Mad Honey: A Novel (37 page)

Mom looks at us with her mouth open. “Did you
see
that? It’s on the SGCN list!”

“SGCN?” asks Asher.

“Species of greatest conservation need.” Mom’s still standing there stunned, like we just saw Elvis. “They’re so beautiful, and so threatened.” Her eyes fall upon me.

And then she turns and leads us deeper into the wild.

Later, after we get home, Mom makes us dinner while Asher looks around the house. He goes over to the bookshelves and reads some of the titles—
Silent Spring, The Sun Also Rises, The Stand,
paperback folios of Shakespeare plays, everything ever written by Toni Morrison. I go into the kitchen to see if I can help Mom. She just looks at me with big shining eyes, like she’s about to cry.

“Are you okay, Mom?” I ask. I’m guessing she’s falling in love with Asher a little bit, too.

“Wasn’t that wonderful today?” she says. “Seeing the scarlet tanager?” And I realize it isn’t Asher she’s all emotional about. It was seeing a rare bird in the wild.

I’m just about to tell her to get over herself when I hear Asher’s voice from the next room. “Whoa,” he says. I head back to the living room in time to see him holding—to my horror—an old photo album, the one that contains pictures of me as a boy.

“What’s
whoa
?” I say, trying to be casual.

“Who’s this boy?” Asher asks. “He could be your twin!”

I feel the blood rushing to my face. I’m also remembering the fight Mom and I had, when we were unpacking, about leaving the album out.
Sometimes I feel like I don’t have any history,
she’d said.

“That’s my cousin,” I say swiftly. “My cousin Liam.”

“Wow,” says Asher. “He looks just like you. Where does he live? California?”

I can tell from the complete silence in the kitchen that Mom is listening to this conversation very, very intently. It’s a good question. Where
does
Liam live now?

“No,” I tell Asher quietly. “He’s gone. Leukemia.”

“Jesus,” says Asher, chagrined. “I didn’t mean to, uh—

“It’s all right, Asher,” says Mom, coming out from the kitchen. She takes the album from Asher’s hand and puts it back on the bookshelf. “We’ll always love Liam. He was a great kid.”

THE FENCING TOURNAMENT
is at Dartmouth, a school that my mother wants me to go to so badly she’s done everything but fill out the application herself. She definitely feels like I should do the full liberal arts thing, instead of going to a conservatory—because it will make me “well-rounded.”

That’s what she says, anyway. But the real reason she loves Dartmouth is because it’s less than two hours away from Adams. “We’d be able to stay close,” she says, although I am pretty sure that hanging out with Mom on the weekends is not going to be my top priority next year. What’s really clear to me is that Mom hasn’t really figured out what she’s going to do with her life after I’m finally launched to college. Maybe she’ll stay with the Forest Service in Campton, but it seems like a long shot to me.

What I hope she’ll do, actually, is through-hike the Appalachian Trail, which she’s always said she’s wanted to do. That’d be a five- or six-month-long commitment, hiking from Mount Katahdin in Baxter State Park, Maine, all the way down to Springer Mountain, Georgia. People who do it say it’s transformative; that they figure out what’s missing in their lives, or who they are meant to be. Maybe she’d even meet some other through-hiker, and fall in love.

I’d like that. Knowing she isn’t alone.

On the drive down here, in fact, Mom suggested that after the
tournament we could hike part of the AT—“just a little day hike,” she said. Incredibly, the trail goes right through Hanover, goes right through the Dartmouth campus, in fact. But I’m pretty sure that when the tournament is over, Asher and I are going to try to sneak off to a mini-golf/ice cream place in West Lebanon. Provided we can ditch not only Mom but Maya, who is driving down with Asher to cheer me on
.

My coach, Mr. Jameson, is my AP English teacher, better known as Chopper. He’s a fearsome character indeed, considering that he’s at least seventy. He paces up and down the edge of the piste, watching every move his fencers make. He’s such a grumpy old man, but then again, when he picks up a foil during practice to show us how to make a particular move, he suddenly is full of grace and poise.

I win my first three matches: 15–4, 15–8, 15–1. By the time we get to my final match of the day, just after lunch, people are tired. The crowd in the stands is thinning out, but there’s still a fair number of folks watching, including what looks like a number of kids from the Dartmouth College fencing team, whom I can identify by their extremely cool matching jackets, decorated with a big green D, a white tree in the middle, overlaid with two crossed swords.

