Mad Honey: A Novel (45 page)

He sits down beside Asher.

The prosecutor rises and addresses the jury. “Mr. McAfee makes compelling use of words, doesn’t he? But then again, so do fiction writers. Strip away his pretty talk about optical illusions and you see the bare facts of this case—and what we have proven beyond a reasonable doubt: in this romantic tale he’s trying to sell you about doomed lovers, there was dysfunction throughout. They fought with each other—you’ve seen the texts. There was abuse—you’ve seen the bruises. One day, after they had sex, Lily revealed to the defendant that she was trans. They were already in a volatile, combative relationship—and this was the last straw. The defendant, a boy who is easily provoked, realized he had had sex with someone who deceived him. Someone who was born a boy. And that, ladies and gentlemen, pissed him off—enough to tell Lily that
this ends now
.”

She turns, gesturing toward Asher. “At the start of this trial, I painted a picture of a defendant who lied, who was abusive, who
fought with his girlfriend, and who was found with her dead body. But now we know
why
this particular fight was different. Asher Fields was so furious after finding out his girlfriend was transgender—he felt so
humiliated
—that he was consumed with rage. Ladies and gentlemen, you even saw this happen before your eyes in court, when he felt betrayed by his friend Maya. Imagine that anger being nursed for weeks, ratcheted up. Imagine him going to Lily’s house to confront her, to teach her a lesson. But you don’t have to imagine the rest, because we’ve given you proof that Asher Fields murdered Lily—not in a crime of passion, but as a bona fide hate crime.”

“Objection!” Jordan yells. “Asher was not charged with a hate crime.”

Gina whips around. “None of us knew the victim was trans when this started. Except for your client.”

“
Enough,
you two,” Judge Byers snaps. “Can’t we even get through the closings?” She looks at Jordan. “Sustained.” Turning to the prosecutor, she adds, “The attorneys will address the court or the jury, but not the opposing counsel.” Finally, the judge looks at the jury. “The jury will disregard that last statement by the prosecutor.”

Chagrined, Gina Jewett takes a second to compose herself. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she finishes, “the defendant thought he had a relationship, albeit a combustible one, with a girl he knew well. Then he found out that Lily Campanello was born male. He could have just broken up with her. But instead, the defendant’s way out of the relationship was to take out his shame, his frustration, his anger
on Lily
. The defense has offered up a list of wild conjectures, hoping that you will be distracted by them enough to ignore reality. After all, isn’t it convenient that the only people in the relationship and in the house where Lily was found dead are the victim herself, who can’t speak, and the defendant—a proven liar?” She turns cold, assessing eyes on Asher. “Nothing is going to bring Lily Campanello back to life…but that doesn’t mean this defendant should not be held responsible for her death.”

AFTER DROPPING ME
and Asher off at the farmhouse, Jordan and Selena drive to Portsmouth to pick up Sam and bring him back to Adams. We don’t know how long the jury will deliberate, and they both want to be present when the verdict comes in.

I know they will return late tonight so that we can go to the courthouse together tomorrow morning, but the house feels cavernous when they are gone. Asher has retreated to his room, still stoic and silent.

I think of something that happened to Asher in second grade. He had been kicked out of school for three days. They had a zero-tolerance policy, and he had decked a boy at recess. He
was bullying
me, Asher had said.
Not the other way around.
I listened to the principal drone on about what was tolerated at this school, and how it was not an auspicious beginning for Asher. When Asher got into my car, I told him we were going out for ice cream. I said that he should always, always stand up for himself, and I would have his back.

The last thing I wanted was for him to turn into someone like me.

In the freezer I find mint chocolate chip ice cream, and I fill a bowl with several scoops and head upstairs.

Asher doesn’t respond to my knock, so I open the door anyway. He looks at me holding the bowl. “I’m not hungry,” he says, his voice clipped.

“Okay,” I reply, and I sit down on the edge of the bed.

“I don’t want you in here.”

“Well, last time I checked, I still own this house.”

He pushes himself up on the bed and yanks his headphones from his ears. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he says, “leave me alone.”

“No,” I say evenly. “I will do almost anything for you. But
that
is the one thing I cannot do.”

“Could have fooled me,” he says bitterly.

I cleave the ice cream with the spoon. “Do you remember the time you were kicked out of school in second grade?”

His gaze slides to mine. “Yeah.”

“Me, too,” I say simply.

He grabs the bowl from me and takes a mouthful, which is, I
realize, an olive branch. I watch him eat a few bites before he glances up at me again. “I wish you’d remembered a little sooner,” he says quietly, still hurt by my testimony. “I guess the pathologist changed your mind?”

