Mad Honey: A Novel (35 page)

I have a flash of Asher’s small, chubby fist clutched around the limp chick, holding it up to me like an offering.

“Who else?” I repeat, and I wonder if the question is rhetorical.

BY THE TIME
we get home, Selena has arrived, and she and Jordan immediately disappear into their makeshift office in the dining room to go over the testimony of tomorrow’s last-minute expert witness, Dr. Powers. There is a message on the phone from Dirk for Asher (which he isn’t allowed to answer, per the judge’s bail orders) and one from the post office for me, telling me my bees have arrived.

I am thrilled to have a task, a responsibility that distracts me. I do not want to believe Asher could ever be the villain he’s been painted by the State to be. But when I let my guard down, I have to admit that what is so exhausting to me isn’t just their depiction of Asher. It’s the struggle to keep
my
version of him sacrosanct.

The post office is a few minutes away from closing by the time I park my truck in front of it. The pound of bees the postmaster hands me (moving faster, actually, than I’ve ever seen him move before) are about four thousand in number, shipped from an apiary in New York, in a box made of wood and mesh. The cage is heavier than you’d think, and hotter. I drive it back home, to rehouse the bees in Celine’s old hive.

I go to get my bee kit in the mudroom and hesitate. I can hear Jordan and Selena in the dining room, but Asher is likely upstairs. I walk up and knock on his door.

Asher is sitting on his bed with his sketch pad. He closes it quickly when I enter, but not before I see the curve of a jaw and a fall of dark hair. “Hey,” I say, and he jerks his head in greeting. “You okay?”

He shrugs. “I’m great, except for the murder charge and the fact that I never get to tell my side of the story.”

I lean against the doorjamb. “I have to go out to the hives. Do you want to come?”

“Do you need help?”

“Not really,” I say, and I just wait, holding his gaze.

He puts the pad down beside him. “Okay,” he agrees.

I carry the smoker and my veil, while Asher lugs the crate of new bees. We walk along the edge of the strawberry fields. “What’s going to happen to the fruit?” he asks.

Strawberries are perennials, and we run a brisk pick-your-own business in June, thanks to the pollination of my bees. It feels like a lifetime ago when I mulched the plants last November, before…everything. By now, I should have raked away the straw; I should have removed the winterizing row covers as soon as the plants blossomed. But the crop has been the last thing on my mind. “Next year,” I say, “we’ll just plant twice as many.”

It’s an optimistic way of saying that this year, the fruit will likely die on the vine.

Asher hasn’t brought a veil, so he lights up the smoker while I open the hive that used to belong to Celine and her bees. It’s empty and still, a stark counterpoint to the other bustling colonies. He sits down in the tall grass, watching me as I suit up and crouch beside the box of bees.

Package bees are harvested bees and a queen from a different hive that specifically raises queens. In the middle of the cluster is a can of sugar syrup, to tide the bees over during the shipment, until they can collect nectar for themselves. The queen is fastened to the top near the syrup in a little cage, with a couple of attendants to take care of her; I can hear her piping, like a toy trumpet. Some of the new bees have not survived the trip, but only a handful.

“How come you haven’t asked me?” Asher says.

My hands still, and then I smoke the sides and top of the crate. “Asked you…?”

“Whether I did it.”

I look at him through the veil. My heart is pounding so hard I am sure he can hear it. “Do I
need
to?”

Asher rolls his shoulders. “I know why Uncle Jordan doesn’t want to talk about it,” he says. “But I figured you would.”

You figured wrong,
I want to say.
Since that would mean I doubt you, and I don’t.

But the words don’t come.

I peel off the queen cage so I can set it aside. Then I overturn the crate and dump the bees into the empty hive. They explode around my face in a cloud of agitation. “There is nothing you could say to me,” I tell him, carefully picking my words, “that would make me love you any less.”

Asher stills. “That’s what I said to her.”

Is it a veiled confession? Did she tell him?

Did Asher hold up his end of the bargain? Or did he let Lily—and himself—down with his reaction?

Does it even matter?

If Asher were to confess to me that he was fighting with Lily and things got out of hand and she wound up dead, I would still defend him.

That’s different,
a tiny voice curls in my head.
That’s an accident.

I just do not believe that Asher has managed to hide a white-hot rage for eighteen years without his control ever slipping.

Then again, things have come easily to my golden boy. School, sports, friends. Girls. Maybe he has never felt so mortified that he needed to strike out, until now. “I don’t think I ever knew how…lucky I am,” Asher muses.

I could argue with that, based on his fraught early life with his father, a messy divorce, a hand-to-mouth existence in a rickety farmhouse.

