Mad Honey: A Novel (36 page)

And I lace up.

“The first thing you need to learn,” Asher explains, as he helps me onto the ice, “is how to fall.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s the one thing I already know how to do,” I say.

“Correction: you need to learn how to fall
safely,
” says Asher. “If you’re going to skate, you’re going to fall. So here’s what you do.” He lets go of my waist for a second, does something almost like a pirouette so that now he is facing me. His skates go
ksshhh
on the ice. “When you feel yourself going over, bend your knees, put both arms out to the side, and push yourself down onto your ass. You want to try it?”

“I’m afraid to fall,” I say, and as I say it I think,
You can say that again.

“Watch me,” says Asher, and he does just what he described, splaying himself down so gently it’s like he just lay down in a frosty white bed.

“Okay,” I say, and a moment later I’m beside him.

“You,” he says, “are an A-plus student. Now: lesson two. Getting back up. Spin so you’re on your knees. Then put both hands on your right knee, and push as hard as you can until you stand. Now put your arms out to your sides and get your balance. Ready?” He does it, and now he’s standing above me, looking down. Without a pause I get up, too, and he smiles, like he’s impressed. “Nicely done. Ready for some baby steps?”

I am absolutely ready for some baby steps, Asher Fields. You have no idea. Or maybe you do. Maybe you’re as ready as I am.

Asher tells me that he teaches little kids how to skate during the summer, and that he hasn’t lost one yet. He talks to distract me, so I don’t look down at my feet. A half hour later I’m actually doing it—gliding around the rink, not gracefully exactly, but without falling constantly. I’m not good at stopping, though. Asher shows me how to do this, too. “To stop, you put your right foot forward and hold it at an angle. You should make a little snow when you’re doing it. That’s how you know you’ve used enough pressure.”

Which is what I’m trying to do when I wipe out on the ice—not gently like Asher taught me before, but a complete crash where my limbs go in directions they aren’t meant to go and the ice knocks
the breath out of me. I’m thinking,
Don’t cry, don’t let him think you’re not tough,
and I almost succeed, until Asher skates to me swiftly and gets down on his knees to make sure I’m okay. The bracelet I wear to cover my scars came loose during my wipeout, and as I tug it back into place, I realize Asher is staring at them, and fuck, my tears just spill over. I feel like I have been holding them in for years now.

He helps me sit up. The ice is cold through my jeans. After I calm down, Asher hesitantly touches two fingers to my bracelet. “That looks like it hurt.”

“I was in…a car accident,” I lie. “Two years ago, on Valentine’s Day.”

I feel awful not telling him the truth, but there is no way I’m going to do that on our first date, or it will likely be the last. What I want right now is not to be reminded of Jonah, or Valentine’s Day, or anything that came before. What I want to do right now is put all of that behind me and just skate with Asher.

Asher helps me back onto my feet. This time he doesn’t let go, and even though I’m staying upright, I know I’m falling for this beautiful boy, who skates backward as he holds my hands and looks into my eyes.

Then Asher guides me into the middle of the rink, raises one hand, and says, “I’m going to spin you. Go up on one skate, okay?”

“Wait, what?”

“Go with it!” he says, but I’m overthinking everything—my skates, this date, my life, and just like that I crash again, taking Asher down with me. We roll and come to rest in a heap. We are right at the center of the ice, the place where during a game, the ref drops the puck to set everything into motion.

“I think we’re ready for the Olympics,” I say.

He laughs. “For sure.”

“I’m crushing you,” I say, wriggling to get off him, but he tightens his arms around me.

“I’m good,” he murmurs. His words are little clouds. “Actually, I kind of like this better than skating.”

“I like it, too,” I whisper, “Asher,” and then I lean down, breathless and cold, and press my lips against his. There it is: our first kiss.

After about eight hundred years, he sits up and I move to the side. “I’m turning into ice,” he says.

“Let me help you up,” I say, and I reach down and then fall on top of him again.

He kisses me again. Against my mouth he warns, “You can get a penalty for that.”

“What did I do?”

“Delay of game,” he says, grinning. “And hooking.”

“Hooking!” I repeat. “What do I get for that?”

“Two minutes in the box,” he says. He gets up and pulls me with him, skating us to the far side of the rink, where a little door opens into the penalty box. Asher and I sit down on the bench and fall into each other again.

