Mad Honey

by Jodi Picoult

But there is a vast canyon between who we want people to be, and who they truly are.

“Maybe,” Elizabeth says, “you need to think about the difference between what is secret and what is private.” I want to tell her that those are the same things, but maybe they’re not.

How similar does someone have to be to you before you remember to see them, first, as human?

I would never know what it felt like to fly. But I knew all about what it was like to come crashing back to earth.

I want to be alive and I want to be joyful and I want to be on fire, I want to be so human it makes the ice in my water glass melt.

“I’m the luckiest person who ever lived,” he says, looking up at me, “to be with you.”

How wonderful it has been to have been alive, I thought. How wonderful, and how sad. When I wake up, I thought, the world will be different. In that new world, I would never be sad again.

I see the wide wall of the barn where I process my honey. On the weathered boards, someone has written in vivid red paint a single word: Murderer. Inside the house, the teakettle whistles. It sounds like a scream.

There are some secrets that I think we are willing to take to the grave for the people we love.

Lily Campanello will never be twenty-one.

I find myself thinking of Lily. Were the fences she built meant to keep others out, or to keep herself in?

There is no set of rules that dictates what you owe someone you love. What parts of your past should be disclosed?

Where is the line between keeping something private, and being dishonest?

I’ve been taught by the world to think of myself as forever undatable, that anyone who ever expresses the smallest bit of affection for me is either someone who is just lying in order to taunt and hurt me; or, even worse, someone who does like me, but only because they don’t know everything. And the moment that they do know everything, all their love will turn to ash.

I was afraid to move, because it might be a dream. And I was afraid to move, in case it wasn’t.

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.

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.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to have to educate everyone about your right to exist in the world.

“There’s a difference between sex and gender. A person’s sex is the body’s biology—what’s between your legs and in your DNA. A person’s gender refers to what’s between your ears. Your own psychological sense of self—who you know yourself to be—is called your gender identity. If your gender identity doesn’t dovetail with your biological sex, you are transgender.”

Some people change their driver’s license or passport to reflect their correct gender.

And once upon a time, they could….

I bent like a willow in the strength of his storm.

He exudes power and privilege, a superhero coming to save the day in his tailored suit. But you don’t get to be the hero of the story when you’re the villain.

The secret weapon of mad honey, of course, is that you expect it to be sweet, not deadly. You’re deliberately attracted to it. By the time it messes with your head, with your heart, it’s too late.

An act of defense. And also an act of violence.

“I have known abusive men,” I say. “I have loved abusive men. I have lived with abuse.” Beneath my thigh, I cross my fingers. “I know an abuser when I see one. And I can tell you without a doubt,” I lie, “that Asher is not abusive.”

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.

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?

“It looks so peaceful,” I said to Mom. “It does,” said Mom. “But things aren’t always what they seem, are they?”

You spend your whole life thinking that you’re the only person who feels the way you feel, only to find out that being trans is not that uncommon, that it is just one more way of being human.

Sometimes I wonder if something bad happened to Mom, maybe when she was young, that made her want to spend her life in the wild, among brown bears and lynx, instead of in civilization, in the teeming world of men.

I think about how easy it is to get lost. And how grateful I am at being found.

And yet, I am the cliché, the woman who is praying to a God she hasn’t previously acknowledged to protect my son.

I know, better than most people, what it means to make a colossal mistake. How you carry it with you; how it alters you at a cellular level. How, if you cannot forgive yourself for your transgression, you snap under the weight of your own flaws. I also know what it’s like to start over.

I wander the halls like a restless spirit. It’s lonely as hell.

“It’s a free country,” I say, shrugging. But maybe not for Asher, not for long.

What I know: You don’t remove from your world the one person who fills it. What I know: Asher can’t be guilty.

But even at eight years old, we were already running the gender maze that the world had set for us, without even realizing it.

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.”

This is the moment, I think. This is when I lose my child, or get him back.

Now here we are, seven years later, in a house in New Hampshire. Boris is old. Mom is going gray. My name is Lily.

But maybe what was true for Mom won’t have to be true for me. I’m not going to be a victim, ever again. I’m going to live my life with power, and fierceness, and with love.

Why is it necessary for me to justify the fact that I’m here upon this earth, to explain and defend the things I have known in my heart since the day I was born?

I think sometimes about all the strange and wonderful things the world contains—the blue potato, the Venus flytrap, the duck-billed platypus. If there is room under heaven for all of these miraculous things, couldn’t there possibly be room for me?

It is true that the way the legal system works, once you are acquitted you are free to go home, but there’s a cognitive dissonance in the realization that the world has spun away without you. Even innocent, you will still be the boy who was involved in that murder trial. You are blameless, but stained.

Sometimes he sits with his head bowed, being coronated by the sun. King of solitude; ruler of nothing.

Here is the ultimate irony: Lily Campanello was not killed because someone was threatened by her being trans. She was killed because someone was threatened by her being a woman.

This has always been my favorite fact about bees: in their world, destiny is fluid. You might start life as a worker, and end up a queen.