Mad Honey: A Novel (30 page)

Oh Mom,
I thought
. You tried so hard.

I grabbed a paring knife from the butcher block. Boris raised his head and cocked his ears.
Are you okay?

No, Boris. Actually. I’m not.

As I climbed the stairs, I had a last, fleeting memory of that human cannonball at the circus. My father’s hand upon my back.
You can be anything you want to be, Liam.

I would never know what it felt like to fly. But I knew all about what it was like to come crashing back to earth.

IN THE DAYS
after I got out of the hospital, my dreams were dark. I’d find myself wandering through underground caves, hearing the dripping of water, every once in a while seeing a shaft of light falling from a distant crack overhead. I’d search those caves, looking for a way out, but I just got more and more lost. Now and again I heard the sound of footsteps behind me, and from this I knew that I was not alone in my tomb.

I saw a social worker while I was in recovery, a sweet woman named Deirdre, who, as I quickly found out, had a strategy for keeping me alive, which wasn’t to get me to see the whole world through a different pair of eyes, but simply to get me to agree not to make another attempt before the next time I saw her. Mom, of course, wanted to solve all my problems, but Deirdre seemed to understand that if anyone was going to solve my problems it was going to be me. We did agree that I wouldn’t have to go back to Pointcrest, and that I’d finish eleventh grade by homeschooling. Mom took an indefinite leave from the Park Service and stayed in the house with me all day. But what could she do besides make chicken noodle soup and look worried? I sat myself down in front of the Akela Homeschooling video tutorials, but my heart wasn’t in it. The chirpy instructor just droned on and on about cosines and the Missouri Compromise and
As I Lay Dying.
All I could think about was that dance, and Jonah, and Boyd, and all those people I’d thought had been my friends.

I thought about the crown they’d put on my head.

Eventually I stopped the Akela videos and just spent a lot of time flipping through this old encyclopedia we had. It had been published in 1953. I read about Vice President Richard Nixon. I read about the Suez Canal. I read about this new planet, Pluto, which they’d discovered only twenty-three years before. I didn’t keep up with the other stuff I was supposed to be learning, though—chemistry and pre-calc. It was weird, because I’d always loved school so much: it was the one thing I was good at. But now, for the first time in my life, I just thought,
What’s the point? Everything comes to nothing in the end
.

The worst of it was the day I made one last-ditch attempt at doing the reading for the AP Psychology course. There wasn’t any mention
of trans or nonbinary people until I got to a chapter titled “Abnormal Psychology.” I checked the title page, thinking, well, maybe this, too, was a book that hadn’t been updated since 1953. But it had been published in 2005, just a dozen years before.

Abnormal?
I thought.
I’m tearing my heart out, trying to find my way. And all you’ve got for me is
abnormal
?

In time my wrist healed; I started playing cello again. Mom tried to act like I was getting better. But all the knives and razors in the house had been hidden away, along with all the prescription medicines.

The dreams got darker, a little more each night. I was lost in the dark, chasing after flickering shafts of light. I’d hear the footsteps behind me. Then I’d turn. I’d see the silhouette of a man, hunched over, drawing closer.
Lily,
he’d say
. I’m waiting for you.

THERE’S A TAPPING
on my window, and I sit up in bed, terrified. Lightning flickers, and rain hammers against the glass. In the light I see that shadow, and I see that he’s here now, come for me at last.

He taps again.
Lily. It’s me.

The lightning flickers once again, and in the flash I can see that it’s Asher.

I get out of bed and open the window and he steps into my room, soaking wet. “What the fuck, Asher?”

“Sorry,” he says, whispering. He’s wearing a backpack. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

I look at the clock. “It’s almost 1:00
a.m.
?”

“I had to see you,” he says. I close the window. Outside, the rain rushes into the gutters.

“What did you do, bring a ladder?” I ask him.

“I climbed up the tree onto the roof,” he says.

“I’m not even sure I’m fucking talking to you right now,” I whisper, although I want to yell it.

