Honey Girl Read online

8:07 p.m.

  joining the gay circus? no.

  Yuki

  8:09 p.m.

  we went from kill your gays to kill your gay circus

  Grace

  8:10 p.m.

  #progress

  go do your show sorry

  i’m going back to staring at my ceiling

  Yuki

  8:14 p.m.

  anything good up there?

  Grace pauses. Yuki doesn’t know this part of her. She doesn’t know Grace spends her nights staring up at the sky. She doesn’t know about the hours spent in a lab, hunched over samples of asteroids and space dust and computer data—not just for her studies, but to feel connected and seen by something bigger.

  Grace

  8:17 p.m.

  stars. i have glow in the dark stars

  all over my ceiling.

  Yuki

  8:19 p.m.

  omg you’re a space nerd

  Grace

  8:20 p.m.

  space doctor actually. i got my phd

  back in january

  Yuki

  8:22 p.m.

  holy shit. and you married a waitress who

  spends her free time telling stories

  Grace

  8:24 p.m.

  i like your stories. they make me

  feel like i am not alone

  they remind me of that

  Yuki

  8:28 p.m.

  you’re not

  alone, i mean

  it’s my turn, right?

  Grace

  8:29 p.m.

  for what?

  Yuki

  8:31 p.m.

  to call. i said next time was my turn

  Grace

  8:32 p.m.

  you don’t have to. i promise i’m fine

  Yuki

  8:34 p.m.

  i can’t hear you i’m dialing

  ...

  was it this scary? calling me?

  Grace

  8:36 p.m.

  terrifying. you really don’t have to

  Incoming call from: Yuki Yamamoto

  “Hello?”

  Yuki lets out an audible, relieved breath. “Grace Porter? That you?”

  Grace laughs softly, unwilling to ruin their quiet, hushed atmosphere. “Who else would it be?”

  In the background, there is the noise of a city that never sleeps. “A clone,” she answers. “Technology is very advanced these days.”

  Grace closes her eyes. She imagines the soft drunken blush on Yuki’s cheeks. She can smell the sea and crushed herbs. “How long have you been walking?” she asks. “Why are you walking? It’s almost midnight your time, and doesn’t the city have, like, a million subways?”

  Yuki scoffs. “You’re vastly overestimating New York City’s subway system.”

  “But there are subways,” Grace argues. “Why are you walking at night?”

  There’s a startled silence. “Are you white-knighting me right now? And to answer your question, I got off the subway when you texted that you were fine. I’m walking the rest of the way.”

  “Yuki,” Grace sputters, sitting up in bed. “It’s so dangerous. Are you crazy?”

  “Probably,” Yuki says, sounding bored. “Only assholes have whole conversations on the train. I got off like a normal human being so I could call you.”

  “I could have waited.”

  Somehow, somehow, Grace knows Yuki is shrugging. “Maybe I didn’t want you to,” she says. “Plus, I have mace and a Taser. I have the power to zap someone’s nuts off if they get too close to me.”

  “Reassuring,” Grace says, collapsing back on her pillows. “You really didn’t have to, though.”

  Yuki hmphs and Grace turns her head to hide a smile in the blankets. “Wanted to. Don’t mention it,” is all she says.

  “My lips are sealed,” Grace says through a yawn. Turned away from the ceiling, she has nothing to focus on but Yuki’s quiet breathing and the faint, rhythmic thud of her shoes against pavement. “Will you tell me about your show tonight?”

  “Nope, I want you to listen,” Yuki says. “I hear you yawning. Nip that shit in the bud. Drink some coffee.”

  “It’s too late for coffee.”

  “Live fast, die young,” Yuki says. “You should stay up and listen,” she adds, more sincerely. “I was undecided between two topics, but I know which one I’ll do now.”

  Grace goes warm. “So, it’s about me,” she guesses.

  “I have the right to remain silent,” Yuki says brightly. There’s the sound of keys jangling, and Grace hears, “Hey, Jarrell, just me. Yeah, I’ll lock up. Night.” Yuki’s voice comes back clearer. “I’m here, by the way, at the studio. Are you going to listen?”

