Mad Honey: A Novel (41 page)

Asher bites his lip. “I hate that he did that to you.”

I hate that I let him. “Did you talk to him about it?”

He shakes his head, then looks at me. “Do you think…he could have changed?”

I stare hard at Asher.
Is he wondering about his father…or himself?

“I don’t know, Asher,” I say. “I don’t think so.”

Asher nods, digesting this. “Do you think he was sorry?”

In this harsh fluorescent light, Asher looks so much like Braden. Not his features, more in his demeanor and the set of his shoulders, the tightness of his jaw. “Asher?” I ask stiffly. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

He glances up, looking wounded.

His father looked at me like that, too.

“Mom,” Asher begins.

There is a knock on the door, and I jump. Jordan sticks his head in. “Court’s back in session.”

Asher leaps up as if he’s on fire, as if he’s just made a narrow escape. He slips through the doorway, past Jordan. “You coming?” my brother asks.

“In a minute.”

I stay seated, my hands knotted together so hard that my fingernails cut into my skin. The cross-examination is coming, but that’s not why I dread returning to the courtroom.

It’s because whether or not I choose to admit it, some part of me has already found Asher guilty.

WHEN I STEP
outside the conference room, Mike Newcomb is standing awkwardly in the hall. He looks at me, and I feel my cheeks burn with embarrassment. He was in court, too, listening to everything I said. I had been so wrapped up in Braden and his reaction, I didn’t even think about who else heard me tell my secrets.

“Olivia.” He hesitates. “I’m sorry. I…didn’t know.”

But you did,
I want to say, thinking of the time he pressed the card for a battered women’s shelter into my hand years ago, at the farmers’ market.
Or at least, you suspected
.

He reaches out and gently touches my arm. “Not every man is like that,” he says.

GINA JEWETT PROWLS
toward me for the cross-examination with a barrage of questions. Although the mother of the victim is treated with kid gloves in court, the mother of the accused does not merit the same consideration. “So you’re telling me Asher’s never lied to you?”

He hid his father’s texts under the name Ben Flanders. He said he didn’t go upstairs, though his DNA was found in Lily’s bedroom. He said he didn’t touch her, though she was bruised.

“Don’t all kids?” I say, forcing a smile.

“I don’t mean lying about whether he brushed his teeth at night. For example, he didn’t tell you about the cheating scandal at Adams High, did he?”

“Not at first.”

“When did you find out he hadn’t told you the truth?”

“When the principal called,” I said.

“Ah, yes. To tell you he was suspended. I assume you also did not know he was sneaking out of the house to spend the night at Lily’s?”

I clear my throat. “No,” I admit.

I glance at the jury, because I don’t think I can look at Asher right now. I wonder how many of them have children.

The prosecutor holds up photographs that have been entered into
evidence. Even though I have seen them before from the gallery, it is shocking to have them up close: the picture of Lily and Maya at a sleepover, with bruises ringing Lily’s arms; the photograph of Lily’s body from the autopsy with purple contusions. “Do you see the extensive bruising on Lily’s body in the photograph taken by her best friend, Maya Banerjee?” the prosecutor asks.

“Yes.”

“Do you see extensive bruising on Lily’s body in the photograph taken by Dr. McBride, the forensic pathologist?”

I swallow. They reminded me of bruises
I’d
had. “Yes,” I murmur.

“Objection,” Jordan calls. “Are we going anywhere with this? We’ve established that the witness has twenty-twenty vision.”

“Get to the point, Ms. Jewett,” the judge says.

“These photographs were taken in October and December. When was your son dating Lily?”

“From September through December,” I reply.

“You’ve heard testimony from Maya Banerjee that your son grabbed Lily hard enough to leave bruises.”

“Yes.”

“Yet none of this was something you would have normally expected of your son, was it?”

I think about Asher punching a hole in the wall of his bedroom. How I’d opened the door to find him cradling his fist as if he was just as surprised by his outburst as I was.
You think you know someone,
he had said, dazed,
but you really don’t know them at all.

I think about the day Asher was born, a full month before his due date. The pain from my dislocated shoulder was an excruciating counterpoint to the contractions. I remember the nurses twittering dreamily over Braden, because he never left my side. But I knew why he stuck so close: so I wouldn’t have a chance to tell them what he’d done to me.

