The Honeys

by Ryan La Sala

They are very, very careful to avoid asking anything that might bring Caroline up. It’s like they can see the voids in my life, the portions that have been punched out by her death, and they ask around them.

Aspen is one of the nation’s oldest and most exclusive camps.

Caroline always talked about escaping it and vanishing somewhere deep in the woods. How could she have meant here? How could this be better than home?

Maybe, in the end, they knew her just as well as I did. Or maybe none of us knew her, and we’re making her up now. A girl in the shape of our guilt.

I’m trapped between the campers and a paper wall of their bloodred remembrance.

I’m on the hill, in the grass. I’m holding a hand up to catch the sun from going in Caroline’s eyes. She’s doing the same for me. A game we used to play, a test of loyalty. We’re together, and she feels so solid, like I could reach into the memory, wrap my arms around her, and pull her out with me.

Twice now these trees have watched me vanish into my grief.

I leave the lip gloss on. Bright things in nature are often poisonous. Let that be my defense, then. Let Aspen watch, and predators prowl, and all the waiting jaws yawn wider. I will be a ruin to consume.

God’s work, I tell myself. You’re doing God’s work, Mars.

I’m not scared of bees. Not usually. A bee is a tiny thing, easy to crush. But seeing them this way, as pixels merging into incomprehensible magnitude, my mind can’t help but do the math. Crush one, be crushed by millions.

To discover again who she was, and save myself from that final version of her. The false, furious doll that attacked me.

These were the things she wore to make herself, herself. The colors of her beauty, all here in one place.

But what about grief? Do bees know loss? Humans have a hundred mythologies to dissect death. When a bee dies, I wonder if it anticipates the moment its curled body will be passed down through the sweetly scented darkness, toward the light that waits below.

Wherever you are, let it be bright. I hope it’s light that greets us, in the end, after everything. The alternative is unbearable.

“Noooo, really?” I gasp, for the drama. “And here I thought Wendy paired me with her nephew because she wanted to emphasize the Aspen core value of nepotism!”

I have known this literally my whole life. People decide they know everything about me the second they see me, and then reward themselves when I prove them wrong.

“It’s cool,” I say. “I’m used to it.” “You shouldn’t have to be.”

I watch Wyatt watch me. Out here, his mismatched eyes are so much brighter. Past the amusement, past the smugness, there’s intrigue. A longing unknown to him, maybe, but clear to me. I think. I hope.

I realize that Aspen, like everyone, thinks Caroline was killed by brain cancer. And for a moment, I do too. I saw the scans. I saw the shadowy blots riddling her body. The constellation of voids, like a prophesy for all the emptiness she’d leave behind.

“I’m sorry,” I tell Wyatt. “I’m sorry, too,” Wyatt tells me. There’s no need to say anything more. We leave it at that, hiking back to the others in shared silence.

Aspen prides itself on letting campers settle their own disputes.

“I went easy on you before,” Callum gloats. “Just because they told us we had to be nice to the freak with the dead sister.”

I can finally crumple over my throbbing hand. It’s like trying to hold a small sun, the heat so ferocious that it purges the tears out of me.

I did. The element of surprise is one of the few advantages I’ve got. Tyler looks at my hand trailing soaked pink bandages. “How is it?”

I stand still and straight, determined to show no fear. This is just another game, another test. If I remind myself of that, I won’t panic.

A warm, derisive jeer. I bite my tongue. They’ve renamed the tradition, but the bones beneath it are as old as Aspen itself. Which is to say: sexist. A sexist skeleton, beneath it all.

The only difference is that now it’s made of plywood, and they’ve removed the traditional garlands of hemlock and juniper. Less to burn in the event a rogue gender-fluid camper decides to go on a flaming crusade against the binary, I guess.

“Actually, I do. Most people do. Your sister made sure of it. For some reason she didn’t think you would ever come back to set the record straight.”

Caroline, righteous as she was, forced the bullies to confess after I was gone. I don’t know how. Aspen begged for me to come back when they realized their mistake, but I wouldn’t.

“Having people try to burn you like a witch kinda ruins the whole summer camp thing, Wyatt.”

I’ve already publicly kicked his ass. Twice. He won’t risk a third.”

I wonder if I can trust Wyatt. I like him, and he likes me, I think, but that’s different from trust. After a moment’s consideration, I decide it doesn’t really matter. I already have what I want.

“The way you have to think just to survive. It’s messed up, Mars.” I shrug because, yeah, it is.

but I think they watch to see how I’ll react, as if the gendered competition will cause me to go haywire or burst into hives.

It’s fucking funny. Clout like that is fragile. Masculinity is, too, I guess.

We were still little enough then that switching clothing the first time was seen as adorable antics, but the second time we got caught I got reprimanded. Not Caroline, though. It was like I’d tricked her into going along with my own wicked perversion. We stopped switching clothes after that. Still, we’d often sneak out of those parties to our spot in the garden, bow to each other, and twirl. Even if it was just for a minute.

I was leaning against it so casually just now, and for a moment there was such a heaviness pressing down on me I thought the railing would snap. I’d land right there on the stone patio, and this time there would be no one to break my fall.

The three of them stare at me, but not with pity. With something more like understanding.

“I’m sorry that you’re now being instructed to escort me places. But really, if you just want to go back to Eco-Lab, I won’t tell. Oh, wait, I’m sorry, that would require you to think for yourself. Can’t have you using your own brain! That’s not very Aspen, now, is it?”

Maybe you got off to a bad start with the boys, but if they got to know you, I think they’d really like you. Instead, you’re trying to join up with Bria and her gang.”

“Love has a weight,” Bria whispers. “And so does loss. Sometimes it can all be so heavy. But look at you, Mars. You’re holding it all up.” I am. Sometimes I stumble, but every time I get back up, I’m lifting everything that’s holding me down. Bria is right. It’s heavy, but I’m strong. I don’t know how I never noticed.

“I don’t subscribe to binaries like shores.” Wyatt does that quick-exhale laugh. “So what? You’ll just float forever in the middle?” “Yes. In my little nonbinary canoe,” I say.

But it’s not drifting around in the middle that makes me tired. It’s staying too long on either shore. People have these specific ideas of what a boy is, or a girl is, and it’s so exhausting to play along. People make themselves so unhappy trying to get it right. But it’s not even real. So I reject all of it. I’d rather be happy and adrift.”

“Gender, the idea that there are two shores directly across from each other. The lake has a ton of hidden shores, but you don’t know that if you’re stuck standing on the land.”

“Brayden didn’t even realize you were gone until Leena radioed. Not a good look. I doubt he’ll tell Wendy.”

Lying should be personal, I think. It shouldn’t be so easy to deceive, at such a large scale. Yet Aspen does it all the time.

“I understand that,” I say. “Sometimes I think the way people react to me has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with them.”

Being with them is like traveling in a pack of ghosts. The walls of Aspen are immaterial to them; we float through restrictions I once found so claustrophobic. We are invisible to the eyes of authority, becoming an ethereal, roaming pressure just at the edge of the

camp’s periphery. People seem to know we’re there and to be interested in what we do, but indirectly.

“You put that energy out into the universe, and the universe hears you. There are studies on, like, positive thinking and subconscious action.”