“I
like
the penalty box,” I say, coming up for air.

“Sometimes you get an extended penalty,” says Asher. “And have to stay in a little longer.”

“What do we have to do to get one?”

Asher’s hand falls upon my breast. We are all alone in the giant rink, and the world around us is frozen. He leans in for another kiss. “Misconduct,” he whispers.

1. We are sitting at the top of an abandoned lifeguard stand at the Adams Town Beach on Pierce Lake. In the summer, Asher says, this place is mobbed, but now it’s deserted. There’s a wooden raft that’s been hauled up onto the beach for winter. Leaves are turning orange. A pair of loons float on the lake, and they sound like ghosts:
   hoooo.
   

   Asher tells me loons mate for life.
   

2. I am walking down the hallway on my way to lunch with Maya and Asher is approaching from the other direction with Dirk and the hockey bros in formation and he stops and says, “Hey, not so fast,” and takes me in his arms and kisses me, right there in
   the corridor in front of everyone. Dirk watches, amazed.
   Dude,
   he says.
   

3. I make Hope Cakes for Asher on Wednesday night. On Thursday I bring them into school, and we sit in the cafeteria together, just us two. He is supposed to be doing his calculus homework but instead we’re holding hands across the table. Other people are staring. We are officially A Couple now. We are eating Hope Cakes. It’s like that.
   

   “Whoa,” he says, “these are amazing. What is
   in
   these?”
   

   I grab his calculus notebook and write down the recipe on a blank page. Then I hand it back to him. At the bottom I write—
   Bake in oven for 40 minutes, or until an impossible thing comes true. Whichever comes first.
   

4. We have our first fencing tournament of the fall next weekend, October the 13th, and the team is practicing hard. I swing my sword forward and shift my weight onto my right leg and charge at my opponent, and as I do this, I give off my classic fléche scream:
   Aieeee!
   And everyone looks over at me, like:
   Who’s that girl?
   I look up into the bleachers, and there is Asher, watching me, with a look that says,
   I know who she is.
   

5. Saturday is unusually warm, and Asher and I are in the fields behind his house, right near the place where the long grass meets the tall trees. We lie on a blanket drinking iced tea sweetened with his mother’s honey. I’m reading
   The Invisible Man
   by Ralph Ellison, and Asher is sketching. He asks if I can be his model, and I say,
   Sure
   . I prop myself up on an elbow.
   Draw me like one of your French girls,
   I say
   ,
   like Kate Winslet in
   Titanic
   .
   

   He smiles and says,
   Don’t make promises you’re not gonna keep,
   and I hear myself answer,
   I’m not.
   

   A moment later my shirt is off, and so is my bra, and I’m looking him right in the eye and I think,
   He’ll have this picture of me forever, and I am not afraid.
   

6. We are at my house after school but Mom is still at work. Boris is on the floor. Asher sits in a chair by the fireplace as I play my cello for him. It’s “The Swan,” by Saint-Saëns. I think about the legend of the swan, the one that says that the bird is mute for her entire life, until
   the moment she’s about to die, and then she sings the most beautiful melody in the whole universe, so gorgeous that just hearing it can crack you in half.
   

   It’s called a swan song.
   

   When I finally lift my bow from the strings, Asher’s eyes are shining. He looks like I feel. “Doesn’t it make you sad,” he asks, “to play a song like that?”
   

   “It’s only a sad song,” I tell him, “if there’s no one to hear it.”
   

   He kisses me and I feel like my heart is going to rise from my chest. Like I will be forever wearing it on the outside.
   

   “I heard it,” he says.
   

ASHER AND I
reveal small bits of information to each other like we are trading Pokémon cards. I learn that he is allergic to cantaloupe; he finds out that I am double-jointed. He tells me that he once had a goldfish that lived six years. I tell him I’ve watched every episode of
The Office
at least eight times. He says once he saw Adam Sandler in a Subway restaurant in Nashua. I admit that I didn’t know until a month ago that the division sign was just a fraction with dots replacing the numerator and the denominator. We tell each other the things that have to be whispered, too: that I’ve moved so much no place feels like home. That he’s afraid to tell his mother he wants to go to art school. That I worry my mom has spent so much time worrying about me, she won’t remember who she is when I leave for college.

