Honey Girl Read online

  Honey Girl

  Morgan Rogers

  Dedicated to the girls with claws. Let them fear you.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  In Las Vegas, they sell cheap replicas of the love locks from the Parisian bridge for twenty-five dollars. You can buy them on your way out of a chapel, drunk and giggly and filled with champagne bubbles. There is someone on your arm, a girl whose name you cannot remember, or perhaps never knew.

  She says, “Let’s get one of these,” and points to the locks. Their shiny surfaces barely echo the originals, but a pretty girl asks, and you say yes.

  It’s the second time you’ve said yes, but you don’t remember that yet. So, you say yes to this, to this replica lock in a replica city.

  In your hazy, champagne-pink reality, you find somewhere for these locks. You won’t remember where later, but now—

  But now.

  This place is sacred. This place has two people, bound together by ceremony and glittering bands around their left ring fingers. This place has roses that bloom purple and pink and red that can be seen even at night. This place has links in a fence, and the lock clicks into place with finality.

  “Where should we put the keys?”

  In your dream or your champagne-pink reality, you decide to make a swap. The girl’s key hangs warm around your neck, and yours around hers.

  In Paris, the love locks made the bridge bend and buckle.

  In Las Vegas, they are light. Was it your whole heart that has been locked away, or just a piece?

  It’s a ceremony. Two locks hang from a fence neither of you will remember in the morning or the months that follow. All you have are keys, warm metal from where you gripped them in the meat of your palms.

  There, a ceremony finished.

  It’s a good dream. Or, it’s a hazy, champagne reality. Perhaps, it is a memory, made up of the two.

  As an alarm buzzes, loud and bright, it is hard to tell the difference. Maybe there is none. Maybe there is no difference between the weighted, heavy locks in Paris and the knockoffs in Las Vegas tourist shops. Maybe there is no difference between dreams and the things you barely remember. They say the things that happen here, stay here, and perhaps that is the same for your midnight dreams and fizzy memories.

  An alarm buzzes. You wake up. Or maybe you just remember.

  One

  Grace wakes up slow like molasses. The only difference is molasses is sweet, and this—the dry mouth and the pounding headache—is sour. She wakes up to the blinding desert sun, to heat that infiltrates the windows and warms her brown skin, even in late March.

  Her alarm buzzes as the champagne-bubble dream pops.

  Grace wakes in Las Vegas instead of her apartment in Portland, and she groans.

  She’s still in last night’s clothes, ripped high-waisted jeans and a cropped, white BRIDE T-shirt she didn’t pack. The bed is warm, which isn’t surprising. But as Grace moves, shifts and tries to remember how to work her limbs, she notices it’s a different kind of warm. The bed, the covers, the smooth cotton pillowcase beside her, is body-warm. Sleep-warm.

  The hotel bed smells like sea salt and spell herbs. The kind people cut up and put in tea, in bottles, soaking into oil and sealed with a little chant. It smells like kitchen magic.

  She finds the will to roll over into the warm patch. Her memories begin to trickle in from the night before like a movie in rewind. There were bright lights and too-sweet drinks and one club after another. There was a girl with rose pink cheeks and pitch-black hair and, yes, sea salt and sage behind her ears and over the soft, veiny parts of her wrists. Her name clings to the tip of Grace’s tongue but does not pull free.

  The movie in Grace’s head fast-forwards. The girl’s hand stayed clutched in hers for the rest of the night. Her mouth was pretty pink. She clung to Grace’s elbow and whispered, Stay with me, when Agnes and Ximena decided to go back to the hotel.

  Stay with me, she said, and Grace did. Follow me, she said, like Grace was used to doing. Follow your alarm. Follow your schedule. Follow your rubric. Follow your graduation plan. Follow a salt-and-sage girl through a city of lights and find yourself at the steps of a church.

  Maybe it wasn’t a church. It didn’t seem like one. A place with fake flowers and red carpet and a man in a white suit. A dressed-up priest. Two girls giggled through champagne bubbles and said yes. Grace covers her eyes and sees it play out.

  “Jesus,” she mutters, sitting up suddenly and clutching the sheets to keep herself steady.

  She gets up, knees wobbling. “Get it together, Grace Porter.” Her throat is dry and her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth. “You are hungover. Whatever you think happened, didn’t happen.” She looks down at her T-shirt and lets out a shaky screech into her palms. “It couldn’t have happened, because you are smart and organized and careful. None of those things would lead to a wedding. A wedding!

  “Didn’t happen,” she murmurs, trying to make up the bed. It’s a fruitless task, but making up the bed makes sense, and everything else doesn’t. She pulls at the sheets, and three things float to the floor like feathers.

  A piece of hotel-branded memo paper. A business card. A photograph.

  Grace picks up the glossy photograph first. It is perfectly rectangular, like someone took the time to cut it carefully with scissors.

  In it, the plastic church from her blurry memories. The church with its wine-colored carpet and fake flowers. There is no Elvis at this wedding, but there is a priest with slicked back hair and rhinestones around his eyes.

