance cover, girl in a white dress with a castle on a cliff behind her, one window lit up. Why do castles always keep that one light on? Haven’t they heard of conservation?”

The footsteps stop, and then start again. I concentrate on the iPad screen, smile wide. “Someone’s always watching our heroine. [Beat] We give this 5 smelling salts.” I want to scratch the back of my neck but that won’t look good on TikTok. I’m sure I’m developing a rash.

@faintingheroines started when we were exploring Mulholland Manor in the first year of the pandemic, when we still Zoomed into school, and Fred, Tyler’s father, had to be talked into letting me into the house. I lied and told both him and Tyler I was vaxxed. My parents oppose Big Pharma. “I’ve done the research,” my mother told me. I’ve never been sick, except for colds, and Mom said, “If you want you can get vaccinated. I don’t trust the rushed approval process, and Covid isn’t as bad as the government says it is.” She wanted me to make my own decision: I agreed with her. After all, no one I knew even had Covid! A little white lie to have a boyfriend like Tyler. Tyler, who I’ve had a crush on since freshman year, like every other straight girl at my school and every gay guy. Tyler, who looks at me as if I’m the lacrosse ball he wants to catch.

Sometimes I wake at night, thinking I should tell the truth. Now that we just went back to school in person—a year and a half after lock-down, wearing masks—it seems kind of silly. But we all tell lies, right? Can I count mine, covering my skin like a heavy exoskeleton? I’ve told Tyler I read all those boring old French and Russian novels he loves. Even Tyler must be lying to me.

Anyway, one day Tyler pulled me into a closet, deep in one of the lower floors of the Manor (“We have to make out in every room of Mulholland Manor,” he said). It was full of boxes of sepia-edged paperbacks belonging to Tyler’s mom, who left 15 years ago, with no communication afterwards but a postcard from Cannes in 2008. Why did Fred keep the books hidden in the closet? Perhaps they meant something to him, although gothics were totally not his jam (he leaves splayed-open Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum novels around the Manor). Pages of heroines fainting and fleeing, haunted by ghosts and husbands, discovering inheritances, royal lineages, or curses, imprisoned in dungeons, attics, mansions, castles, and abbeys, and love lost then found because the heroines fought for it or finally fell into the arms of the man they first thought was their enemy. We read them to each other, alternating paragraphs, in person or over Facetime late at night (“How super-Victorian of you,” Bella said), and really got into them, making silly comments about the books to each other. And then Tyler said, “We should post on TikTok,” and @faintingheroines was born. And now we’ve got over 10k followers!

If I’m honest, I love these books, no matter how misogynist they are (looking at you, Jamaica Inn). Perhaps (I like to think) I’m on my way to becoming a heroine, to the extent I can be: I’m not an orphan, have no mysterious relatives (as far as I know), don’t need to become a governess, have not journeyed to a mysterious castle in Italy to save a friend (as if I have the money), have not been threatened by any ghostly monks or nuns, have no secrets (other than the vaxxing thing), and I haven’t (not yet) met a mysterious wealthy man who will totally gaslight me or try to kill me.

Now, Tyler slips from the chair-and-a-half to the floor, working on the recording with his editing app. His hair falls across his face and I resist the urge to push it back. I can’t believe that I got a boyfriend during the pandemic, especially one as cute as Tyler. Neither can Bella who is always the pretty one when we go out; when I told her we’d gotten together, she said, “That’s amazing” as if she sucked one of those sour candies she likes so much.

I scratch the back of my neck. But when I start to pull the dress over my head, Tyler looks up, “Katie, I love that dress on you, please wear it tonight.” If I say that his eyes are full of love for me, just like some hero, would that be too corny? I smooth the dress back over my knees, try to tuck the lace at the neck so it doesn’t rub.

“I heard those footsteps again,” I say.

