Mad Honey: A Novel (29 page)

“What do you mean?”

“I’m pretty sure he hurt her,” says Asher quietly. “It’s not like she talks about it. I mean, she goes out of her way to
not
talk about it. But, like, we left in the middle of the night, when I was a kid. And I remember her wearing turtlenecks and long sleeves when it was hot
out. And sometimes, when I come up behind her and she’s not expecting it, she cringes. It’s all these little things, that add up.”

As Asher tells me this, I’m thinking about the bruise I had on my arm from where he grabbed me too hard after the fencing meet.

“If he hurt your mom,” I ask, “why do you want to be part of his life?”

“He’s still my
dad,
” Asher says, defensive. “I mean, I get why my mom would want nothing to do with him…but whatever I am is partly because of him.”

I imagine Asher as a young boy, trapped between his arguing parents. For a horrible moment I remember the young child
I
used to be, as my own mother and father fought with each other. About me.

“What’s his new family like?” I ask. “He kept mentioning his wife and…some boys?”

“Shane and Shawn,” he says. “Twins, eight years old. And his wife is named Margot. She’s a nurse.”

I want to say,
Well, that will come in handy
. We don’t say anything for a while. I notice that Asher has begun to drive faster. “Do they look like you?” I ask him, finally. “The twins?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Every time I’m supposed to go over there, something comes up. One time, their dog got—what’s that thing when their stomach gets twisted?”

“Gastric dilatation-volvulus,” I say, remembering the time that Boris got it after swimming all afternoon in the Pacific.

“Whatever,” says Asher. “Another time one of the boys got sick.”

“So you’ve never met them,” I say.

He’s driving really fast now. We’re up over seventy on a little two-lane road. A sign says
Welcome to New Hampshire. Live free or die
.

“No,” says Asher, his face reddening. “Go on, say it.”

But we both know I don’t have to.

“You think he pities me.” On the far side of the turn a minivan flashes his lights at us, and honks.

“I don’t think he pities you,” I tell Asher. “I think he’s playing you.”

“Yeah, like you know anything about him.”

“I know enough, Asher,” I say. “I’ve got eyes.”

Asher honks back at the minivan. “Asshole,” he says. “Can you believe these fucking assholes?”

“Can you slow down?” I ask him. “You’re scaring me.”

“Well, you’re pissing me off!” he shouts. Asher is driving faster and faster now: eighty, eighty-five miles an hour. There’s another curve ahead of us.

“I said you’re scaring me!” I shout at him.

“You’re going to tell me how to drive now?” he says. “Is that it? Cause I know you’re an expert on fucking everything.”

“All right, stop the car!” I yell at him. “Goddammit, Asher, fucking stop! You’re going to get us killed!”

Asher is now driving close to ninety. He looks at me with a wild smile, like he is actually enjoying the fact that I’m frightened. Which I am. And his driving like this isn’t the thing that scares me the most. What’s worse is the fact that Asher has suddenly turned into a stranger.

“Please stop!” I shout. I can’t believe that now he’s got me begging. “Please, Asher!” I’m clutching the handle on the Jeep’s ceiling.

“You don’t know everything, Lily, okay? There’s some shit that’s so dark you can’t possibly imagine it, ever! You couldn’t even if you tried.”

“Stop the car!” I yell at him. “Goddammit, Asher, just fucking
stop
!”

But he doesn’t. We must be doing close to a hundred. In a panic I reach over and grab the wheel, but Asher flings me back with his right arm and I feel myself crash against the window on my side. I cry out in pain as I bounce off the glass, but it’s not really the pain that makes me cry. The thought flickers through me:
I’m going to have a bruise on my shoulder, a bruise given to me by the boy I thought I loved
. Asher jams his foot down on the brake and now—
finally
—we screech to a stop, bumping and skidding all over the road. A car comes around the curve before us, its horn blaring all the way. We just sit there on the shoulder, in a hot, angry silence.

“Fuck you!” I shout at him. “What is
wrong
with you?”

“Me?” he says. “You think
I’m
the one who’s got a problem?”