“No one’s ever thought the worst of me before,” he says, and he picks the queen cage up from where it is balanced against the side of the transport box. “Now I kind of feel like this. Boxed in. Like I’ve got nobody.”

I take the little wooden coffin from his palm and set it between two of the frames in the hive. “You’ve got me,” I say. As I wedge it tightly, I hear myself ask, “Did you know…”

I turn to find the sun crowning Asher, an afternoon prince. His
eyes meet mine for a moment, hesitating just long enough for me to take the coward’s way out.

“…these come with a candy plug?” I blurt, adjusting the queen cage.

“Yeah,” Asher says, letting me change the subject. “When I was little and you told me that, I tried to lick one.”

“It’s not that kind of candy,” I say.

“So I discovered.”

Since the queen hasn’t been raised in the same hive as the bees shipped in the box, she’s unfamiliar to them. As the worker bees chew through the thick fondant at one end of the cage, they become used to her. The candy plug isn’t a barrier meant to restrain the queen; it’s a barrier meant to protect her from attacks, while the colony decides whether or not they will accept her.

I find myself thinking of Lily. Were the fences she built meant to keep others out, or to keep herself in?

There is no set of rules that dictates what you owe someone you love. What parts of your past should be disclosed? Should you confess you are trans? Alcoholic? That you had a same-sex relationship? An abortion? That you were abused by the person you trusted most in the world?

When, if ever, is the right time for that conversation: before your first date, before your first kiss, before you sleep together?

Where is the line between keeping something private, and being dishonest?

What if the worst happens? What if honesty is the thing that breaks you apart?

“What’s her name?” Asher asks, drawing me out of my reverie.

I cover the new hive. I’ve been thinking of Billie Eilish, but maybe not every queen needs to be a pop diva. “Lily?” I suggest.

I sit down next to him in the field, as stragglers from the crate fly to the entrance of the hive. We watch the sun go down, until the horizon burns like the coil of a stove. “She would have liked that,” Asher says.

LILY
7

SEPTEMBER 22–OCTOBER 13, 2018

Two months before

I am eating apple pie with cheddar cheese melted on top of it when I find out that the thing I thought existed only inside of my head is actually real. And I couldn’t be more excited. Or more scared.

Tonight Maya and I went to see the hockey game—hockey in Adams, New Hampshire, kind of being like football anywhere else. Our school mascot is the Presidents, which is ironic when you think that the only president from New Hampshire was Franklin Pierce, and that his three claims to fame are that he was a drunk, he completed the Gadsden Purchase, and he once ran over an old woman with his horse and was arrested for it while still in office. We were playing the Jefferson Patriots, and the bleachers at the school’s hockey rink were packed. Maya screamed her head off after every goal (Asher scored three of the five). It’s kind of amazing to see the players skating so fast, almost like ballet dancers except every last one of them is huge. But it’s a violent beauty. Dirk, the goalie, got himself put in the penalty box twice for roughing. In the last period, Asher wound up in the penalty box, too—for slashing.

Afterward we went to the party, which was, of course, at Dirk’s house. This was pretty much the bloodbath you’d expect (Dirk drinking an entire can of Foster’s lager through a giant funnel as the other hockey players shouted,
DIRK, DIRK, DIRK
). But instead of hanging out with the hockey bros, Asher spent most of the night sitting on the front porch talking to Maya and me. There we were, the three
of us in the warm evening, crickets chirping, the moon shining down. I saw other girls watching us, enviously. Many of them were from the women’s soccer team, which is called—aspirationally—the Lady Presidents. Some even barged in on our conversation to openly flirt with him, like Maya and I weren’t even there. But every time, Asher politely dismissed them and picked up the thread. It was hard to square the fierce athlete I’d seen tearing up the ice an hour or two earlier with this thoughtful, quiet boy who seemed to listen to me talk the way I’d listen to a favorite cello piece.

When I was telling a story about Point Reyes, he asked about the Pacific Ocean—
How is it different from the Atlantic? Isn’t it weird to put your ankles into water that you know is also touching Australia, and China, and Vietnam?
I told him about the sea otters and how they tie themselves in kelp when they sleep so they don’t float away, and he said he heard that they float around linked together like a giant jigsaw puzzle and had I ever seen that? Later, he and Maya talked about growing up in Adams, and then they started singing the praises of the A-
1
Diner’s house special, apple pie with steamed cheese.

I said, “Steamed cheese?” I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded a little gross. And the two of them started swearing left and right about how I had to have some
now,
and the next thing I knew we were in Asher’s red Jeep Rubicon—Maya up front, me in the back—on our way to get a slice.