I shake my head. It wasn’t the pathologist. It was realizing that my doubts had very little to do with Asher, and everything to do with my own experiences.

I think about how, the first night I stayed at Braden’s apartment, he already had bought two toothbrushes—one soft and one medium—because he didn’t know which one I liked. I believed, at the time, that he was being considerate. Now I know he was being calculating.
No one thinks of you the way I do. No one cares about you as much as me
.

“I used to believe the best of people,” I say haltingly.

He studies me, the spoon falling into the bowl. “Why didn’t you ever talk to me about what Dad did?”

“Oh, Asher,” I say. “Because I was afraid you’d think it was my fault.”

“Like he did. You thought I was like him.”

“No,” I correct. “I
hoped
you weren’t.”

“Until…now.” The full force of my testimony, and his, and all the hints dropped by the prosecution swell between us like an airbag that has been deployed to keep us from being hurt even more by each other. Asher runs his finger around the edge of the ice cream bowl. “In first grade?” he says. “When I hit that kid? I did it because the asshole was talking shit about you.”

My jaw drops. “What?”

“His mom worked in dispatch at the police department. He heard her say you moved here because you were a punching bag.”

The restraining order. I close my eyes, because I don’t know how to respond. All this time I tried to hide my past from Asher, and he’d known. All the time I’d tried to shield him, when he was already protecting me.

“When Lily told me she was trans,” Asher says quietly, “I didn’t know what to say. I was scared, yeah, and freaked out, and I didn’t
want to betray her by telling anyone else…even by telling you. But I wanted to. I thought,
What would Mom say?
And then I figured it out. I went back to Lily, and I told her how sometimes you run into people who knew you when you were married. They always say something in code, you know:
You’re like a different person!
And you always just smile and make a joke and say you’re who you’ve always been. I told Lily that when you were with Dad, he wanted you to be someone you weren’t. If you’d stayed with him, maybe you would have made yourself into that person…but it wouldn’t have been you. It would have been who
he
said you were.” Asher looks up at me. “And then I told her I loved her.
Her
.”

Tears fill his eyes, and his hands shake. I take the ice cream bowl from him and set it on the nightstand.

“I loved her, Mom,” Asher says, crying. “I still do.”

I wrap my arms around him, holding him until his chest isn’t heaving and his breath evens. Then I pull back, bracing my hands on his shoulders. “Asher,” I say, “I believe you.”

He knows I am talking about all of it—his pain, his innocence, his truth. And it’s not because of a Hail Mary witness testimony or a blood disorder. It’s not because Asher isn’t like Braden after all.

It’s because he is like
me
.

In spite of everything that has happened to me, I still believe in love…and so does Asher.

Even more remarkable: that may not be a flaw…but a strength.

Asher reaches for the bowl of ice cream and holds it out to me. “Here, Mom,” he says. “Help me finish.”

LILY
9

SEPTEMBER 6, 2018

Three months before

There are so many gendered things in this world. Hurricanes. Bicycles. Ice skates. Ships at sea. Even countries—Mother Russia, Uncle Sam? And of course, the planet itself:
Let earth receive her king.

Sometimes it makes me wonder about all the time we spend tearing out our hair labeling things. And how some of the results of all that work are dubious at best. It was Mark Twain who noticed that, in German, the noun for
fish
is masculine, the one for
fish scales
is feminine, and the word for
fishwife
is neuter.

These are the thoughts that go through my head as we—boys, girls, and even a couple of nonbinary folks—gather here in the Adams High School gym for the first day of the Coös County Honors Orchestra rehearsal. All around me are my fellow musicians, tuning up their instruments, students not just from Adams but from a half dozen other regional high schools. Surely an instrument is neither male nor female—they’re just things that make sound—strings and bows, brass and wood, mallets and cymbals and drumskins and little metal triangles.

And yet all you have to do is look around at these musicians to see the way that even sound is gendered.

In the middle of the orchestra is the brass section—tubas, trombones, trumpets, French horn, every last one of them played by boys. It’s not all that different in the woodwinds—where the boys play
bassoons and clarinets, but all the flutes are played by girls. The strings are even more ridiculous—the deeper the instrument, the more likely it is to be played by a boy. So all the basses? Boys. Most of the cellos? Boys. The violas split half and half. All but one of the violins? Girls.

Then there’s the harp, which I guess federal law requires be played by a girl. And the percussion and kettle drums, which are usually played by boys.

How weird is this? Most of us decided to play our instruments in third grade, a bunch of little kids who made our choices without even thinking about them. But even at eight years old, we were already running the gender maze that the world had set for us, without even realizing it.