“I don’t even know who you are right now,” I say.

Asher doesn’t look at me. His jaw is clenched so tight I think he might break a tooth. He pulls out, driving the speed limit. “That makes two of us,” he says.

WHEN I WAS
six years old, my father took me out of kindergarten one day and brought me to the circus—Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. I remember the smell of the popcorn and the sparkling leotard of the lady on the high wire and how very big the elephants were. It was just the two of us; Mom must have been out on the Olympic seashore that week. I remember being a little frightened by how many people were in the arena. I remember his arm around my back.

But most of all I remember the man who was shot out of the cannon. He had a big handlebar mustache, striped shorts, and a white muscle shirt with a red star on it. His head was shaved bald, and it reflected the glare of the spotlight that lit him up. There was a drumroll as he was hoisted by the acrobats into the muzzle. He waved to the crowd, as if saying farewell, and then he disappeared into the barrel of the cannon and a moment later there was an explosion and a puff of white smoke and that man with the star on his chest soared through the air. Then he landed in a net on the other side of the arena and everyone clapped, and I looked at my father and said,
Will he do it again?
and Dad explained no, it was a onetime thing. A moment later a woman rode into the ring standing on two white horses, one foot on the back of each steed, and I forgot about the human cannonball for the rest of the night, at least until the moment when, full of popcorn and snow cones and hot dogs and soft pretzels, I lay my head down on my pillow, and my dad kissed me on the forehead and said,
Remember today, Liam. Life was good today.

I fell asleep thinking about what it might feel like to be shot out
of a cannon. To fly through the air. For days I wondered about the moment at the top of the arc, the moment when the human cannonball was suspended between the explosion that had propelled him toward the ceiling and the long fall back to earth. I imagined being immune from gravity. Being that free.

I remember asking my father one morning, as I ate my Alpha-Bits, if I could be a human cannonball when I grew up. He laughed and said,
You can be anything you want to be, Liam.

Years later, after I’d tried—and failed—to kill myself, I remembered that man with the star on his chest. This was when I was starting to wake up in the hospital. I hadn’t seen a tunnel of white light or heard angelic voices calling me, or any of that. There was a black space, and then there was the room, and my mother was sitting in a chair by my bed, and I closed my eyes and disappeared. It was like that for a long time, like I was at the top of my arc, between the explosion that had launched me skyward, and the long fall back to earth, and everything that lay ahead.

Eventually my eyes were open long enough for my mother to say things that I understood.
You’re okay, Lily,
she said.
You’re safe, and I love you
. There were bandages on my right arm. I’d lost a lot of blood.

The first thing I said, when I got around to saying anything, was
Where’s Dad?
Mom looked really confused, and then she looked hurt, and then tears filled her eyes. Because of course, we’d left Seattle years ago. I found out later my father didn’t even know what I had done.

But in my head, I was sure we’d only been to the circus a couple days before. He’d kissed me on the forehead and told me never to forget that day when things were good.

When I got out of the hospital a few days later and we went back to the Point Reyes cabin, I tried to make sense of what had happened to me. Not cutting my wrist, of course—that was still all too clear. So was saying goodbye to Boris, climbing the stairs, filling the tub. I knew I had listened to the water running, had thought about leaving a note, but couldn’t think of anything to say that would make it all
less terrible for my mother. I remembered putting on the Barber Adagio for Strings and how, when the tub was full, I took off all my clothes and lay down in the water.

That part I could make sense of. What was incomprehensible to me was the Valentine’s Day dance the night before: getting picked up by my friend Jonah in his mother’s Prius, for the date that had come out of nowhere.

Until he asked me to the dance, I’d thought Jonah was never going to talk to me again. He’d been so ugly to me. But then, out of the blue, he’d asked me to the dance, and given me a sheepish apology, too.
You just have to give people time,
he’d said, and gave me a look. I should have known that it was a look of malice.

But I so wanted to believe in the goodness of people.

