She noticed a change and it was scary.
For all Honeychile’s gregariousness and sporadic outbursts of affection, Zelda, in the role of codependent bestie, was a close observer of her brilliant friend’s other moods as well. She understood that what the world (or student body) judged to be standoffish, bitchy, embarrassing or sometimes outright ridiculous—her nickname at school was Funnychile, not meant to be endearing—was simply a misunderstanding of Honeychile’s deep insecurities. It made Zelda so sad! She wanted to “fix” her friend, but lately their enmeshment wasn’t meshing so well. The BFF’s usual words of support had no effect.
Zelda spoke to her own mother about it, using her as a sounding board for her latest theory that the change in Honeychile’s personality might possibly be related to her cleidocranial dysplasia. She’d done a fair amount of Internet research on the subject, though as yet couldn’t confirm or deny. Each time she came across a dreadful user comment on various message boards that invoked horror-film scenarios of what could or probably already had happened to the brains of people afflicted with the condition, she comforted herself by watching YouTube interviews with Gaten Matarazzo, the amazing star of Stranger Things. He was smart—more than smart. He was, like, the smartest kid in the room.
Just like Honeychile.
When her mom offhandedly said, “Maybe she’s just manic-depressive like your uncle Walt,” Zelda went down that Internet rabbit hole faster than Alice herself.
What was it? What was wrong with her bestie?
The teacher expelled Honeychile from class because not only did she start humming “Rise,” but actually started to sing. Really belted it out. The kids were shocked at first and then began to laugh, which only seemed to inspire her. WTF? Zelda knew that Honeychile was a total Katy Perry hater—she liked Pink and Alessia Cara and Twenty One Pilots (and maybe parts of the Chainsmokers and Sia), but held Katy in outright contempt. She was always schooling Zelda on people she’d never heard of, like Amy Winehouse and Nina Simone and that amazing YouTube video of a bald woman who stared right at you the whole time as she sang this incredible breakup song.
And that crazy place they went that day at the museum! It was fun for a little but then it got seriously fucked-up and weird. In the cab, Honeychile told her that she was “just looking for a friend” and wouldn’t answer when Zelda kept asking, “What friend?” Finally, Honeychile said, “The friend I’m looking for is dead, okay? And I’m going to fucking hunt down and kill the person who did it!” She seemed utterly serious before dissolving into peals of laughter, like the theatrically silly girl Zelda once knew. Then the laughter turned into creepy cackles. “I’m writing a movie about a girl with superpowers who avenges death,” she said, her voice all different and really, really young-sounding. Zelda just shook her head and let it go; all she wanted was to have her friend back. She was afraid, not only because she felt like she was losing Honeychile, but because she suddenly realized how much she meant to her.
The morning after the “Rise” incident at school, Zelda sat up in bed as if struck by a thunderbolt. The answer had arrived in the exact same way her teacher said that answers came to famous scientists in their sleep. She googled her brainstormy diagnosis and confirmed her suspicions:
Honeychile had multiple personality disorder!
The texts came one after the other—
YOU SING LIKE KATIE PARY.
YOU LOOK LIKE KATE PARY.
ACCEPT U HAVE NO FUCKING TITS
AND U R SO FUKING UGLEE AND NOT FAMMOUS
+++YR VOICE IS SHIT THEN +++++YOU R A FUCKTARD/DEEFORMD HORE
UGLY BITCHCUNNT
UGLIEST DEEFORMD CUNTBITCH HOREMONNSTER—
—but Honeychile was oddly unaffected. She thought the whole bully thing was tiresome and overplayed. Anyway, she could give as good as she got, laying low her detractors with a laser-beamed Funnychile aperçu. She liked to pretend her words had the same effect as in that awesome episode of Stranger Things, when Eleven made the bully pee his pants.
She had a pretty good idea who sent the texts, but at the moment couldn’t really be bothered. She had a lot of other things to distract her—like all those new, amorphous feelings and memories that definitely weren’t hers . . .