  Grace is exhausted. She feels like she could melt into her mattress and never see daylight again. It would be a comfortable way to go. Yuki’s voice is calm and luring, and Grace could follow it to sleep and away from the heavy weight of worries.

  “Grace?”

  “I’ll listen,” she says. “No coffee, but pure will.”

  “Pinky promise,” Yuki demands, “that you won’t fall asleep.”

  “You can’t see my pinky.”

  “Your verbal pinky,” Yuki argues. “Your metaphorical pinky.”

  “Oh my God.” She holds her pinky up, as if anyone else can see. “Okay, I’m pinky promising.”

  When Yuki speaks again, she sounds far away, like the phone’s been put on speaker. “No crossed fingers, no take-backs. Bye, Grace Porter.”

  “Wait, what—” But the call ends. “I’m married to her,” Grace whispers with an air of disbelief. “I’m married to this weird girl, and I like it.” I like it so much.

  With her earbuds in, it is just Grace and the dark as she watches the loading circle on her phone and waits.

  Finally, the player loads, and Yuki’s voice comes through.

  “Hello, lonely creatures,” she says quietly, sounding so much different than the out-of-breath girl Grace just talked to. “Are you there? I hope you’ve had a good day, and if you haven’t, maybe being with other lonely people tonight will help you. Hopefully, I can help you.

  “I struggled with what to talk about tonight. But recently I’ve found some good in a person, and hopefully they found a little bit of good in me. Tonight’s show is about the origin of lonely humans. It is from Plato, from a dialogue composed in his work The Symposium.”

  Grace closes her eyes and gets comfortable.

  “In the beginning of the world,” Yuki says into the mic, “humans looked very different. We had two heads, four arms, and four legs. We had heads with two faces, to see all the things around us.”

  “We were powerful,” she says. “The earth trembled beneath us, and we grew so arrogant in our feats that we dared to test the gods. We dared to wage war against them.”

  Her voice spins the tale like it’s a spider’s silky web, and Grace finds herself intertwined. She is not in her bed in Portland. Yuki transports her to ancient Greece, surrounded by wine and ripe grapes and gods that walked the earth.

  “The gods,” she continues, “beat us down, of course. We were not as powerful as we thought, and we faced a terrible fate.” Her voice trembles. “The gods, in their wrath, decided to split us, right down the middle. They decided to halve us as punishment. We became just one. One human with two arms and two legs and two feet. Weak.”

  She laughs, a brittle sound. “It would explain a lot, wouldn’t it? It would explain the longing you get, out of nowhere sometimes, for a person you cannot see. It would explain the ache we get in the hollow space between our ribs, and the uneasy thoughts at night in our beds, hoping that maybe someone, somewhere, is thinking of us, too.


  “So, we were halved. Broken into pieces. According to Plato, and echoed through Aristophanes, it does explain that feeling. It explains why humans sometimes spend their whole lives looking for their other halves, and why we try so hard to fuse ourselves into one. Perhaps it is because we once were exactly that. One.”

  Grace grips her phone. The feeling that Yuki stirs, the hollow feeling like the pit of a peach, weighs heavy in her belly. It is what she feels, sitting in a sterile room, sitting in front of her mentor, reading through recruiter emails, begging for someone to see her. To not water her down or pity her. It is perhaps what pushed her toward Yuki, that hot night in Las Vegas. It is perhaps what’s pushing her toward Yuki now, toward a girl that hears Grace’s “I’m okay” and sees, really sees, the ugly truth of it.

  Grace blinks until her eyes stay closed. Darkness, the good kind, the deep sleep kind, begins to cloak her. And like that, with a voice in her ear, she falls asleep.

  Grace doesn’t know that Yuki continues to talk, a siren song leading her thoughts and dreams into the blue-green saltwater deep. Yuki says, “Maybe there is not a specific half destined for us. Maybe we have to keep trying to fit ourselves together, until we find the pieces that fit.”