Wait,
Asher had asked during the first police interview with Mike Newcomb.
How did she fall?

Had he planted that seed, so everyone else would see it that way?

My eyes swim with tears; my hands are shaking. “Asher couldn’t have hurt her,” I manage, wondering if I am trying to persuade the jury, or myself. “You don’t know him like I do.”

The prosecutor’s eyes light. “But by your own testimony, Ms. McAfee, you once loved an abusive man. Isn’t it true that you can love someone…who inflicts great physical harm?”

Dimly, I hear Jordan object; I hear the judge dismiss him, saying that he opened this line of questioning during the direct exam.

They are waiting for my answer.

It is true that people are not always who they appear to be.

It is true that I lied about the bruises my lover had given me.

Had Lily?

I have studiously avoided looking at Asher, but now I do. Something shutters in his eyes as he realizes my love for him
is
conditional, after all. That I am as much of a stranger to him as he is to me.

Isn’t it true that you can love someone who inflicts great physical harm?

There are fault lines in my heart. I stare at Asher, unblinking, as I finally answer the prosecutor. “Yes,” I say. “It is.”

HERE IS WHAT
Asher does not remember, and what I will never tell him: on the day that he came between Braden and me, when Asher clung to his leg like a barnacle, Braden plucked him off and hurled him across the room. There, he struck the wall and crumpled.

For a terrifying moment, Asher didn’t move. Then he began sobbing and shrieking. I crawled over to Asher and cradled him, surrounding him with the barrier of my own body, and my life cracked in half: before that moment, and after. I could suddenly see two paths, clear as day.

I thought:
I will not let him hurt my son.

I will not let Asher become a victim, too.

I would save that boy, even if I lost everything else.

LILY
8

SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

Two and a half months before

M
y mother doesn’t know about it yet,
squeals Mackenzie LaVerdiere, the co-captain of the girls’ soccer team. We’re in the locker room, and Mackenzie’s teammates are gathered around her, looking at her new tattoo, a black butterfly. Some of the Lady Presidents are naked.
She told me I couldn’t get one until I’m eighteen, but screw her! It’s my body!

It’s really my first time in a girls’ locker room. At Marin-Muir I was excused from sports. I have to say the vibe here is really different from the men’s locker room—where guys just walked around naked, laughing, talking. Once, a long time ago, I was in the locker room of a public swimming pool in Seattle, and I remember seeing a guy standing in front of a steamy mirror,
shaving,
naked as a blue jay.

That’s definitely not the deal in the women’s locker room, where most of the girls are more modest, turning their backs to one another as we wriggle in and out of our gym clothes. Over at the mirrors, there’s a tight crowd. There are blow dryers and lipsticks, moisturizer and tease combs. One girl from my AP Bio class stands in front of a sink staring at herself for a good thirty seconds, before simply announcing,
Somebody kill me now.

And then there’s Mackenzie and her court. There’s an air of confederacy about them as they admire the black butterfly, a confederacy not only of the tattoo but of their own gorgeousness. You can tell they are confident and at home in their bodies, these girls. I see other
girls on the outside of their circle casting looks at them, wondering what it must be like, to feel in your nakedness only a sense of pride and command, rather than a sense of somehow being
less than
. There were boys like that, too, in the men’s locker rooms I once inhabited, nerds looking on at the muscle boys with envy.

Later, as I walk through downtown Adams, I think about the things I have seen that most men, and most women, don’t get to experience. In a way, it’s a gift, being trans, and there are moments—like now, walking through this pretty town on a late summer evening—when I am willing to say,
Sure, I’m grateful for it all
.

For the longest time, I wasn’t grateful, though.

I remember what it was like to look in a mirror and think,
Somebody kill me now.

Mom’s working late tonight. I told her I’d just walk home. It’s a long walk, but I’m feeling expansive, here almost at the end of my second week at Adams High. I go over to the little park that overlooks the Cobboscoggin and sit down on a bench to watch the river flow.

I open my backpack and get out the poetry book we’re doing for Chopper. We’re starting out with William Blake, the
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
.

And all at once, tears rush to my eyes, and I’m sobbing.

