Mad Honey

by Jodi Picoult

On the day of my father’s funeral, and years later, on the day of my mother’s, I told the bees. It’s an old tradition to inform them of a death in the family; if a beekeeper dies, and the bees aren’t asked to stay on with their new master, they’ll leave.

The bee itself is considered a symbol of Christ: the sting of justice and the mercy of honey, side by side.

I retreat to the door again, realizing that there isn’t any food I could cook that would fill the hole inside him. That I brought him a tray to make me feel better, not him.

My brother’s mouth opens and closes. It is so rare that I see him at a loss for words. “What was it like for you?” he finally asks. I hesitate. “Like someone stabbed me,” I say slowly, “and then blamed me for getting blood on the knife.” I suck in a breath. “When that stopped being only metaphorical, I left.”

Asher is not the killer that the prosecutor and the media and, Christ, everyone seems to think he is. But if he has to stay in that jail—if he has to adapt to protect himself—whoever he is when he comes out will not be who he was when he went in.

I felt something so foreign inside me that I couldn’t even name it—like I was carbonated, like if you shook me just a little I’d explode. I couldn’t define it as hope, not even when it was coursing through me.

Do not listen to anyone who tells you a broken heart is a metaphor. You can feel the cracks and the fissures. It’s like ice splintering under your feet; like the cliff crumbling beneath your weight.

“What’s shocking to you isn’t that the justice system is flawed, Olivia. It’s that you were naïve enough to believe all this time that it wasn’t.”

But we’re all working too hard to act normal, like we are struggling to stay upright in a wind tunnel while pretending it’s a gentle breeze.

sometimes think there is something very Jesus-like about Charlie Brown—his heartbreaking patience, his endless suffering. You have to admit the show would have a very different ending if, after he and Linus bought the sad little Christmas tree, the other kids in the Peanuts gang came after them with a hammer and some nails.

There’s a thing called passing, which is not only about transgender people but about everybody. It has to do with the way the bigotry and meanness of the world get parceled out, based on how you might, or might not, look or act like everybody else. The way there’s a particular kind of anti-Semitism that gets leveled at people who “look Jewish,” whatever that means. African Americans with darker skin sometimes are on the receiving end of more bigotry than people whose skin is lighter. Gay men who “act gay” get treated one way, those who pass as straight get treated another. It’s a whole pyramid of bigotry, with people who most resemble the dominant culture at the top, and people whose difference makes them stand out at the bottom. It’s inconceivable, if you think about it, the complex ways people have come up with for being horrible to one another.

ARISTOTLE WAS THE one who said the largest bee in the hive was the leader of the colony, but because of the time he lived in, he made the assumption it was a king. Even though scientists subsequently saw that same monarch laying eggs, cognitive dissonance allowed them to still assume it was a male, because female rulers just…didn’t exist. In the 1600s, when a Dutch naturalist, Jan Swammerdam, dissected a queen bee and found ovaries, it was the final proof that the “king” bee was actually female.

What I know about transgender women comes from the media—from seeing and hearing Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox and Chelsea Manning and Janet Mock. I haven’t really thought about what it means to be trans…because I have had the luxury of not having to think about it. But I’m thinking about it now.

If you want to understand something, you first need to accept the fact of your own ignorance. And then, you need to talk to people who know more than you do, people who have not just thought about the facts, but lived them.

“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. I think about my history with Braden. Is what happened between us a secret, in the way that the nuclear codes are secret? Or is it private, in the way that—painful as the facts are—this is history that belongs to me, and is mine to reveal?

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

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.

I may not be able to brag about his achievements the way I used to when he was a hockey star; I may hear whispers everywhere I go from now on. I may have pictured a future for him that involved college, a job that brought out his artist’s eye, a woman he couldn’t live without, a house full of children. But just the fact that the arc of Asher’s life may turn in a different direction doesn’t mean I will stop loving him.

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.