There was a mirror ball in the gym. The music: “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” by Justin Timberlake, “Cold Water,” by Major Lazer, “One Dance” by Drake. The expression on Jonah’s face, all night long, like he knew something I didn’t.
Here,
he said at one point, handing me a can of Coke.
Have something to drink.

It was weird seeing everyone all dressed up. Students there acted like vegan hippies, but at the dance it was clear how much money they all had. In their tuxes and their gowns, you could see the people they were behind their masks, the people that they’d grow up to be, little carbon copies of their parents.

My friend Sorel came up to me at one point and said,
Lily, you have to get out of here. I’m not kidding. You think these people are your friends, but they’re not.

All I could think was
Actually the person who is not my friend is you.

I’d come out to Sorel a few months earlier. She’d said I was the
bravest person she’d ever known.

Then she betrayed me, by telling everyone else that I was trans.

She’d spilled the beans the semester before, fall of 2016. The school, which was supposed to be so progressive, turned me into the diversity poster child. I had never wanted that; all I’d ever wanted was to fit in, to be left alone.

Jonah and I danced to a few of the early tunes, but then he
vanished, leaving me standing alone and awkward. I started feeling really strange, like time was speeding up and slowing down.

I thought about that Coke that he had given me, and wondered whether anything else was in it. My co-captain from the fencing team was there. Boyd looked like he’d been inflated with helium, he was so large. His voice echoed strangely in the dark space, and it was hard to understand him. When I walked, it was like wading through hot tar.

Then Jonah appeared out of nowhere. I could tell from his eyes he was wasted.
I’ve been looking all over for you.

We went out on the dance floor. The DJ put on a song by Aerosmith. Jonah spun me around, and I saw all the faces of the people I went to school with, all my friends, watching us, smiling.

She had the body of a Venus, Lord, imagine my surprise.

The tiny sparkles of light from the mirror ball revolved around the dance floor.
Dude looks like a lady.

Then there was a drumroll, and somebody said,
Now! The moment you’ve all been waiting for. The crowning of the Valentine’s King and Queen!

There was a spotlight, and Jonah and I were standing in it, and everyone was applauding.
Lily O’Meara, come on up here!

I felt giddy, airborne. I couldn’t believe that Jonah and I were going to be crowned. Sorel was wrong about these people. They knew the truth, and it did not matter to them! It had been a long, hard road, but I’d come into my own at last.

Come on, Jonah,
I said.
They want us!

Not us, Lily,
he said.
Just you.

I’m not sure how I got to the front of the room. But I remember them putting the crown upon my head. And then the sash:
Valentine’s King
and
Queen.

Even now I’m not sure if they were trying to humiliate me on purpose, simply because they were all cruel fucks—or if, in some twisted universe, they thought that crowning me king
and
queen was supposed to be a joke I was in on.
We’re not laughing
at
you, we’re laughing
with
you!

It didn’t feel like they were laughing with me, though, when they cued up “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” on the speakers again.

It didn’t feel like they were laughing with me when the tears poured down my face and I rushed off the stage and through a side exit into the parking lot.

It didn’t feel like they were laughing with me when I ran headlong into a crowd of people who yanked off my crown and tore off my sash. I struggled to get away from them but someone—
it was Boyd, from the fencing team, but how could it be Boyd?—
had me in a headlock. I heard fabric tearing. They pulled off my shoes. They tore my dress. Then they grabbed my panties and cheered, like they were playing Capture the Flag. I lay on the pavement, naked from the waist down, while everyone stood around laughing like my body was the funniest punch line they’d ever heard.

I don’t know how long I stayed there on the asphalt after they left. I lay on my back looking up at the sky. There were no stars.

Then Sorel was there.
I’m so sorry,
she said.
I tried to stop them. I really did.
In slow motion she picked me up and got me into her car. I didn’t say anything.

In the morning I woke up in an empty house. Somehow, word hadn’t gotten back to Mom, and incredibly, she’d just headed off to the national park to do her job, same as any other day. There was a note on the kitchen counter:
Have a muffin! Back by supper!
There was a little heart at the bottom of the note.