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“You know she’s a lesbian, right?”
Bella didn’t even look up from Breaking Dawn to dismissively say, “Uh, yeah, duh. Everybody knows that, mate.”
“What?” blurted Katie, who had hoped to get more of a reaction from her new bestie, and was not under the impression that everybody knew that, actually.
“Yeah, she came out on SNL or something. To say fuck you to Trump, I think.”
“What?” This sounded incredibly unlikely to Katie.
“Yeah, only the weirdos who want her to get back with ‘RPatz’,” Bella lifted one hand for a half-hearted air quote, “believe that—or the nutters who think they’re secretly married and have kids or whatever.”
“What?” Katie repeated for the third time. This time she had something more to add, though: “Emma never dated Robert Pattinson.”
That finally made Bella look up from her book. She stared at Katie in confusion, so Katie raised her eyebrows and nodded towards the bluetooth speaker between them on Bella’s bed.
“I need a man who is handsome, clever and rich, because I’m handsome. Clever. And. Rich!” it sang cheekily, in the voice of the biggest female singer on the planet.
Now it was Bella’s turn to lift her eyebrows, but in surprise rather than in duh.
“Emma Woods isn’t gay,” she said. She was too Gen Z to add an “ew,” but there was definitely a bit of a hint of one in her tone. “She literally just sang that she needs a man.”
Katie rolled her eyes.
“It’s a joke song, she’s making fun of what the media says about her,” she clapped back, as if she had not taken the song 100% at face value the first forty-three or so times she’d heard it.
“Uh, yeah, obviously, but how does that make her a lesbian?”
“Because it's about how she ‘needs’ a man when the rest of the album is all about going out to get drunk and dance with her girlfriends—or girlfriends, y’know. It’s basically ‘I Don’t Need a Man: The Album’,” Katie said, stealing both an argument and a joke from one of the Emgays online who had convinced her that Emma Woods was a lesbian. And then, she added another theft: “Plus, she calls herself ‘handsome.’ That’s, like, a guy word.”
“Girls can be handsome, don’t be sexist or whatever. And if the point of EMMA is that she doesn’t need a man, why was she so extra about Frank Churchill that whole era, huh?”
"Oh, come on. Please tell me you don’t believe she really dated Frank Churchill!”
“Yeah, no, that was totally PR, but that just screams ‘I need a man’ even more, yeah?”
“No, it doesn’t, because she was actually using him as a beard to hide her relationship with Harriet Smith!” Katie announced triumphantly.
Bella threw a pillow at her.
“Harriet Smith? The boringest girl from SixVix, who released one flop solo album and then disappeared off the face of the earth? Be so for real right now.”
Katie captured the pillow and hugged it to her chest, trying to get herself to chill. This was the closest she and Isabella had ever come to a fight in their almost three weeks of bestiehood, since meeting when volunteering at the same library over the summer. (Katie did not question why a girl quite a bit older than herself wanted to be best friends, nor did she have any idea whatsoever that Bella had chosen her summer activity only after overhearing Katie’s very cute brother James telling her brother about his nerdy bookworm sister’s summer plans.) Isabella was so much older and wiser and cooler, and Katie had just wanted to flex her gossip knowledge a bit, not end up in a dispute. But she felt she was in the right, so she couldn’t just take the L either.
“Okay, yeah, Harriet sucks,” Katie admitted, “but that doesn't mean she and Emma Woods didn’t date. They used to be all over each other.”
“Yeah, 'cause they were besties. Besides, didn’t Harriet get married to some boring banker bloke?”
“Yeah, and, like, three days later Emma covered that old Kelly Clarkson break-up song on Graham Norton…”
“Behind These Hazel Eyes?”
“Yeah, exactle! And then she released Church Bells. Which can’t really be about Frank Churchill, obviously.”
“God, that song is leng, though.”
“Yeah,” Katie sighed, “it is.”
And then she got one of those little proofs she liked collecting, of how very in sync she and Bella was, when Bella started fiddling with her phone and they scooched closer on the bed to belt along to the chorus:
“In my mind I heard church bells, I thought they were weeeeedding bells, but now that you’re gone I know that I was wrong, they were funeral bells all along… they were funeral bells for our loooooooove.”
When the song was over they collapsed in a giggling heap, and Katie felt those butterflies in her stomach that she got around Bella sometimes, and never interrogated further. As they rearranged themselves, Katie somehow ended up with Bella’s head in her lap, her very pretty eyes looking up into hers.
“Alright, so was Harriet using what’s-his-name as a beard and then they fell in love, or what happened there?”
“His name is Robert Martin. And uh, some people think he’s a beard, but they were super off and on, which seems weird for a bearding contract. They had probably just broken up when she met Emma, because she mentioned in an interview that she had a real break-up right around the same time as SixVix split, and she and Emma met because she signed to the same label as Emma for her solo record.”
“Wow, you really know your onions. You’re, like, an Emma Woods expert or something.”
Katie—who didn’t pick up on Bella’s cheeky tone—rejoiced that she was finally getting the admiration she’d been hoping for. She blushed, and started babbling about how brilliant it must have been for Harriet to have this older G.O.A.T. superstar sweep in from nowhere to take her under her wing and how it was no wonder she fell in love with her in, like, a second.