  In it, Grace is tall and brown and narrow, and her gold, spiraling curls hang past her shoulders. She is smiling brightly. It makes her face hurt now, to know she can smile like that, can be that happy surrounded by things she cannot remember.

  Across from her, their hands intertwined, is the girl. In the picture, her cheeks are just as rose pink. Her hair is just as pitch-black as an empty night sky. She is smiling, much like Grace is smiling. On her left hand, a black ring encircles her finger, the one meant for ceremonies like this.

  Grace, hungover and wary of this new reality, lifts her own left hand. There, on the same finger, a gold ring. This part evaded her memories, forever lost in sticky-sweet alcohol. But there is it, a ring. A permanent and binding and claiming ring.

  “What the hell did you do, Porter?” she says, tracing it around her finger.

  She picks up the business card, smaller and somehow more intimate, next. It smells like the right side of the bed. Sea salt. Sage. Crushed herbs. Star anise. It is a good smell.

  On the front, there is plain text.

  ARE YOU THERE?

  brooklyn’s late-night show for lonely creatures

  & the supernatural. sometimes both.

  99.7 FM

  She picks up the hotel stationery. The cramped writing is barely legible, like it was written in a hurry.

  I know who I am, bu
t who are you? I woke up during the sunrise, and your hair and your skin and the freckles on your nose glowed like gold. Honey gold. I think you are my wife, and I will call you Honey Girl. Consider this a calling card, if you ever need a—I don’t know how these things work. A friend? A—

  Wife, it says, but crossed out.

  A partner. Or. I don’t know. I have to go. But I think I had fun, and I think I was happy. I don’t think I would get married if I wasn’t. I hope you were, too.

  What is it they say? What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas? Well, I can’t stay.

  Maybe one day you’ll come find me, Honey Girl. Until then, you can follow the sound of my voice. Are you listening?

  It all barely fits, the stops and starts, but Grace finds herself holding the paper close and tight. A calling card with no number, a note with no clarity.

  Someone knocks on the door, and all of Grace’s adrenaline snaps like a stretched rubber band. She shrieks, heart thumping as she swings the door open.

  “Stop screaming,” Ximena says. She’s already dressed, burgundy-red hair slicked into a bun and outfitted in what she calls her airport clothes. Grace wonders how Ximena can make edge control work in this heat. “If anybody should be screaming, I should be screaming. You know why I should be screaming?”

  I got married last night, Grace thinks. To a girl with rosebuds on her cheeks. To a girl whose name I don’t even know. I should be screaming.

  “Why should you be screaming?” Grace asks instead. “Why are you already dressed?”

  “I should be asking the questions,” Ximena says, eyebrows raised.

  “Oh my God.” Agnes peeks her head from behind Ximena’s shoulder. “We have to be at the airport in an hour. The fact that you’re not dressed and ready means you’re actually an evil doppelgänger. So that means I, in fact, should be screaming. Are you going to let us in? Rude.”

  She shoves past, and Grace sets the photograph and the business card and note on the little nightstand by the window and covers them up with a stray Bible.

  Ximena follows more primly, perched carefully on the edge of the bed where Agnes has already sprawled on her back. They stare at her, and Grace stares back.

  “Well?” Ximena asks. “Aren’t you going to tell us where you were last night?”

  Grace frowns. “I was here.”

  Ximena stares in disappointment at the blatant lie.

  Agnes props herself up on an elbow. “Nice shirt,” she drawls. “Now, what did you really get up to when we left?”

  Grace plucks at the shirt. The gold ring on her finger feels heavy and damning. Someone has laid claim here, it says. This person is not yours now, but mine. She hopes they don’t notice. “Not much after you guys left,” she says. “Hung out.”

  Ximena blinks. “Hung out,” she repeats.

  Grace blinks back. “Yes.” She tries to remember when exactly Ximena and Agnes left. Was it before or after the girl smiled at her over shot glasses? The girl that tangled their fingers together as they walked through crowded streets, past theater lights and clubs with rhythmic music. Grace danced, she remembers now, right there in the street. She clung to the girl and laughed, like it was uncontrollable. “We just walked around, I guess.”

  Agnes sits up abruptly. Her mouth curls, a glinting, knife-sharp thing. “You’re lying,” she says. Agnes’s hangover is apparent in her messy, bleached hair and the shadowed crescent moons under her eyes, but excitement brightens her up like a dog after a bone. “Grace Porter, you are lying. Oh my God, I’m putting this in my calendar.” Her black, pointed nails click frantically against her phone screen.

  “Dr. Porter,” Grace says weakly, trying to run fingers through her own tangled hair. She should have tied it up last night. “If you’re going to slander my good name, at least address me correctly.”

  “Sue me,” Agnes says distractedly, still looking down at her phone. “Sue me in court, you liar.”

  Ximena narrows her eyes and examines Grace like she is one of the patients she must keep careful watch over. “You have flowers in your hair,” she says. She watches as Grace reaches up and feels dried petals in her honey-dipped strands.

  “We were outside,” Grace says. We were outside an illuminated, plastic church. We were behind roses and weeds and long lilac stems with just the smell of blooming desert flowers and sage and cheap metal. She remembers the keys suddenly; it burns like a brand against her skin, hidden under her shirt. “I think I was so drunk I fell over.”