That’s why it’s cool when you see someone breaking the expectations a little bit. Like the absolutely huge dude who “mans” the piccolo. And the girl in the back row “womaning” the gongs and kettledrums, twirling her percussion mallets around like a badass.

The oboist is female, too, which is a little bit unusual. She’s an Indian girl with a serious face. Mr. Pawlawski, the conductor, taps his baton against his music stand, turns to her, and says, “Maya?”

And Maya gives the A, and the first violin—a guy named Derrick—tunes to it. There’s a moment of silence, and then Derrick gives the rest of us his A, and then we all tune up to him.

Mr. Pawlawski is an intense, thin man with a goatee. He looks kind of like a
nice
Count Dracula. He passes out the sheet music for the four pieces we’re going to practice this fall—the “Jupiter” movement from Holst’s
The Planets;
the Polovtsian Dances by Borodin; a medley of movie music by John Williams; and Prokofiev’s
Peter and the Wolf
. The Prokofiev is going to be narrated by the goalie from the hockey team, this huge creature named Dirk Anderson. He’s wearing a T-shirt that reads
Puck it
. I met him two days ago, on the first day of school, in my English class. I guess getting the goalie to narrate
Peter and the Wolf
was some kind of coup for Mr. Pawlawski, but just looking at this kid gives me a sinking feeling.

Obviously, no one here has practiced any of this music (except
maybe for me, because I played “Jupiter” back in the Pointcrest orchestra two years ago), but Mr. Pawlawski seems to have a lot of faith in his players, because he asks us to give the John Williams piece a go, and just like that he raises his baton, counts it off, and we start in on the theme from Star Wars.

How does it sound? Not good.

What it sounds like, in fact, is the music that would go with that movie if Emperor Palpatine killed everybody in the first thirty seconds.
Good! Good! Let the hate flow through you!

Mr. Pawlawski taps his music stand with his baton, then raises one hand and holds the bridge of his nose with his fingers. He stands like that for a long time, like his brain is bleeding from the inside, and he’s trying to stop it. He sighs, then turns to all of us.

“Again,” he says, and the horrible noise begins anew.

It’s going to be a long semester.

OF COURSE,
I was running the gender maze, too, when I chose the cello in third grade. Even then I was aware of what things boys were supposed to do, and what things were for girls.

My parents had already started having fights about me. Third grade was when my father said that I couldn’t wear a dress outside the house. I think his exact words were,
This shit has to stop somewhere.

I didn’t really understand what difference it made what clothes I wore. On the weekends, when I went with Mom to the farmers’ market, the cheese lady would tell me how pretty I was.
She’s going to break some hearts someday,
she said. I was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt, but no one thought I was a boy, not unless my father was with me, and he made it very clear that this
young man
was his
son
.

It wasn’t about my clothes, so what was it people saw when they laid eyes on me and said,
She’s going to break some hearts
? Was it just my hair, which I liked long? Or was it something else, something in my spirit that they sensed?

That fall was when we first chose our instruments for the orchestra. I knew I was going to play cello from the first moment I ever saw
one. Like I said, cello is usually an instrument that boys choose, but I wanted it anyway. Was it because of the sweet sound it made, that it’s the string instrument that most duplicates the human voice? Or was it the shape, so like the hips and shoulders of a woman?

It’s a good thing I found the cello that year, because third grade was when I first felt the world closing in on me. I remember one weekend calling my friend Jimmy Callanan on the phone, asking him if he wanted to come over and play video games. Jimmy just said,
Nah, I don’t feel like it.
Really?
I said. I mean, I could understand it if he was doing something else, or if he wasn’t feeling well, or something. But Jimmy, clearly, wasn’t busy. He just didn’t want to hang out with me.

After I hung up I sat in the kitchen, trying to understand what had happened. Mom came in, and asked me what was wrong.

I have no friends,
I said, and burst into tears.

Oh, Liam,
she said, holding me.
I’m sure that’s not true.

But it was. I had stopped getting invited to other boys’ birthday parties. On weekends I’d just lie around, playing Zelda, or practicing cello, hour after hour. I got really good with the cello as a result, maybe because I have a good ear. Mostly, though, I was just driven by loneliness. I held that cello in my arms, and let her form the sounds I felt so keenly in my heart but had no other way to express.

Then, one day, my mother came home early from the park. I was in the living room practicing scales. “Liam,” sang out Mom. “I have something for you.”

I looked up, and there she was, framed in the doorway. In her arms was a puppy, a black Lab. My mouth dropped open.

I ran to my mother and then I held the puppy to my face. He licked me. My nose filled with that great puppy smell.

I was so grateful. My mother had seen how lonely I was, and got this little dog to save me. It was great to have Boris. I loved him.

But it was even better to have my mom.