This, for some reason, made Isabella sit up from Katie's lap and narrow her eyes at her.
“Are you in love with me?” she asked.
“What?” said Katie, who was totally in love with her but had truly never considered the question.
“Like, are you gay or something? Is that why you waffled on for ages about that fic where Bella fell in love with Edythe instead of Edward?”
“No! At least, I don’t think so…”
Katie’s lower lip quivered as she pondered this potentially life-changing question—and Isabella, who didn’t, in fact, feel like hosting a gay awakening in her bed, quickly said, “Whatever, nevermind, go on.”
It took Katie a moment to remember what she was supposed to be talking about, and she wrapped up her tale of Emma Woods’ and Harriet Smith’s epic love story with a rather anticlimactic, “There’s a video of them snogging. Maybe—it’s really blurry. And then they probably broke up.”
“Probably?”
“Well, some people think Harriet’s marriage to the banker is all fake and the kids are actually her and Emma’s.”
Isabella scrunched up her nose in disapproval.
“Wow, that’s even more delulu than the Robsten freaks.”
Somehow, Katie here had the uncharacteristic sense not to mention that she kind of sort of did believe that too—at least whenever she saw a particularly convincing video on Tiktok or read a really ace Emmiet story on Wattpad.
“Well, I don’t believe that,” she protested. “But it is weird that she keeps writing love songs when she’s supposed to be single—uh, Emma, not Harriet, I mean.”
“But that’s because she’s secretly dating her manager, of course.”
Again, Katie fully missed any signs that Bella might, in fact, be taking the piss.
“Mister Knightley? Ew! He’s, like, friends with her dad. He knew her when she was a kid.”
“He’s a lot younger than her dad, though.”
“Yeah, but he's a lot older than her!”
“And that’s why they’re keeping it a secret, obviously. But have you seen the way he looks at her when she wins awards? Also what about Night in the Woods —that’s sus, innit. Like, a Knight-ley in the Woods, if you know what I mean.”
Isabella wiggled her eyebrows suggestively, and for once in her life Katie actually did know what she meant.
“Ew!”
“Actually, this makes perfect sense," Bella went on. “There’s that guy who shows up on a white horse at the end of the song and saves her from the scary forest. That’s a knight!”
This was exactly the kind of argument that was most convincing to Katie. She considered it for a moment, before feeling forced to concede at least part of the point.
“Okay, sure, maybe that song is meant to hint at Mister Knightley. But that just means that it’s a stunt song to make her fans who ship them happy. Like Frankly, My Dear. Also, have you heard the leaked demo, Lost in the Woods? It’s a lot gayer—she gets lost together with another girl, and there’s no knight at the end. She probably changed it to throw people off her scent.”
“What scent? If she’s not with Harriet Smith and she’s not with Mister Knightley, then who is her secret squeeze?”
Katie racked her brain for lesbian Emma ships that would not get her accused of Robsten-level brainrot, and reluctantly settled on, “Jane Fairfax, maybe?”
“Jane Fairfax? Don’t she and Emma hate each other?”
Later that night, Katie googled “Jane Fairfax Emma Woods dating” to find some new facts (and perhaps some fictions) with which to strengthen her case, and ended up at woodfax-get-married.pumplr.com. There, under the heading,
lost in the emma woods
eleanor | she/her | cringe millennial at heart (but actually gen z) | #1 woodfax truther | emma woods is a lesbian and that’s FINAL
Katie learned:
- that several reviewers of Emma’s pandemic era album woodhouse had mentioned an obvious influence from Jane Fairfax’s more serious folksy indie music
- that this Eleanor person thought that the mysterious “Miss Taylor” pseudonym who was credited on several of the woodhouse and Meditations songs might very well be Jane Fairfax herself
- that there was an interview in Rolling Stone where Emma said “not everyone fights fair, in fact”—which most woodsies saw as her throwing shade at Fairfax (fair [...] fact), but Eleanor took as a cheeky wink to her new girl
- that Emma very clearly had sung “her” instead of “you” in her latest performance of Blunder on the EMMAs Tour—which also, Eleanor pointed out, rhymes better with “blunder” anyways
and, most importantly
- that Emma and Jane Fairfax had not, in fact, first crossed paths when Fairfax started “dating” Emma’s “ex” Frank Churchill, but had actually been schoolmates at some fancy music school called The Purcell School for Young Musicians—which was proven by a bad scan of a clipping from the school paper, with a picture of a very millennial-preppy looking teenage Emma next to a teenage Jane Fairfax in a full early 2000’s emo getup. The only readable text on the page was a pull quote from Emma, at this point still called Emma Woodhouse, saying “I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up with any other.”
After filling her head with so much new knowledge, Katie ended the evening by creating a Pumplr account (PrincessKatie09) and sending woodfax-get-married an ask about how to convince her best friend that Emma is gay and also girlfriends with Jane Fairfax. Thus she set in motion a sequence of events that would end with Katie gaining a new new bestie—but that's a story for some other time.