Avonlea Village contained an old church, a schoolhouse, several replications of houses from the 1870s, and lots of ye-olde-shops selling shitty souvenirs and ice cream. The big draw, apparently, was the actors hired to wander around as characters from the books. It was Ana’s first job since dropping out of theatre school, and I already knew a bit about how it went down. How she had sent her headshot in to be considered for Anne’s brunette best friend, Diana Barry, but ended up being cast as Anne herself, the island’s redheaded and freckled literary mascot. How, on the first day Ana arrived, the woman who’d hired her had said: “Oh, you looked a bit paler in your photo.” How a summer of itchy wigs, dyed eyebrows, and face-lightening foundation ensued, which Ana said made her look like a Weimar Cabaret performer. Like full-on whiteface. But what had been missing from the story up until now was Will. The homegrown boy from the island who’d been cast as Gilbert Blythe, her rapscallion love interest.

Ana turned twenty on her first day of work, depressed to be alone in the middle of nowhere, and horny as hell. In this precarious state she fell hard for Gilbert Blythe. She said they were essentially hired to be human automatons, “like two cute teenage robots” smiling and walking through the village, or whiling away the day at the “Green Gables” house.

“But I’ve never understood, like, what would you actually do all day?”

“Mostly just hang up laundry and play tag,” Will replied, pulling his hair back and fixing it into a ponytail with an elastic band.

“Tourists would walk through the house watching us,” Ana added, “enacting this kind of perpetual prologue to some vanilla Christian sex fantasy.”

“We had to be ‘on’ eight hours a day and only got a half-hour lunch break. I’d leave the park, run across the road to the Subway, and order a hot meatball sandwich. And all the tourists who’d just seen me as Gilbert would look at me horrified, like their entire day had been ruined.”

Ana said her crush on Will intensified throughout their chaste summer of role-play, until she began to get wet every time she pulled on Anne’s coarse green wool dress. Sometimes so much so she’d have to disappear periodically throughout the day to stuff toilet paper into her underwear. Once, as they were sitting together side by side on a swing, being photographed by a paparazzi wall of Japanese tourists, she managed to bring herself to orgasm just by squeezing her legs together. As she told me this, I tried to discreetly glance at Will — both to gauge his reaction and to see what all the fuss was about.

“The strange thing was,” she explained, “that even though we spent, like, every second of our days together, we barely knew each other, because we were always in character.”