When we were talking about the Blake poem today, Chopper looked at us and asked what it made us think about—not what it
meant,
but how it made us
feel
. I thought that was a nice distinction.

Until Dirk raised his hand and said,
She’s got an STD!

Chopper pointed to the door. “Out,” he said.

“But, Mr. Jameson—”

“Out,” said Chopper, and Dirk got his things and slunk out of the room. Then, with a smile, Chopper said, “Actually, venereal disease is one of the things readers have thought the poem’s about. But maybe that’s too specific. What else do you think when you read this?”

“It makes me think about a woman who’s been made sick,” said the girl in front of me. “By a man. Who says he loves her. But mostly, she wants to be alone.”

There was a long pause as we all thought about this. “So sometimes,” growled Chopper, “love just makes people sick?”

Heads nodded. A
lot
of heads nodded.

“Sick,” said Chopper, again. He is positively the gnarliest, most wrinkled teacher I have ever had. But then he looked at us with a strange, gentle expression. “But we keep on looking for it, day after day. Getting our hearts broken. And getting them healed again.”

He looked out the window. We all sat there in an electric silence. Chopper looked back at us, and pointed toward the door again. “All right,” he said. “
Out.
”

Today was a Granite Day. The schedule at Adams High changes every day, and each schedule has a different name. There’s Finch Day (named after the state bird) and Quartz Day (the state gem) and Birch Day (tree). On a Granite Day (rock) we have “Morning Meeting.” Today at Morning Meeting there was a presentation from something called the Rainbow Alliance. It’s the student LGBTQ group, led by two students named Finn Johnson and Caeden Wentworth.

“We want to welcome everyone back to school,” said Finn, who was assigned female at birth but is now nonbinary. Finn uses the pronouns
they
and
them,
binds their top in order to have a flat chest, and seems to delight in subverting all the expectations people have around gender. Caeden is trans, AFAB, but has been on testosterone for two years now and has a short black beard. “We wanted to let you
all know what the Rainbow Alliance is doing,” said Caeden, “and what we have planned for the coming year.”

There are going to be buses to take people to some lectures at Dartmouth this fall—one by Kate Bornstein, another by Janet Mock. There’s going to be a drag ball just before Christmas, and weekly drop-in sessions where anybody who wants to can come and talk.

Sitting there in my chair at assembly, all I could think was how remarkable it is that Adams—this tiny, rural New England town—has resources like this. How people who feel the thing that I felt now have something I didn’t have—allies, resources, fellow travelers. It used to be that trans stuff was something you had to figure out on your own, like joining a secret underground. Now there are
people to talk to.
It seems like since 2005—the time I first said to myself,
I’m a girl
—the whole world has changed.

But the strangest thing of all is that I do not have any interest in joining the Rainbow Alliance. I don’t even want them to know who I am.

What on earth is
that
about?
I wonder. Why, after suffering for so long, and in such isolation, would I not want to talk to people who are
just like me
?

But that’s the question.
Are
they like me?

Well, of course they are. It makes me ashamed to think this, makes me feel like even now, deep-rooted transphobia and self-hatred must be turning me away from people who, God knows, I could help. I could tell them about what I’ve been through. I could tell them how it almost killed me. I could tell them about Sorel, and Jonah, and my father. I could tell them what it’s like to go from a place where everything about you feels wrong to a place where you finally feel at peace.

But in order to do any of that, I’d have to come out.

And even though I am proud of who I am, proud of having fought against all these odds to become the person I always dreamed of being—it means everyone would know I’m trans.

When all I really want to be—all I’ve ever
been—
is a girl.

Is it so wrong to want to fit in, and to be left alone? Do I really have to spend the rest of my life as the emblematic trans girl?

But again: that’s the question. Is being trans the truth of who I am? Or is it just the truth of who I
was
? Am I even still trans, at this point, after everything I’ve been through? What is it that makes me so different from other girls my age? Is everything that happened to me before the age of seventeen really going to be the most important thing about me for the next seventy?

Or is all of this just a long-winded way of running from the facts: that I’m never going to be like everybody else, that whatever scars being trans has left upon me, they’re pretty much there for the rest of my life, like it or not.