They were chattering about people I didn’t know yet and moments I hadn’t been around to share. I know I have only been in Adams a little while, but watching Maya and Asher in the front seat was like seeing two circles of a Venn diagram overlap, and realizing I was somewhere on the outside.

In the diner booth, I sit next to Maya, Asher opposite us. They watch me lift a bite of the pie to my lips. The cheese has been melted in a little copper tin and then laid on top of the crust with a spatula. It is a little bit sweaty, and very gooey, and frankly, sort of nasty.

But surprise: it’s ridiculously good. It’s hot and tart and sharp. “Okay,” I say to them. “You were right. It’s great.”

“Another convert,” says Asher.

“It’s good that you like it,” says Maya. “Because this is kind of it for Adams. There’s ice fishing, there’s hockey, and there’s steamed cheese.”

Asher has ordered a cup of coffee, and the waitress now puts it down on our table. He adds two sugars to it, and some milk from the creamer. This surprises me—he doesn’t look like someone who’d drink his coffee sweet. He doesn’t even look like someone who drinks coffee. I wonder why that was my initial impression. I also wonder what to do with this surge of curiosity that nearly buckles me, to know not just how he takes his coffee but what pets he had growing up and if cilantro tastes like soap to him and which TV shows he can quote from memory.

Asher sips his coffee and then he looks at me thoughtfully. “Do you miss California?”

I think about the village of Point Reyes Station, the Bovine Bakery and the little bookstore. I think about the ocean, and the walk down the steps to the lighthouse. But I also think about Jonah, and Sorel, and everything that happened at school. “It’s okay,” Asher says, intuitively. “I wasn’t trying to dig around. I’m just curious about anywhere that isn’t here, you know?” He raises his coffee cup to his lips. “It’s hard not to think about California sometimes, when you have five months of winter.”

“Correction, six months of winter,” says Maya.

“I’m excited to see snow,” I tell them. “I’ve never seen it before.”

Maya laughs. “We can help you see some snow.” She turns to Asher. “Remember that time when we were nine, and we made the snow fort that looked like a castle?”

I feel a pang of jealousy. I’ve never had friends like that. Maya and Asher have an unbroken line of history.

Asher puts his cup down in his saucer and glances out the window. He doesn’t reply to Maya, like he’s lost in his thoughts.

“The winter’s fine,” he says, turning back to us. “The hard part is the spring—March and April, when you really want it to get nice out, and instead it just keeps snowing.”

“And driving during Mud Season is a competitive sport,” Maya adds.

We laugh and we eat our pie and look out at the quiet Main Street until Asher finishes his coffee. I imagine driving here during Mud Season with Asher and Maya, six or seven months from now, watching the snow finally melt.

I also have a quick flash of next summer, meeting here for apple pie with cheese one last time before we’re off to our various colleges: me to Oberlin or Peabody—and Asher and Maya to wherever it is they want to go.

Something else I don’t know about him.

“I’ll be back,” says Maya, and she walks the length of the diner and disappears into the tiny bathroom.

“Lily,” says Asher, “I have to ask you something.” He says it almost fiercely; I’m afraid he’s about to tell me something terrible.

Asher lowers his hand onto mine. “I wanted to ask if you’d ever want to go out sometime. With me.”

I am hoping I don’t look too shocked. But I’ve been taught by the world to think of myself as forever undatable, that anyone who ever expresses the smallest bit of affection for me is either someone who is just lying in order to taunt and hurt me; or, even worse, someone who
does
like me, but only because they don’t know everything. And the moment that they
do
know everything, all their love will turn to ash.

So the first thing that comes out of my mouth is “Are you sure?”

But then his face ripples into this big, broad smile and it is everything I can do not to pass out face-first into my empty pie plate. “I
am
sure,” he says.

“But what…what about Maya?”

His eyebrows raise, like the idea of Maya as a romantic partner is something that has never seriously occurred to him. “She’s not the one I’m asking,” he says.

“Yes,” I tell Asher. It’s the softest thing I’ve ever said. But Asher squeezes my hand. He heard me.

“Well, well, well,” says Maya, now standing at the side of our table. “What do we have here?” Asher does not let go of my hand.

“I asked Lily out,” Asher says.

Maya’s mouth opens, and then she snaps it shut. She looks from me to Asher, and then smiles like she orchestrated this whole thing. “I was wondering how long it would take you two to realize the obvious.”

“Was I that easy to read?” says Asher.