“Old houses make weird noises.” Tyler replays the recording, and adds the Loki images, both Hiddleston and the Norse god, types a string of hashtags. I mean, I live in an old house too, a small cabin in Topanga Canyon, with door frames all crooked because of a slide in an El Nino year 30 years ago and window frames that swell in the rain, but we don’t ever hear footsteps.

“They’re not old house noises.” Mulholland Manor is an old big ass house built on a ridge above Mulholland in the Hollywood Hills. In the tradition of gothic romances, Tyler’s house has a story: the house was built by his great-grandfather, the Oscar-award-winning actor Giles Tilney. Giles imported a Tudor-style house, stone by stone, timber by timber, from England to pretend he was not descended from Jews escaping a Galician shtetl, and parts of it probably are from the Tudor period. There’s even a friggin tower (we can’t go into it, Fred says there’s an asbestos issue, which sounds pretty sus to me). This is their family home, four generations lived here, and in L.A. this is not a thing. Tyler’s dad dug two floors of basements under the house because he couldn’t expand to the side, couldn’t expand above (“Damn regulations,” he says): a media room, some storage, a saltwater lap pool, and a room that was once a playroom and is now a studio we use to record TikToks. Mulholland Manor is a maze–I’m sure the rooms shift and reconfigure, just like the staircases at Hogwarts, and the expensive chrome lighting never illuminates the dark corners where walls join ceilings. My parents’ little rented house (tucked into the end of a box canyon) is the size of Mulholland Manor’s living room.

“Perhaps you are imagining the footsteps.” These are the “explanations” Tyler’s given for the footsteps: (1) he doesn’t hear them, ergo, they don’t exist; (2) the house is settling; (3) Fred is pacing on the floor above; (4) it’s the plumbing, either old and/or unsecured; (5) one of the everchanging housekeepers is cleaning; and (6) overgrown branches are knocking against the windows.

“I’m not imagining it.” I watch the video over his shoulder. On the screen, I look very small beside Tyler. I usually wear more makeup than my liking, more than I ever wore before I started dating Tyler, before I saw the photos of his exes, all with perfectly straightened hair, eyeliner expertly winged. I didn’t have time to put on makeup today.

“Do you want to fight now?”

“Listen!” The footsteps start again, echoing. I’m sure the footsteps climb the tower, the one with the “asbestos issue.”

His fingers skid across his iPad screen as he fast-forwards through the recording. “You think my mom met some nefarious end, instead of running away with a D-list celebrity who was on Dancing with the Stars and just too embarrassed to show her face again.”

In my world, mothers don’t disappear. They stay around and annoy you, asking you who you are going out with and nagging you to do your homework or clean your room. But you trust them—“I do everything in your best interest,” Mom told me once. It’s true. I think. So there’s got to be a reason. I hear the footsteps in my bones, sort of like when Dad plays horrible jazz music that sets me on edge.  

And sometimes I think (thoughts I push back): perhaps it would be easier not to have a mother who can have a hold on you. Someone who doesn’t hem you in and tell you what to think. When I was younger, I hung on every word she said; I believed she knew everything about anything, books and the way to act with friends and politics. But now, she still sees me as a little kid that she can control instead of being seventeen, a year away from going to college.

I flip through the pages of our next subject for @faintingheroines, Nightmare at Swinton Abbey. On the cover: a girl with beautiful Kate Middleton hair, in a lacey nightdress, runs through a graveyard, a mansion looming on a hill (one window doused with faint yellow light). The tagline on the cover: Can she escape her passionate thrall to a man of evil? Truly bat-shit crazy: a cult’s satanic sacrifices, a charismatic husband married after a whirlwind romance, wives buried in the graveyard. Someone, I assume Tyler’s mother, dog-eared the pages, and, on one page, made faint notations. I peer closer: I am still here written in pencil.

Chills run down my spine.