But there are times I don’t want to be an outlier. There are times when all I want is just to sit on a bench by a river and read a poem and watch the sun slowly sinking behind the mill.

Like now.

When dusk falls, I put my book in my backpack and head toward home. Streetlights have come on, and I can see people in the A-
1
Diner, eating their burgers and their fish and chips.

It surprises me how early it starts to get dark here, but then, as I keep reminding myself
, We’re not in California anymore
. I walk down Main Street, past the Catholic church and a music store called Edgar’s.

As I draw near the public park—Presidents’ Square—I see a dad in a polo shirt, shouting at a little boy, who is sitting on a park bench, sobbing. “I don’t want to!” says the boy.

“I don’t care what you want,” says the father. “Life is not about getting what you want!”

I’ve stopped on the sidewalk to stare at this exchange, and now the man looks up at me and says, “What are you goddamned looking at?” and I quickly walk on. But the sound of that boy sobbing is like a knife in my heart.

I remember what it was like to be that boy.

And I remember what my father did to me our last night together.

After he cut all my hair off, he’d stormed out of the house, heading down to the bar. My mother came home late and found me on the kitchen floor, right where he had left me. I couldn’t move.

She scooped me up in her arms and held me. I sobbed into her shoulder.
I’m so sorry
. I kept saying over and over again.

That was when Ranger Mom kicked into gear.
You don’t have a thing to be sorry about,
she said.
You’re my child, Liam, and I love you.

But Daddy said
— I paused. I couldn’t even bring myself to say it
. But Daddy said—

You don’t have to worry about him ever again,
she replied.

She meant what she said. Two hours later we—the two of us, plus Boris—were driving south on Route 5, past Tacoma, past Olympia, past Grand Mound. We stayed that night at something called the Mt. St. Helens Motel, in Castle Rock. Mom tried pointing out the cone of the burned-out volcano, but it was too dark.

In the morning, though, I saw it, the summit covered in snow. “It looks so peaceful,” I said to Mom.

“It does,” said Mom. “But things aren’t always what they seem, are they?”

No,
I told her,
they’re not
.

We drove all day, past Portland and Eugene and Medford. Mom talked about the national forests in Oregon—Willamette and Umpqua to the east, Siuslaw and the Rogue River–Siskiyou off to the west. I don’t remember Mom saying that we’d never return to Seattle, that she wouldn’t be going back to my father, that she’d never again guide people through the Olympic National Park, showing them the Hoh Rain Forest or Hurricane Ridge.

What I do remember is a field of flowers near Mount Shasta. We’d crossed over into California in the late afternoon, and stopped for a break at a restaurant not far off the highway. While Mom was in the bathroom, I got Boris out of the car and let him have a pee. There before us was a beautiful field of long grass with a small stream trickling through it.
Lily Hollow Overlook
,
said a sign.

Mom came out and found me lost in thought. “Do lilies bloom here in the summer?” I asked her.

“I bet they do,” she said. “They’re pretty hardy. But they only bloom once a year.”

I thought it over. “I think I want my name to be Lily,” I told her.

Mom got down on her knees and put her arms around me. I still remember that hug. “That’s a pretty name.”

“I’m going to be a girl from now on,” I clarified.

“Lily,” said Mom. “You’ve always been a girl.”

IT TOOK A
while before Point Reyes really started to feel like home, instead of just a place where we were camping. Mom’s family had owned the house there for decades, and I vaguely remembered visiting it a couple of times when I was really little. But now it wasn’t a summer home, a place to stay a couple of weeks a year. Now it was where we lived.

I didn’t go back to school that spring, but Mom homeschooled me, and I didn’t fall behind. It took until the summer to get things straightened out with the Park Service, but by July, Mom had been officially transferred to the national seashore. I stayed home, practicing cello, exploring this new world with Boris. Mom came home in the evening with fresh fish and vegetables she bought at the farmers’ market. In June and July, she brought me bouquets of lilies, too: Pitkin Marsh lilies, and Humboldt’s.

That summer was when I had my first consult with a gender counselor, and an endocrinologist. They started me on puberty blockers—a drug called Lupron.

I turned twelve. I bought new clothes.

Mom started introducing me to people as her daughter.