My opponent is a girl named Nancy Seidlarz, who has at least three inches and forty pounds on me, and I can tell from the start that she’s going to be tough. I saw her steamroll her last opponent this morning, 15 to 2, and it didn’t even take her the full three periods to do it. She gets a touch off of me in the first period, and then another, and then three more.

It’s five to nothing when we take the first break, and Chopper comes over to whisper in my ear.

“What’s the matter with you?” he growls.

I want to explain to him that Nancy Seidlarz is bigger and stronger than I am, but he’s not hearing it. “Use your head,” he says. “She’s big but she’s slow. You can outsmart her. I know you can.”

The ref says, “
En garde. Prêtes? Allez!
” Nancy Seidlarz comes charging at me and gets a touch before I even raise my sword to parry.

“Focus, Campanello!” shouts Chopper. “Focus!”

I take a deep breath, and the ref says, “
Prêtes? Allez!
” and just like that I point my sword at Nancy Seidlarz and I scream “
Aiieeee!
” and I flèche her. She is not prepared for this at all, and unless I’m mistaken, she takes a half step backward before I get the point.

“Halt,” says the ref, and the place erupts in cheers. It’s 6–1.

This point is enough to put me back in the game. In the next five minutes I catch up with her, tie her, and then we trade the lead back and forth. It’s 10–10 at the end of regular play. Now we’re in sudden death.

The ref conducts the “draw” before we get started, a coin flip which Nancy calls and wins; that means that if neither of us scores in this final minute, Nancy gets the win. It’s not a good situation for me to be in, but then, it’s not the first time my back’s been against the wall.

My whole being is focused on anticipating and outguessing Nancy Seidlarz. With fifteen seconds to go, I get my break. Nancy parries an attack, but she swings her arm out too far to the right, leaving her open and slightly off-balance. That’s when I hold my sword forward, move my weight onto my right knee, and then charge at her.

I get the point, and the match. The gym erupts in thunder.

We take our helmets off, and Nancy and I reach forward to shake hands. She takes off her helmet, and to my surprise she just looks at me with generosity and respect. “You’re amazing!” she says.

“Isn’t she?” answers a strangely familiar voice, and I turn, and that is when all the sound in the room disappears.

“Jonah?” I say.

THE VALENTINE’S DAY
Massacre was the final act for Jonah and me, I guess. But things had really ended long before that.

I had been fencing against Hartshorn, not well, but that wasn’t the problem. It was because—halfway through my third match—there’d been a disturbance up in the stands. A man was shouting and
swearing from one of the bleachers, more upset with my poor performance than maybe
I
was. The voice was unmistakable.

You can be anything you want to be, Liam.

There in the bleachers was my father, wearing a ratty-looking raincoat. He had at least two days’ beard on him. His voice sounded like he was drunk.

It was impossible. How could he be here?

Even more rattled, I lost that match, and the next one. I kept wanting to go up into the stands and say,
What the fuck are you doing here? Why can’t you leave us alone?
I wanted Mom to pull him by the hand into the parking lot, and tell him to get lost.

But Mom wasn’t there that day. She was at the national seashore, doing research on the tide pools.

Had he driven down from Seattle to see me fence? How had he wound up so drunk on a Saturday morning? It was the first time I realized that you can cut someone out of your life, but that doesn’t mean they’ll cut you out of
theirs.

Fuck you, Dad,
I thought. Strangely, the anger helped me focus. I stepped up for my final match and made short work of my opponent. But I wasn’t really fighting a fencer from Hartshorn.

I pulled off my mask as the crowd cheered.

“That’s my kid!” Dad shouted, pointing to me. “That’s my
boy
!”

Everyone on the team—including Jonah, and Sorel—looked up at my drunken father, and then at me. “Lily,” asked Sorel. “Who
is
that?”

A security guard was talking to Dad now. Dad was still shouting. “His name’s not Lily!” he shouted. “It’s Liam! I should know! I’m the one who fucking
named
him!”

“I have no idea,” I said, and turned to leave the gym.