What was Tyler’s mother trying to tell us? I am still here. That she was still somewhere in Mulholland Manor? Perhaps imprisoned in the tower or in a secret basement room? Pacing on the reclaimed wood flooring? Or dead? Buried in the rose garden she loved to tend, but Fred has always wished to raze to the ground (as per Tyler), or under the thin ribbon of pool? Her ghost haunting the halls of the Manor, rising in the steam of the jacuzzi tubs? Certainly Fred must have been an unkind husband, as he did not love his wife’s roses, but would he have resorted to—murder or imprisonment?

“Should I post?” Tyler asks.

“Whatever.”

“Don’t be like that.”

“Like what?”

“Posted,” he says.

Fred opens the door without knocking and we both grab our N95s and strap them on. His slicked-back hair is not kind to his receding hairline and he’s dressed a bit too formal to meet my parents—in a pressed button-down shirt and polished shoes that cost more than my entire outfit. His forehead wrinkles above bushy eyebrows and his N95 is a duckbill covering the bottom part of his face. The scent of hand sanitizer wafts from his skin. “Julie’s finally ready. Time to go.” On the set of films he directs, everyone calls him the General, and every sentence sounds like an order. His eyes rove between us, as if following an invisible string attaching our hearts. He’s trying to collect evidence of something—our kissing with tongues or spreading Covid germs all over each other’s bodies. Or just as simple as me being there, the scholarship kid at school.

I look closely at him, assess whether he could be a murderer. There are no tells for a murderer, no secret signs. That’s what makes it insidious. Sometimes there’s nothing that distinguishes a good person from a bad. Or reveals that a person who acts badly may want to be good.

“Just gotta put on my shoes. We’ll meet you outside,” Tyler says.

Fred turns piercing eyes on me. “You look beautiful today.” He’s never said anything like that to me before, and a warmth flares in my chest, as if my body glows under his gaze. Then, he closes the door to the studio behind him and his footsteps reverberate up the staircase to the main floor. The phantom footsteps echo lighter, faster. An odd doubling.

“I’m sorry. I don’t want to fight with you.” Tyler kisses me with our masks on. Like that Magritte painting with the two lovers kissing even though they wear hoods. I can’t stay angry at him. I giggle and he starts laughing too.

His phone chirps. “Already 25 likes.”

“Your dad scares me.”

“He really likes you.” When I make a face, Tyler says, “No, really, he told me. He didn’t say anything like that about my other girlfriends.”

I imagine a string of paper doll cutouts spread between Tyler’s hands, clones of each other, except the last one, clasped between his fingers. Me. Perhaps Fred does like me. He sent me flowers on my birthday, in a vase filled with lemons; Mom was impressed.

We walk up the stairs into the main hall; it’s two stories high, with a staircase splitting into two at the first level. In the corner of my eye, shadows scamper across the beamed ceiling. Fred and Julie wait in the front seat of a black Audi SUV, idling in the driveway, exhaust puffing into the chilly night air. She’s got perfectly styled hair and diamond solitaires in her ears and a talent to say something inoffensive and then fade, an insubstantiality like footsteps on carpeting.

I hesitate before climbing into the SUV. Why are we doing this? Dad with his wild curly hair, needing a trim, in his Birkenstocks and cutoffs and tie-dye. “Hey, I went to Cal,” he always says to excuse his hippiness, but he went to Cal in the 80s, not the 60s. My mom with hoops in her ears running from earlobe to cartilage. They run an organic vegan café in Santa Monica, popular before Covid; since lockdown they’ve pivoted to take-out and expanded the patio, but now they have more quiet discussions that stop when I come near. “Please don’t act too weird when you meet Tyler’s family,” I’d told them. Dad responded, “Whatever do you mean?”

Inside, the car smells of leather and Julie’s signature scent, with a top note of vanilla, custom-blended at a West Hollywood perfumery. Fred doesn’t turn to look at us but grips the steering wheel with his driving gloves. As the tires lurch on the cobblestone driveway, I glance back at Mulholland Manor. It hulks behind us with its crenelated roof, windows blocked by dark oleander bushes. The one tower without a matching pair. The ground must’ve settled since the Manor was assembled—the building is crooked and lopsided, although inside the floors and walls are stable. All of the old leaded pane windows dark, except for one pale yellow light gleaming in the window of the tower.