Maya rolls her eyes. “Asher, you just spent a whole night sitting on a porch talking about sea otters when you could have been doing funnels with Dirk. Do you really think I thought that was because of
me
?”

“How much do you actually know about sea otters, Maya?” says Asher. “A lot?”

Maya laughs. “I don’t know shit about sea otters. But I know all about
you
.” She looks at her watch. “Now can we get out of here?”

“Okay,” says Asher. We go out to his Jeep, his fingers along my spine, and Maya gets in the backseat. “You take shotgun,” she says to me.

I think about protesting, but Asher kind of nods at me, and holds open the door to the passenger seat, and helps me up into the car. He’s got surprisingly good manners, considering that earlier this evening I saw him spend two minutes in the penalty box for slashing.

I’VE HAD ONE
BOYFRIEND.

This was the fall of eleventh grade, before everything went to hell. Jonah Cooper and I had become friends as sophomores, and that whole summer we hiked the national seashore, or lazed around the house playing Xbox. He had black hair, freckles. He was lanky, a little bit shy. In the fall and winter he fenced with me, but in the spring he was the pitcher for the Pointcrest baseball team. He had a killer fastball.

In August, when he passed his driver’s test, we spent a lot of time
cruising up and down the coast. It was nice, after all that time, to have a friend besides Sorel. We went to the Cowgirl Creamery and spent part of the afternoon lying on the lawn sampling all the cheeses: Red Hawk, and Wagon Wheel, and Devil’s Gulch. We drove to the Cypress Tunnel, its arching tree branches interlocked overhead. It looked like a portal to another world.

Which, looking back, it was—although not the one that I had hoped for.

On a September day we drove his father’s Miata to the seashore, top down. We parked the car and walked down to Wildcat Beach, in hopes of hiking to Alamere Falls. The beach was nearly deserted, and very dramatic—the stretch of sand running between the crashing ocean to our right and the high cliffs to the left. I’d told Mom our plan, and she was insistent that we only do the hike at low tide. One time, in fact, she had to rescue some people who got trapped against the cliff wall, a couple who’d set out at exactly the wrong time, on exactly the wrong morning.

But Jonah and I had the perfect day. We found seashells, and pieces of polished glass, and a creepy doll with no head and all of its clothes washed off, and we made up a whole story about what had happened to the doll, and a cursed little girl who had thrown it overboard after it had started to whisper to her in her sleep.

When we finally got to Alamere Falls, the creek gushed wildly off the cliff and crashed forty feet down. The stream from the falls had cut a winding path into the sand as the water rushed toward the ocean. Mist hung in the air and on our faces.

That was when Jonah took my hand.

I could feel my heart hammering away in my chest. It felt so nice, his hand in mine. I was afraid to move, because it might be a dream. And I was afraid to move, in case it wasn’t.

What came next was that he kissed me. Then he kissed me again.

It was sunset of that same day—after we’d hiked all the way back to his car, after we drove the Miata to the other side of the point, after we’d stopped every five minutes to make out some more—that we stood by the Elephant Seal Overlook in Inverness. Below us were
the seals. It was just the juveniles on the beach at that time of year, a bunch of rubbery teenagers.

“Lily,” said Jonah. “I want this, I do. But I also want to make sure that no matter where it goes…we stay friends. Promise me we won’t lose that.”

I don’t want to lose it, either,
I said. But I wondered, even then, whether we were making a promise we could not keep.

MY FIRST OFFICIAL
date with Asher Fields is a week later: Saturday morning, September 29. What we’re doing is a surprise, although he did ask me for my shoe size. I’m a little nervous about this because, of course, I’m paranoid about my big feet. But Asher just said,
Okay, great
. Which makes me suspect we’re going bowling. Or, I don’t know: tap dancing?

But when Asher pulls into a parking lot, we are not at a bowling alley. We are at the Adams High hockey rink, deserted except for the two of us. I wonder who Asher had to bribe to get in here. Then I realize he probably just had to smile and ask nicely. I can’t imagine anyone saying no to him.

When he hands me the skates that are in the trunk of the Jeep, he says size ten women’s is size eight men’s. “Your skates should be one size smaller than your shoe,” he tells me. “Lucky for you I have every pair of skates I’ve ever owned, going back to third grade.”

It is sweet that he brought me a pair of skates that fit, but I hold them out like they are poisonous. Because they’re black.

Asher reads my mind. “What, you don’t want to wear men’s skates?”

The truth of the matter is that I don’t. I know it’s just a little thing, but all those childhood years wearing the wrong clothes—it pushes my buttons a little. Then I take a look at Asher’s smiling face, and I decide that just this once I can get over myself.