The difference between Asher and me, though, is that presumably, he’s telling me the truth, and I am skirting the edge of lies.

When he asks me why we moved so much, I say it was for my mother’s job.

When he asks me why my mother worries, I say it’s because I’m an only child.

When he asks me if my parents are divorced, I tell him that my father is dead.

It is particularly gratifying to kill him off, if only fictionally.

My whole life begins to orbit around Asher—when I’m with him, I’m enraptured. When I’m not with him, I want to be. Even when I spend time with Maya now, she wants to know all about Asher. I can’t tell if she is trying to be a good friend or if it’s because that’s the only way she can be part of a relationship that is now only big enough for two. But in spite of all of that, I am very guarded in what I choose to reveal to her. Saying the words out loud makes it less special, somehow. I don’t want to share Asher with anyone, not even the girl who introduced me to him.

But he wants to share me, at least with his mother. I know that, like mine, his father isn’t in the picture. And I know that his mother is a beekeeper, which is weird and a little badass. The first time I meet her, she takes me out to the hives and we watch her bees carrying out their tiny secret missions. I didn’t tell her that I’d already been to her farm the week before, when she wasn’t home, and that while she was out I took off my shirt in the autumn sunshine and Asher sketched me in his book.

While she taught me Beekeeping
1
0
1
, Asher put his hand in the back pocket of my jeans, and all I could think of was that he wasn’t ashamed of me in front of his mother.

I caught her staring at me when she thought I wasn’t looking. “I like this one,” she said to Asher, before I left. But I could tell she was thinking,
This boy is the most precious thing I have in the world. You be careful.

WE ARE SURROUNDED
by drifting yellow mist, like the smoke that wafts from a fireworks show. Asher and I are making love and I can smell gunpowder. His eyes are soft and green and
knowing
. That’s what tips me over the edge in fact, not the undulating electricity rising in me, but his eyes, those eyes of his, which tell me,
Lily you are seen, and loved.
And then and then and then

Yeah, then the morning sun is coming through the window, slanting onto my pillow, and I open my eyes from sleep. And I remember
the big glass of water I drank last night, just before I turned out the light.

It’s one of the more arcane delights of being trans, the surprise orgasms that sneak up on me sometimes, if my bladder is full. Dr. Powers explained it to me once; because of the way my parts have been turned inside themselves, a lot of the most tender tissue now rests right up against my bladder. Which means that if I have a lot of liquid to drink the night before I go to bed, as my bladder fills up toward morning I can wind up getting all hot and bothered—
while I’m unconscious.
The result is these orgasms that arrive unbidden in the early dawn. I call them the
Night Visitors.

Biology sure is goofy, is my conclusion.

As I sit up in bed, a lot of the details of that dream are already disappearing, like dew on summer grass. But the look in Asher’s eyes—
that
I remember, maybe because that much was no dream.

He’s looked at me that way before, and grinned. And did not disappear.

A FEW DAYS
LATER,
Asher meets my mom for the first time. Mom picks us up and takes us to Ripley Falls, near Bartlett. Mom is in full ranger mode—showing us all the flora and fauna—but she has her guard up, too, remembering what’s happened before. But she
moms
the hell out of him anyway—insisting he put on sunscreen, making sure he has a full water bottle, and so on. Then we’re off—this is a trail that she’s been on several times, since it’s part of the lynx habitat she’s researching—but I haven’t been on it. Asher is diplomatic, asking Mom about her work, and for the next one point one miles we hear all about lynx.
The tufts on their ears increase their hearing. They can detect a mouse from 250 feet away. Their big, rounded feet can act like snowshoes.

“Have you seen one yet?” Asher asks. “Since you’ve been here?”

Mom sighs. “Not yet. But I’m hoping.”

Suddenly there is a fluttering of wings as a bird, frightened by our
approach, skitters into the air, flies over our heads, and lands on the branch of a white birch. “Oh my God,” says Mom, her long braid swinging around as she points toward the bird. “Look! It’s a scarlet tanager!” It’s an amazing creature—bright red with blue-black wings, and our sudden sighting of it is like seeing some fabulous celebrity walking swiftly from a theater door and into a limousine. The bird, perched on her branch, looks at us nervously for a second. Then it takes off, disappearing into the forest.