  Asleep, Grace does not hear Yuki’s careful voice as she weaves her tale into the night. She does not hear, “Maybe pieces come when we least expect it. Maybe you find yours in the dry desert, and they are like bee honey, sweet enough to keep your throat from needing water. Maybe you pledge yourself to them, your promise held in a metal lock, and you do not know it yet, but you will dream of the flowers in their hair for weeks afterward. You will dream in golds and yellows and browns, and you will be scared, the good kind.

  “Maybe Plato knew something we didn’t. Or maybe the gods did, when they split us in half and left us to reclaim our missing fragments.”

  Eight

  The base where Colonel works always smells medicinal and clean. Everyone walks around in their uniforms, moving with purpose. So determined to get from one destination to the next.

  Grace embraced that for a long time, still does, though now it feels heavy and difficult and tiring.

  It’s no different today. Grace leans against the front desk and waits for Miss Debbie to check her ID and sign her in, as if she didn’t practically grow up on this base.

  “Do you think today you’ll finally prove I’m an impostor?” Grace asks, when for the third time Miss Debbie holds up her license and squints at it. “Has this all been a sixteen-year-long con?”

  Miss Debbie narrows her eyes and slaps Grace’s ID down on the desk. She has pointy, sharp-angled glasses with a chain attached. Even sitting down, Miss Debbie will find a way to make you feel small.

  “It’s you, all right,” she says. “Nobody else comes in here with a mouth like that.”

  Grace smiles with all her teeth, a terrible habit picked up from Agnes. “Can you buzz me in, please, Miss Debbie?”

  She mutters something under her breath that Grace can’t hear. Grace’s mouth has gotten her in trouble here more times than she can remember; she’s given up counting.

  “I’ll walk you to Colonel’s office,” Miss Debbie says, locking up her desk and computer before heading toward the big vault-like door that separates them from the people working inside. “I’d hate for you to get lost.”

  “I know where I’m going,” Grace says, annoyed. She sighs, following behind Miss Debbie’s office-regulated black heels and her tightly-wound bun.

  There was a time Miss Debbie tried to embrace Grace as her willing and malleable pupil. Grace remembers coming here when they first moved. Her clothes still smelled like citrus. Her palms still had scratches from climbing grove trees too high. She remembers Colonel standing here at Miss Debbie’s same desk, a firm hand on her shoulder.

  “This is my daughter, Porter,” he said, mouth curving up into what Sharone calls his people smile. “This is Miss Debbie. She runs this place with an iron fist.” Then he winked, like the three of them were in on some joke.

  Miss Debbie stood up and reached a hand across. “Hello, Porter. Aren’t you a beautiful thing? Everyone calls me Miss Debbie.”

  Grace was angry and lost. Her parents were divorced, and Colonel had moved her across the country. She looked up for orange groves and only found towering, terrifying redwoods. She could climb those forever and never reach the top.

  She kept her hands by her side, she remembers. Colonel’s hand tightened on her shoulder, and Grace liked it. She liked the feeling of provoking him, of causing that downturn of his mouth. No more people smile.

  “My name is Grace,” she said, with all the force she could muster, “and I am not a thing.”

  The impression was lasting and brutal. Grace Porter made a lifelong enemy out of Miss Debbie that day.

  They walk. The office is full of people but still hushed, like even the conversations in the little kitchenette are confidential. It’s mostly white men with the same haircut, suits and ties buttoned up so tight their necks bulge. No one bats an eye at Grace. Her gold hair and her amber-brown, freckled skin and her mismatched parents are no longer worth gossip. That’s just Porter, they probably think, while they engage in global warfare at their computer screens like it’s a game of Tetris. Just Colonel’s daughter, nothing special.

  The door to Colonel’s office is closed. Miss Debbie knocks and waits. Grace peers into the office and waves through the glass wall. Colonel holds his finger up, gesturing toward the phone.

  Miss Debbie glares, huffing at she turns away. She points at the row of seats outside the office until Grace picks one and sits. “You will wait there,” she says sternly. “Very important things happen in this office, Grace Porter, and I will not be responsible for you interrupting your father and jeopardizing security.”