In the morning, she awakened from a dream that she was somewhere else—in a bedroom that wasn’t hers, surrounded by a menagerie of stuffed animals and a wall of magazine cutout collages of Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid and . . . Kaia Gerber—Kaia Gerber! How did she even know who Kaia Gerber was? That she was Cindy Crawford’s daughter! How did she even know who Cindy Crawford was? But she did. In the room, there was a mosaic of pictures of Marc Jacobs, all buff and tatted, posing with Neville, a bull terrier in a bow tie. How did she know what Marc Jacobs fucking looked like and that his dog had two hundred thousand followers on Instagram? But she did . . . in the dream, somewhere close by, was a woman with no face, making breakfast—eggs and toast, so real that Honeychile could smell the smells. Who was she? Her biological mother? Maybe that’s why she went to visit Mrs. Collins after all, and not because she missed her. To find her real mom . . .
There were darker thoughts too.
But were they thoughts? Or were they feelings—
Weren’t the two things the same?
Honeychile hated the corrective dental surgeries she’d undergone, dreaded them, and told her parents that she refused to have more. But now she had the strange sensation that she was having surgery again, somewhere else on her body, somewhere down below. Between her legs . . . And that she was being—buried? Buried! She could smell the mud as it burrowed into her nostrils, and tiny seizures of lancing coldness shot through her at the most inopportune times, even when she wasn’t dreaming. Like when she was on the toilet or when Rayanne came into the kitchen to try to talk to her about whatever.
And that nasty woman—the one who sicced those freaky creatures after her on the train. The train! Night after night she found herself onboard, hurtling through darkness. Sometimes she saw children in the corridors, but they were so much younger . . . She couldn’t make heads or tails of it. And that meeting at the church! Why wouldn’t the nasty woman let Zelda in? That wasn’t very nice. Even more vexing to Honeychile was that she really wanted to join the gathering, was desperate to, and as much as she hated that woman, she loved her too . . . It made no sense at all, but Honeychile had the feeling that she belonged there, and ached to meet the people on the other side of the door. Something about it all felt like family . . . so, so crazy! Since that afternoon they went AWOL from the museum, she’d had more dreams of being on the train, but those awful, shadowy creatures no longer wrestled her into the cabin. She’d been behaving herself.
That beast called Annie kept handing her slips of paper but instead of running, Honeychile crossed her arms and rebelliously shook her head, refusing even to look at what was written down.
This is what she heard when eavesdropping at Harold and Rayanne’s bedroom door after they thought she was sleeping:
“I’m so worried about her.”
“What now?” said Harold.
(He probably wasn’t even looking at his wife—just reading a book and being chill, which was his way.)
“You mean you haven’t noticed? Have you seen that weird shiver that she does?”
“Maybe she’s getting sick,” he said. “Did you take her temperature?”
“She is not getting sick, Harold. It’s like—like she’s . . . somewhere else. Like she’s someone else.”
“Hey, it’s called ‘fourteen,’” he said. “Fourteen-year-olds are someone else—a lot of the time, anyway. Fourteen-year-olds don’t know who the hell they are. So they try on different outfits.”
“No no no. You don’t know what I’m saying. Something isn’t right. My God, have you seen the drawing? In her room?”
“I don’t go in her room. Probably not a good idea for you to go in either.”
“It’s Katy Perry, Harold!”
“Who’s Katy Perry?”
“Like, her nemesis. She drew it right on the wall. It’s huge!”
“Fourteen-year-olds are artistic,” he said with a shrug.
“Well, I think something is wrong and I think she should see someone.”
“Maybe she should see Katy Perry.”
“It isn’t funny, Harold. I’m serious.”
Maybe I should see someone, thought Honeychile as she crept back to her room.
Yes, I should—I will.
Tomorrow!
She sat on the couch with her head against Mrs. Collins’s breast, enfolded in the ravaged woman’s arms.
Her son was irretrievably gone—Hildy knew it in her heart—but for a series of moments, holding the distraught girl as she sobbed inconsolably, the grieving mother had the strange sensation that it had all been a dream, that Winston was here with her now, with them, as she rocked her unexpected houseguest like she used to rock her boy. How strange. She would take her relief wherever and whenever she found it.
It felt good to be a mom again.
When Honeychile asked if she could visit his room—“my room” was how she put it—Hildy said she would get her a blanket and she could nap right there on the couch. But the girl insisted, tenderly pleading, and to Hildy’s surprise it felt right.
She looked in on her an hour later.
It would be impossible to describe the emotions that played across Hildy’s face when, in dusky darkness, she saw the shape of the girl’s small, misshapen body beneath his favorite quilt—bolstered by an army of stuffed animals and watched over by wall-pastings of Kendall, Kaia and Bella torn from the pages of W—dead asleep.