Mad Honey: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

talk to you,” I tell him, and I get up and start walking away.
    “Lily, wait,” he says, and he grabs my arm.
    “Let go of me.”
    “Please. Let me explain.” His pretty face is pale and scared now. “ Please? ”
    He’s gripping me hard . I can tell without even checking that I’m going to wind up with a bruise. It wouldn’t be the first time.
    “I was trying to do something nice for you.”
    “You thought it would be nice to stage a reunion for me with the person who ruined my life? Why would you think I’d ever want that?”
    “Because I know what it’s like. Not having a father.”
    “Lucky you!”
    Anger flickers in Asher’s eyes, but is quickly banked. “It wasn’t lucky, Lily. Not for me. It was like having a giant black hole in the middle of everything.”
    “I would rather have had a giant black hole in the middle of everything than to have that asshole, ” I tell him.
    “You don’t mean that.”
    “How do you know what I mean? You weren’t there!”
    I start to move away, but he grabs me by the arm again. “You’re right, I wasn’t,” he says. “I was here . Without my own father. And I thought maybe if I couldn’t fix that for me, I could fix it for you.”
    I look him hard in the eye. “You,” I say slowly, “can get your fucking hand off my arm.”
    I twist out of his grasp and start walking through the snow. It’s five miles to the house, but I will walk a hundred if it means I can stop having this conversation.
    “Don’t you think he deserves a second chance?” Asher calls.
    “No,” I snap.
    “Lily,” Asher says. “You gave me one.”
    Again, I stop in my tracks. The snow is coming down harder now. “Maybe that was my first mistake,” I say, and head toward the trail that leads through the dark woods to my house.
----
    —
    FIVE DAYS LATER, I wake up sick. Correction: still sick. It’s my third day home from school. I can hardly remember Monday and Tuesday because I spent both days trying to avoid Asher and everyone else at Adams High. Whatever I’ve come down with started the night I walked through the woods, and keeps getting worse.
    Although to be honest it is hard for me to separate how crappy I feel from being sick from how crappy I feel about Asher.
    I don’t even know how in the living fuck he found my father. Social media? A private detective? Obsessing over it makes me crazy. What if Dad is still around here? What’s to keep him from coming over and knocking on our door? It’d be easy enough for him to find us. It’s a small town.
    The bruise I got from where Asher grabbed me is greenish blue. Yesterday, when I told Mom I wanted to stay home, she looked at it and said, Lily. Talk to me.
    But what could I tell her? I didn’t have the words.
    Lily, she said. If that boy is hurting you, you have to tell me.
    I opened my mouth, but instead I just started crying. So Mom put her arms around me and held me and we just sat like that for a long time. He did hurt me, Mom, I whispered. But not like you think.
----
    —
    I’D ALMOST FORGOTTEN that today’s the day I find out about the early decision from Oberlin. To be honest, all I want to do is sleep. At lunchtime, Mom comes in to check on me again. She’s not wearing her Forest Service uniform, which means she’s taken the day off to take care of me. She carries a mug of tea, which she puts down on my nightstand before placing a hand on my forehead. “You’re hot,” she says.
    I take the tea and sip it. It is Irish breakfast, my favorite, although I wish that we had some of Olivia’s honey.
    If I’m breaking up with Asher, that means I’m breaking up with his mom, too, I guess? Which is sad, because I really liked her. Once Olivia called me a pixie, although clearly she didn’t know the mythology. In England pixies were thought to be children who’d died before being baptized.
    She sits down on the edge of the bed. “You look terrible.”
    “You’re supposed to love me unconditionally,” I say,