  Grace crosses her legs and smiles. “Yes, Miss Debbie,” she says. “The nation’s enemies won’t hear a word from me. God bless America.”

  Miss Debbie starts to walk away. She pauses in front of Grace, leaning down just enough to ensure her voice won’t carry. “Your father had such high hopes for you,” she says softly. “It’s a shame.”

  Grace looks up and meets her eyes. “A shame, indeed,” she says, and Miss Debbie leaves. Grace lets her shoulders drop like she’s shedding heavy armor.

  “Porter?” Colonel calls, sticking his head out of his door. It takes everything in Grace not to feel like she’s picking all that armor back up, heading into the battlefield of Colonel’s office. “What are you doing here? Is everything okay?”

  “I’m okay,” she says. She sees his desk is pulled up to a standing position, and try as he might, he can’t hide the stiff way he limps as he walks toward her.

  It’s better now with the metal leg. He might stiffen up, but the thing doesn’t buckle underneath him or make him immobile. Even still, she can tell it’s one of his Pain Days.

  Colonel gestures toward one of the chairs. Grace sits and folds her legs up in it. He stays standing in front of his computer, pushing his glasses to the top of his head to stare her down.

  Finally, he clears his throat. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “You are?”

  “I’ve been talking to Sharone,” he says, “about what you said to us at dinner. She made me realize—” He looks at Grace. She doesn’t know what he sees. “You know I love you, right?”

  She freezes. She sits up straight, suddenly self-conscious of her ripped jeans and ratty sweatshirt she stole from Raj. “Yes, sir,” she says, wiping her hands on her pants. “Yes.”

  Colonel gives her a wry smile. “Good,” he says. “Sharone said maybe I’m too hard on you. That I expect too much.”

  Grace remembers being a kid in Florida. She remembers running through the orange groves and getting caught up under people’s feet and climbing too high. She remembers falling.

  She remembers th
e blood that dripped from her palms. Mom fretted, considered driving into town to the hospital. Colonel, stoic and calm, knelt in front of her as she wept. He could still kneel then, and he did, right down to her line of sight and grabbed her hands.

  “Porter,” he said. “Hey. Hey. Look at me.”

  She looked at him. When Colonel said jump, you jumped. When he said look, you looked.

  “You’re a Porter,” he said. “Porters fall, they get back up. Porters bleed, they don’t cry. They bandage themselves, and they get back up. That’s what we do.”

  Grace sniffled. “But it hurts.”

  “That’s life,” he said. “But I expect you to be able to handle it. Do you know why?”

  Grace, tearful and bleeding, knew. Of course, she knew. “Because I’m a Porter.”

  “Because you’re a Porter,” Colonel reiterates. “So, hold your hands out, and I’ll bandage them, and it’ll be done.”

  Grace thinks back to that day while she sits in her father’s office. He says, “Maybe I expect too much,” and Grace, still remembering the hurt in her hand, says, “I’m a Porter,” the way she knows she should. “There’s no such thing.”

  He nods. “That’s what I told Sharone. I said I didn’t know what she was talking about.”

  “You don’t expect too much from me,” she says. “I just—”

  “You want to be the best,” Colonel says. “It’s normal to need to think about how to get there.”

  “That’s not what you said at dinner,” she mutters. Louder she says, “I’ll figure it out.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “I know you will. Is that what you came to talk about?”

  Grace stares at her knees. “I talked to Professor MacMillan,” she says quietly. “We talked about how I’ve been doing this for so long.”

  “This?”

  “School,” she clarifies. “Studying. Pursuing this goal. Research. Working.”

  Colonel makes a small, questioning noise. “You’re committed. You create goals, and you reach them. That’s how I raised you.” You’re a Porter. That’s what Porters do.

  “Yeah.” Grace sighs. “But did you ever think that maybe one person isn’t meant to go so hard for that long? That maybe—” She looks down and steels herself. “Maybe I need time now because I never had a chance to do anything else but my studies. Be anything else.”