We curve downhill, passing estate after estate until we can see the silver river of the 101 at the base of the hills. After we started going out (he texted me after seeing my face in the Zoom box in English—Katie Morrison she/her), Tyler would drive me home in the warm velvet nights of Los Angeles, the glow of lights from both the Valley and downtown like stars, and he’d do doughnuts in silent parking lots, leaving circular skid marks under the streetlamps, my heart a butterfly against my chest bones, as if it wanted to escape, but not too far, and he’d stop the car across multiple parking spaces to kiss me, his hand on my thigh. The smell of burning rubber and brakes and the sweet floral of the Jo Malone perfume Tyler gave me.

Julie glances over the headrests. My stomach tenses. I can’t imagine the horror of this evening—why did we decide this was a good time to meet? It was Tyler’s idea, I know, we’d been going out a year and he couldn’t believe that our parents hadn’t met yet. But to tell the truth: I don’t want Fred to see where I live. How will he treat me afterwards?

Julie smiles, showing white teeth. “I just watched your latest TikTok. I remember my mother reading that book.”

“What are you talking about?” Fred says.

“The kids’ TikToks—reviewing these old 70s gothic romances?”

“Tyler, that’s an interesting use of your time.”

Interesting is never good.

Tyler’s face is inscrutable. “Katie really likes the gothics.”

I want to say: “This was Tyler’s idea.” But I don’t. (“You imagine he’s something he’s not,” Bella said once.)

“Shouldn’t you be studying for the SATs?”

“Filming takes like less than an hour,” Tyler says. He reaches for my hand.

Tension spreads like an oily thick cloud. I say, “We just found these books in a closet and started reading and reviewing them. Stanford would love this on an application.” Fred always brags about graduating from Stanford.

Fred doesn’t respond to my kickass comment. He merely says, “In a closet? I’ve forgotten about my mother’s books—I meant to throw them out. They are worth nothing.”

Tyler’s grandmother’s books, not his mother’s books? I lean back against the leather seats. So there’s no message from Tyler’s mom? That doesn’t mean Fred didn’t kill or imprison his wife. Look, I know he really didn’t. Or I’m almost totally sure he didn’t. Or, I think, perhaps she’s just a terrible person to abandon her child. She can be both the runaway victim and a horrible person, and can’t be forced into the confines of a gothic romance.

The speed of Fred’s car is seductive. On the 101, the hills flash by, and then the backs of tacky apartment buildings and businesses, pale dirty beige stucco, the flats of the Valley stretching in ordered blocks and straight lines from the Hollywood Hills (topped by Mulholland Manor) to a mountain range I can’t even name. Fred clears his throat. “Katie, I want to confirm the Covid measures your parents are taking.”

I sit straight up. The tone of his voice always does that. “We’re eating outside and the Covid tests they took are negative. So we are good to go!” My voice sounds disgustingly cheery.

“And they are all vaccinated?”

I clear my throat. He likes me, right? And I’m tired of lying. “No. Uh, none of us are vaccinated.”

“What?” Fred says.

I try to make a joke of it. “You know, we’re all Topanga hippies. . .” My voice trails off. I can see the curve of Fred’s cheek from where I sit; his skin reddens and gets blotchy.

“What the fuck?” Fred says. “You’re not vaccinated?”

The car fills with Fred’s presence, smoldering and dark and red.

What would one of my heroines do? The feisty fiery heroines! The heroine (an Indian princess) in Merlin’s Keep who steals a gem from a Tibetan monastery to save her friend and restore her lover’s sight at the bequest of the evil sorcerer, or the heroine in The Moon-Spinners who uncovers a jewelry theft ring and saves the lives of both her love and his younger brother? Or am I like the heroine in A Bride for Belvedere who gets thrown down a mineshaft and then waits (crying and hysterical) until a man saves her?