“There,” she said. “
Now
you have a friend.”

I’M PACKING UP
my cello after rehearsal when I hear a voice behind me. “Early one morning,” says the voice. “Peter opened the gate and went out into the big fuckin’ meadow!”

I turn, and there, grinning from ear to ear, is Dirk Anderson. “How’m I doin’?”

“I don’t think that’s how it goes,” I say.

“Yeah?” says Dirk. “Well, maybe you could teach me.” He takes a step closer. “I’m
Dirk
.”

“I know,” I say. “I’m Lily Campanello. I’m in your English class, with Mr. Jameson.”

“Fuckin’
Chopper,
man,” says Dirk. “He’s gonna bust my balls.”

I am not sure how to reply to this.

“Are you good at English?” he asks, and he gives me this look that almost makes me feel sorry for him. Dirk, it would seem, is
not
good at English.

“Good enough, I guess,” I say, closing the final latch on my hard case.

“Maybe you can help me out this semester,” says Dirk. “You could help me, and I could help you.”

He keeps closing the space between us, and I take a step back. Another step and I’m going to be up against the gymnasium wall.

“Hey, Lily,” says Dirk. “If I said you had a beautiful body”—he can’t believe how clever the thing is he’s about to say—“
would you hold it against me
?”

I’m wondering if Dirk has enough of an IQ to realize what an idiot he is, when all at once a guy I’ve never seen before steps between us. “Dude, what are you doing?” he says. He’s beautiful—tall, curly hair, green twinkling eyes. He whispers, “
Play along.
”

“What does it look like I’m doing, Fields? I’m turning on the charm!”

“Too late, Dirk,” says the guy, and he slips an arm around my waist. “She’s mine.” He turns to me, and nods. “You want to go?”

“Okay,” I say, and I grab my cello and the two of us head out of the gym arm in arm, leaving Dirk behind.

“You owe me one, Asher!” shouts Dirk.

We pass through the double doors of the gym, and now we’re in the hallway, where Asher or Fields lets go of me and says, “Looked like you needed a lifeline there.”

“Asher, you’re gonna be late for practice. Again,” says Maya, the oboist, coming over to join us. “Oh—you’re the sick cellist!” She sticks out her hand. “I’m Maya.”

“Lily Campanello,” I say.

“Lily,” Asher repeats, like he’s savoring a candy tucked into the side of his cheek.

Maya pokes Asher in the side. “How did
you
meet the new girl before me?”

“I didn’t, officially. I rescued her from Dirk.”

“Ugh,” says Maya. “Can you believe he’s going to be in our faces all semester? He’s narrating
Peter and the Wolf.
”

“What’s his deal?” I ask.

“His deal,” says Maya, “is that he’s a mouth breather.”

“Killer goalie, though,” says Asher. He looks at his watch. “Damn. I
am
late.”

“See you this weekend?” says Maya.

“Always,” says Asher. “It was nice to meet you, Lily,” he adds, and then heads down the hall. We watch as Dirk comes through a second set of doors, and he and Asher laugh at something and walk away together, like they are the best of friends.

“So,” I say to Maya. “Are you two—?”

It takes Maya a second to realize what I’m hinting at. “Me and Asher?” She blushes from the neck up. “God, no.”

We’re walking down the hallway now toward the parking lot, where my mother is supposed to be picking me up. “I can always tell when someone’s serious about music,” she says. “Like you. You’re hardcore.”

“I’ve been playing since third grade,” I admit.

“Me, too,” says Maya. “Maybe we could do some duets sometimes? Unless you’re afraid of OD’ing on the nerd factor.”

“I don’t think it’s possible for me to OD on the nerd factor,” I say.

“I knew I liked you.” Maya laughs. “Do you know the Eugene
Bozza piece for oboe and cello? Why don’t you come over to my house this Saturday? We can play, and eat dinner with my moms, and watch a show or something?”

“That sounds great,” I say, and I have just enough time to register (
1
) that she said
Moms
and (2) that it was no big deal. My phone dings, a text from my mother. “My mom’s pulling up,” I explain.

Maya grabs the phone from me and types her number into my contacts. “I’ll text you so we can make plans,” she says, and I smile and rush toward the car—well, what passes for rushing what with the cello and my backpack. I’m thinking of what Mom said when she put Boris in my arms.
There.
Now
you have a friend.

“How was your day?” Mom asks as we drive home, and I tell her about Chopper, and Dirk, and Maya, and everything. I tell her today was wonderful. I tell her I think I’m going to be all right.

The one thing I don’t tell her, the thing I keep to myself, is the memory of Asher Fields, and how perfect his arm felt wrapped around my waist.
Too late, Dirk,
he said.
She’s mine.