Our story begins in 1902, at the Brookhants School for Girls. Flo and Clara are obsessed with each other and with a daring young writer named Mary MacLane. To show their devotion to Mary, the girls establish their own private club and call it the Plain Bad Heroine Society. They meet in secret in a nearby apple orchard, where their bodies are later discovered with a copy of Mary’s book splayed beside them. Less than five years later, the school closes its doors forever --- but not before three more people mysteriously die on the property. Over a century later, Brookhants is back in the news when wunderkind writer Merritt Emmons publishes a breakout book celebrating the queer, feminist history surrounding the “haunted and cursed” Gilded Age institution.

When Cameron Post’s parents die suddenly in a car crash, her shocking first thought is relief --- that they’ll never know that, hours earlier, she had been kissing a girl. But that relief doesn’t last, when she is forced to live with her ultra-conservative aunt Ruth and a whole new slew of challenges.