Tyler moves away from me. My body is dissolving. Perhaps I’ll melt into the leather of the seats and never be found again.

Fred takes the next exit off the freeway a little too fast and pulls into a Chevron station, parks in one of the spaces reserved for the convenience store. We’re somewhere in the Valley, near North Hollywood, a liquor store and a tattoo shop across from us. The air conditioning is so cold.

“You’ve been lying to us.”

I take a deep breath. This would really be the best time to faint. How do gothic heroines faint? The interior of the car whirls around me. Fred, Julie, Tyler, and the clean windows. Blackness edges the corner of my sight. My cheek against the warm leather seat. “What’s going on?” Fred says. Tyler elbows me. I open my eyes. The interior of the car, stable.

My voice is very low, almost a whisper. “Sorry.”

“Girl, speak up. I can barely hear you.”

“Sorry,” I say a little louder and I feel like I’m shouting.

“Fred,” Julie says. The quietest chiding I’ve ever heard.

He ignores her, picks up his phone.

“I’m calling Katie a Lyft.”

“Fred, be reasonable,” Julie says. And then she leans deep into her seat and presses her lips together.

“Reasonable! Reasonable people get vaccinated. I’ve been breathing the same air as she has. And to think I could be breathing the air of her entire family.”

So extra. I wait for Tyler to say something. In gothics, the hero is either Byronic or wimpy, and I’m wondering which one Tyler is. But I guess he’s just a regular boy who’s scared of his father because he says nothing, his hand growing sweaty and uncomfortable in mine, as if it no longer belongs there. A Honda Accord parks next to us and Fred says, “Your Lyft is here.”

I realize that I’m crying. Tyler still says nothing. Julie rolls down her window and says, “Darling, I’m so sorry. Please give your parents our regrets about dinner.”

I try to slam the door but even that doesn’t work out right; the Audi is so fancy the door closes slowly. And then I’m in the back seat of the Accord and the driver—a woman with hair dyed blue—pulls out of the lot. I watch Fred’s SUV disappear as we turn a corner to get onto the freeway.

The driver meets my eyes in the rearview mirror, passes me tissues. She unrolls one of the windows and my hair flies into my face. I bunch the used tissues in my hand and then slip them into my purse because I don’t know what else to do with them. 

My phone buzzes. Texts from Tyler. You lied to me too. And then: I love you. I turn the notifications to silent. Let him see the little message that says my notifications are turned off for his texts. After all, he didn’t even try to protect me from his dad.

We’re still driving on the freeway; the freeways are endless labyrinths. I can go anywhere, do anything. I fumble with my phone, Facetime Bella. Her face fills the screen. Dark curly hair buoyant around her face; her irises reflect her iPhone’s screen. “How’s the parental dinner going?” she says. In the background, the wicker of the hanging chair in her bedroom.

“I’m in a Lyft! Tyler’s dad kicked me out of his car because I’m not vaccinated.”

Bella’s face turns into pixels and then solidifies again. Mom’s going to kill me because I’m using all of our data on the family cell plan. “Oh girl. What a creep.”

“I don’t even know why I lied to them.”

“Don’t you?”

Sometimes, I want a best friend who will always be on my side, not one who will throw up a mirror and call me on my B.S. I’m not sure which one I want now. But yes, I know. I wanted Tyler so badly.

“Well, whatever,” Bella says. “There’s no reason for Fred to be a jerk. And Tyler! What a wimp.”

“Tyler’s scared of Fred.”

“You always want Tyler to be a hero and you the heroine.”

“That’s not true.” I mean, I know we’re not in one of our stupid gothics.

On the pixelating screen, Bella rolls her eyes. “Oh come on, I saw you looking at him on the TikTok you posted today. And you looked so hot—girl, you can get anyone.” Bella’s head sways; she’s swinging in that hanging wicker chair. Leaves of a plant come into the frame, and then disappear. “Let’s see Hostile 17 tonight at the Assembly Rooms. They’re super cool. Or we can order pizza and watch Legally Blonde. Have that Lyft bring you to my house.”