“I know,” Asher says. Then, again, more softly: “I know.” He takes off the backpack and unzips it. There’s a bouquet of flowers inside,
late-season mums and black-eyed Susans from his mother’s farm. “I picked these for you,” he says, a little embarrassed, and it’s in his awkwardness at this moment that I actually recognize the boy that I love. And not the hotheaded asshole who scared me half to death in the car today.

“What happened today?” I ask him. “I felt like I was driving around with some stranger.”

Asher looks at the bed. “Can I sit down?”

I think about it. “No.”

“Please?”

I sigh. “You’re wet.”

He nods. “I know.”

“Wait,” I say, and I slip out into the hallway and into the bathroom, where I grab one of the towels. While I’m there, I steal a glance in the mirror. A frightened girl looks back.

I head back into the bedroom, and Asher’s sitting down on the bed, after I told him not to. The flowers he gave me are lying on the pillow.

He dries himself off with the towel, then he looks at the floor. “I got mad,” he says. “Because you were telling the truth.”

Asher saying this to me makes me feel like I’ve been stabbed with a sword—because of course, the question of whether and when to tell him about my private truth is the one thing that is starting to really mess with me.

“Was I?” I ask quietly.

I sit down next to him. “When you said you didn’t know who I was…and looked at me like that—” His voice cracks. “I only saw that look once before in my life. On my mom’s face.” He pauses for a moment. “I don’t have many memories of my parents together. I remember them fighting, the sound of their voices. But most of all I remember that look—the look of someone who sees that the person who’s supposed to look out for them is actually the person who’s putting them in danger.”

The rain is still hammering against the windowpane. Lightning flickers in the distance. Fifteen seconds later, thunder rolls. Which
means that the storm is three miles away: you count the seconds, and then divide by five.

“When we drove off this morning,” Asher says. “I told you there was something about me you didn’t know.”

I nod. Lightning flashes once more.

“It wasn’t what I thought,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it wasn’t that I see my father once a month at the Chili’s. The secret is—it’s that I’m afraid I’m more like him than I want to be.”

“Asher,” I say, wrapping my arms around him. Thunder rolls in the distance. I hold him for minutes, maybe even hours. I know I ought to be warier of him at this moment, that I shouldn’t so quickly forgive him for what happened in the car on the way home. Because that was some bad shit. I’m never going to forget what I saw in him today, what I understood he was capable of doing.

But it’s up to me right now to decide whether I believe him when he says he’s sorry.

And I do. Because I know better than anyone the power of second chances. If that makes me an idealist, I’ll admit to that. It’s not that I’m not angry with him anymore. But at the same time, even more than the anger I feel is the desire that I have to do whatever I can to take away his pain.

I rub his back and kiss his hair. It smells like rain. After a while he pulls back and we look each other in the eye. Both our faces are wet. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’ll never hurt you again. I promise.”

“I love you,” I tell him. “All of you. Even the dark parts.”

“I love you, too,” he says, and our faces draw close together and we kiss and we kiss and we kiss.

He is so tender, and so gentle. I think,
Asher Fields is nothing like his father.

There’s a lightning flash, but I never hear the thunder. The storm is moving off. The rain is still falling, but it’s lost its fury.

“What’s your biggest secret?” Asher says.

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.

“Lily?” He can see I’m struggling.

“If I tell you,” I say, “you have to promise never to tell anyone, ever.” I hear his own words from this morning echo in mine.

“I promise,” Asher says.

I can feel the truth rising in me. I can almost hear it spoken in this quiet room. I so want to tell him. But then I remember Jonah, and Point Reyes. I’m actually shaking now, because I can’t imagine telling him, and I can’t imagine not telling him, and I don’t know how I’m going to survive going on like this. Even after everything I’ve been through, I’m
still
torn in half.

But then Asher puts his hand on my wrist. “I think I know,” he says, and he gently pulls off my gray cuff bracelet.

Even in the dim light of my bedroom, the scars are still visible.

“I told you I got these in a car crash,” I say. “But I didn’t.”

“Oh, Lily,” he murmurs, and from the way he says this, I can see he’s really shocked.