  “You fell over.” Ximena looks unimpressed. “You came back with that girl? The one you met?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Was she here, too?” Agnes asks, looking around like someone will jump out of the closet. “It was loud when you came in for the night.”

  “After ignoring our texts,” Ximena adds. She gears herself up for a rant. “What the hell would I look like on Dateline talking about how you disappeared in Las Vegas? Colonel would kill me for losing his kid. And when would I have time to film my segment? I work soul-crushing hours, Porter. No time to get my hair and nails done before I make my television debut as the distraught best friend.”

  “Why am I not the distraught best friend?” Agnes asks. “I can cry on command. What can you do?”

  “You need help,” Ximena says seriously, but doesn’t move when Agnes smiles and leans on her shoulder.

  “My therapist would be thrilled to hear you say so,” Agnes says. She looks at Grace, who straightens up under sharp eyes. She keeps her face blank. You have a secret, Agnes mouths, and Grace looks away.

  “As you can see, I made it back just fine,” Grace says dryly, “and alone. So, now that nobody will have to mourn me, tell me again when we have to be at the airport?”

  “Again?” Ximena ask incredulously at the same time Agnes yells, “Doppelgänger!”

  “An hour,” Ximena repeats. She stands up, hand coming up over Grace’s forehead. “Did that girl give you something? You made us memorize the travel schedules, Porter.”

  “We had to recite them before we could leave the apartment,” Agnes adds. “What was her name anyway? You’re fucking lovestruck.”

  Grace jerks back, away from Ximena’s probing fingers and Agnes’s eyes. “I don’t have time to be lovestruck. It was only one night.”

  “One hell of a night,” Agnes murmurs, hidden from view as Ximena plucks petals from Grace’s hair and inspects her pupils. “Let it be known to the court that my question was not answered.”

  “They’d never let you be a lawyer,” Ximena mutters, a smile just for Grace hidden between them. “You didn’t answer, though,” she says, face softening once she confirms Grace is Grace and is not drugged or cloned. “And you did look a little smitten. Mostly drunk, but kind of smitten.”

  Grace sighs. She hears the echoes of laughter from dancing in the middle of a sidewalk. Giggling like—like newlyweds, pressed close together as they left the church. “I was not smitten,” she says, suddenly desperate to keep it—this—to herself. “And I don’t think I even found out her name.”

  “Ugh,” Ximena says. “For all you know she could have been The One, and you don’t even know her name. How can I live vicariously through your relationship without a name?”

  Grace rolls her eyes. “You don’t,” she says simply. “You can live vicariously in the lobby while I get dressed.”

  Everything rushes back to her, all the things that make up Grace Porter. Diligence. Efficiency. Details. “God, we have to be at the airport in an hour. Have you guys packed? Agnes, check under the bed, I don’t feel like calling back here to have them ship one of your shoes or something. And, if you took anything from the minibar, you are paying for it. Ximena—”

  “There you are, conejito,” Ximena cuts in, patting her cheek and smiling. “I’ll get our brat together. You get dressed. I’ll call for a cab in—”

&n
bsp; “Fifteen minutes,” Grace says. “That’s all I need, swear.”

  “Fifteen minutes,” Ximena repeats, back in their natural rhythm. Grace feels her chest loosen and her breath return, slow and steady, as Ximena kisses her nose quick and disappears out the door. “C’mon, little demon.”

  Agnes crosses her arms, reminding Grace of the three years between them. “Why do you get a cute nickname, and I get ‘little demon’?”

  Grace laughs. “The better question would be why are you a little demon?”

  Agnes humphs. She takes her time as she leaves the room. Grace turns her back, trying to get everything in her bag, folded and tidy. “Hey, Porter,” she says.

  “Hmm?”

  “You might wanna hide this from Ximena.” She pauses. “Unless you’re ready to explain why you have a ring on your finger.”

  Grace whirls around. Agnes is holding the photograph, one eyebrow raised.

  “Don’t—” Grace starts, her mind moving faster than her tongue. Don’t what? Don’t tell anybody about the accidental marriage? The nameless girl that carries a matching black ring on her left hand? Don’t, she says, but there is no finish.

  “Hey,” Agnes says. She comes close, and she’s trembling and—no, that’s you trembling—goes eye level with Grace. “The good thing about putting up with me for so long,” she says carefully, “is that now you have my morally gray and questionable loyalty. You get me?”

  “Please don’t,” Grace says again, and she trusts that Agnes hears all the things within it.

  “I won’t,” Agnes promises. “But for Christ’s sake, get a little better at lying. I know I’ve taught you better than that.”

  She leaves, and Grace buries the photograph and the business card and the note under her silk hair scarf for safekeeping. She buries her rosebud girl and her calling card.

  She closes her suitcase.

  Agnes sticks close in the cab. On the plane, she whines until Ximena agrees to switch seats, and she gives Grace the window seat. She pulls Grace’s nails out of the tender skin on her palms. In the air, the clouds mold themselves into different shapes. A dog. A bunny. A human heart.