THAT WEEKEND,
Sorel took me aside. “Everyone’s been talking about that guy at the fencing tournament who said he was your father,” she said, and she waited, like she knew if she let the time and silence rise between us, I’d fill it with the answers she wanted.

“I don’t know how to tell you,” I said.

“I’m your friend,” she told me, “and I’ve got your back. You can tell me
anything.
”

I made the mistake of trusting her, and told her I was trans. I told her about Seattle, and how my mother and I left our home in the middle of the night.

“Have you had the surgery?” she asked, and I told her, no, I wasn’t old enough. “Maybe someday, though.” I started to cry as I told her
.
“You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone.”

Sorel just looked at me. “After yesterday, everybody already knows.”

As it turned out, Sorel’s definition of having a friend’s back didn’t match mine. Through texts and whispers she made the most private aspects of my life as public as possible. I know Sorel thought she was doing the right thing.
We all have to look out for Lily now! Treat her with respect!

But
looking out for Lily
wasn’t what people had in mind.

Instead, when I got to school on Monday, some kids stared at me with a combination of pity, horror, and disgust. Oh sure, some people tried to be nice.
You’re so brave!
they said. But most people just ignored me, like I made them uncomfortable, like I was suddenly invisible.

The only person I
really
wanted to talk to about this was avoiding me.

I finally saw Jonah that morning at his locker. “You,” he said, like he couldn’t even bear to call me by name.

I wanted to say:
Remember when we were standing by the ocean, and you said,
No matter where it goes…we stay friends.

“Can we just—”

“No,” Jonah said. “You know, yesterday if you asked anyone in this school who I was they’d say,
Yeah, he’s the guy who pitched the perfect game
. But now, you know who I am? The guy who was too stupid to know what was in your pants.”

“That’s not what matters,” I said. “What matters is how we feel. How we—”

“You know how I feel?” Jonah’s eyes slid away from me. “I feel like you should go
fuck yourself.
”

He stormed off down the hall, leaving me standing there alone.

Goodbye, Jonah.

“HELLO, LILY,”
Jonah says. He’s wearing one of those jackets with the D and the crossed swords. He doesn’t look unhappy to see me, but he does look embarrassed. Then again, the last time I saw him, he was standing over me in a parking lot and my dress was in shreds.

“What are you doing here?” I say.

“I go to Dartmouth,” says Jonah. “I’m a freshman.”

Of course he is. I’d be a freshman, too, if I hadn’t lost a year. Thanks, in part, to Jonah.

“I live here now,” I explain. “Well, a couple hours north.”

“I wasn’t sure it was you until I saw your flèche. I’d recognize that scream anywhere.”

Members of the team are swirling around, celebrating. The stands are emptying. Maya waves to me, beaming. But I distance myself from her, and everyone else. I don’t want the stain of my old life to spread through my new one.

“Listen,” Jonah says. “I just wanted to say—I’m sorry. About what happened. I’ve thought about you
a lot.
”

I want to tell him,
I’ve thought a lot about you, too, you bastard
. But there’s something different in his face. He seems more mature, maybe a little smarter about the world? Maybe a little bit sadder?

Good,
I think.
I
want
him to be sad.

“I did a terrible thing,” Jonah says. He looks like he’s in real anguish.

I remember the moment just before I succumbed to the anesthetic:
ninety-eight, ninety-seven.
One of the thoughts that passed through my mind was the hope that I could find forgiveness for Jonah. It isn’t easy to do.

“Yeah,” I acknowledge. “You did.”

“If I could take it back—”

“Well, you
can’t,
” I say.

“I just need to know—” he says. “If you’re okay. If you’re happy?”

It’s a simple question, but for me, it’s never been an easy one. I want to say,
Yeah, since I got away from you.

Instead I just nod, and Jonah smiles. “That’s good,” he says. “You deserve it.”

“Well,” I say, and I’m unexpectedly moved by this. “Thanks, Jonah.”

Someone calls Jonah’s name and he twists around, raises a finger to tell them to wait up. “You take care,” he says.

He steps forward, opening his arms, and incredibly, I find myself walking into them. Even more incredibly, it feels good, like I am starting to let go of some of the anger that has haunted me all this time. I’m still holding my sword in my right hand, but as my arms wrap around his back, my foil falls out of my hand and I rest my face against his shoulder.