“It was a year and a half ago. Valentine’s Day.” I feel the tears coming as I remember. But I also feel a sense of fear, because even if I give him more of the truth, it’s not all of it, and he deserves to know
why
I tried to kill myself. And that’s what I can’t tell him.

He traces the scars that travel horizontally across my wrist: one, two, three. He waits.

“There was a dance,” I murmur, aware that my mother is just down the hall; and that saying it out loud makes it come alive again: all those cruel faces, the laughter. Aerosmith
.
Sorel, whispering,
You think these people are your friends, but they’re not.

How can I explain this all to Asher? If he had been there, would he have been among the crowd that put me in a headlock and then tore off my clothes?

No, that’s impossible. He’d have defended me. Yet if that is true: how can I
not
explain this all to him?

“I’m not good at talking about it,” I confess. “I was in the hospital for a while.” If I can tell him just a few true things, maybe it won’t be the same as lying. “After the dance—no,
during
the dance, some people—”

“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,” says Asher, and he holds me tight. And all at once, I shudder, and I’m sobbing. In a year and a half, I’ve never cried about it, not like this. All this time I’ve had to keep it in, prove to Mom that I was strong enough to get through surgery, to get through the move, to get through everything. Prove it to everyone, including myself.

Except that I’m not strong. I’m exhausted from living this life.

As I’m weeping it occurs to me that no one’s ever put his arms around me and protected me like this before. For the first time, I almost do feel safe.

“There was a fight,” I say again. “After the dance. I got hurt.” I take a deep breath. “I got hurt by people who I thought were my friends. Instead they—” I swallow. “They tore my dress off in a parking lot, and laughed. Everybody was there. Even the boy who’d been my—”

Asher takes all this in. He looks me deep in the eyes. “I’m not him,” he says. Then he says it again. “Listen to me.
I’m not him.
”

The rain has almost stopped. Water drips onto the roof outside my window.

“I never went back to school,” I told him. “And I didn’t go back last year, either. I finished up eleventh grade at home. That’s why I’m a year older than everyone. I had a lost year.”

I’m not telling him what else happened during my lost year.

“I’m really glad,” Asher says. “That you didn’t succeed.”

“Me, too,” I tell him. “Me, too.”

Our kisses feed into each other and I have two sensations at once. The first one is the feeling of finally occupying my body exactly in the way I always dreamed: because what’s even the point of having a body, if not to be able to choose to give it away to someone you love?

And the other sensation is both this feeling’s twin and its opposite: that I am not a body at all, that I am floating free above myself like the human cannonball, and that after a lifetime of being chained to the earth by my own flesh I am unbound.

“I want to tell you something else,” I say.

A car goes by the house, and the wet tires make a shushing sound against the pavement. There is a long, long silence while I try to find my nerve.

Then I say, “I changed my name.”

“Really?” says Asher.

“My mother’s maiden name was Campanello,” I say. “But my father’s name was O’Meara.”

“O’Meara!” he says, and he sounds delighted. “All this time, I’ve been going out with an Irish girl? And I never even knew?”

“Half Irish,” I tell him.

“Wow. You went from O’Meara to Campanello! So many more letters. It must have been painful!”

He smiles, like he’s made a hilarious joke. But I want to tell him,
You have no idea.

Asher can tell I’m thinking something, because he looks at me seriously. Maybe he’s remembering the way I shut down the conversation today when he asked me about my father. I whisper, “Actually, it
was
painful.”

“Well,” says Asher, holding me tight. “I love you no matter what your name is.”

“Why?” I ask, because no one, except my mother, has really loved me before, and I’m pretty used to thinking of myself as someone who is impossible to love.

What is it that Asher can see in me that everyone else is blind to?

“Because you’re the only one who gets me,” he says.

“That’s how I feel,” I tell him.

He tips his forehead to mine. “I wish,” Asher whispers, “the world was just the size of you and me.”

“Maybe it can be,” I say.

My hand slowly, slowly slides down toward his pants. And then, the most incredible thing of all happens.