We’re off the freeway now and winding up into Topanga Canyon, the lights of the Valley below in their neat grid. On the hillsides, windows glow in the darkness. “Maybe.”

We hang up. I dial my mother.

“Are you running late, hon?”

“They’re not coming.”

“But the lasagna’s ready.”

“They decided not to come, Mom, because we’re not vaccinated.”

Mom’s quiet for a moment. “Sweetie,” she says, “Sometimes people are ignorant and just don’t get it. There’s so much prejudice against people who chose not to be vaccinated.”

I wonder, though, how much of a choice I really had.

“I’ll be home soon,” I say. The driver turns onto my street, snakes up a steep hill; her headlights illuminate my house. The bleached wood the landlord has never repainted. (“Good thing,” my mother said, “Because if he fixes it up, he’ll raise the rent.”) Light streams from the windows that always leak in the rain.

I lean toward the driver. I’m sure she’s trying not to eavesdrop on all of my drama. Or maybe she wants to listen to it. “Hey, can we turn around and go back to Encino?” I hate the vocal fry in my voice.

“It’s your credit card,” she says. But of course it isn’t; it’s my parents’ credit card. “Submit a new ride request and I’ll accept it.” I fumble with the app, enter Bella’s address, and she makes a quick U-turn on the road and now we’re cruising back down the hill, toward the lighted grid lines of the Valley and Bella’s house, on her block lined with almost identical ranch houses. My phone pings again and it’s a text from an unknown number: This is Fred. I am so sorry. Julie and Tyler are telling me that I overreacted. Can I make it up to you next weekend? Dinner at Mozza? Parents invited too of course.

Oddly formal, but Fred is an old. I lean back in the seat, text Mom so she doesn’t worry. Feeling the pull of the car as it rounds the S-curves, back and forth, heading down the hill to the Valley. The dress still itching my neck. I tug on the neckline, then I’m undoing each of the small pearl buttons on the front of the dress, wrestling with the tight buttonholes, and shrug off the dress. I’m even colder now, just in my leggings and camisole. The dress is light in my hands, like a cloud, and I ball it up, throw it out the open window. White chiffon in the dark, unfolding and flaring in the air like the nightgown of a gothic heroine fleeing a castle through a secret corridor, a graveyard, quicksand, a seaside colonnade, a forest in winter, and then we take another curve and we’re now in the Valley and zooming toward the 101 again. A glimpse of the white dress in the rear window caught on the branches of a black walnut on the hillside.

Replying to Fred and Tyler is a problem for future me. Now, in the Lyft that’s accelerating towards Bella’s ranch home, I change the password for @faintingheroines, a password Tyler will never guess. I scroll through the comments for the On the Night of the Seventh Moon episode and one jumps out at me: What’s up with T? Did you see his face?

I press the arrow to play the episode. There’s Tyler, hot as always. And there’s me, small on the screen, my face glowing. I do look good. I should be bigger. And at the 25-second mark, when I look up and stutter the L in Loki, when I’m hearing the soft footsteps threading through Mulholland Manor, Tyler looks up too. Right before a mask snaps over his face and he giggles at the word titular. Cocks his head as if he’s listening to something far away. And then turns pale. Pale under the tan he’s gotten from playing lacrosse. Like he’s seen—or heard—a ghost.

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Lori Sambol Brody lives in the mountains of Southern California.  Her short fiction has been published in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Tin House Flash Fridays, the New Orleans Review, Craft, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.  Her stories have been chosen for the  Best Small Fictions 2018 and 2019 and Best Microfiction 2021 anthologies, Longform Pick of the Week, and Wigleaf Top 50.  She can be found on social media at @LoriSambolBrody and her website is lorisambolbrody.wordpress.com.

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