The Furious Spinner

I've finished Blue Honey Clan, I think. It's different from the previous first chapter I posted, so those of you who read the first draft might be a bit confused. It's the same place, with the same characters minus one, but they've all got different names from before, except for Molly.

Enjoy!

Chapter One

Have you ever wondered how you became the person you are right this minute? Like you started out a few months ago as one person--as yourself. Now you feel like someone else.

I felt that way.

I felt that way as I made myself walk up the steps to the Blue Honey School of Girls the first morning of summer school. I wanted to turn around and run home, even though home was empty. Mom was gone on a trip to Europe with her sister. And where was Daddy Dearest? I didn’t even know who my father was. Never really mattered. It had always been me and my mom.

Then I discovered boys. One boy in particular, actually: Trick Jordan. He was a good guy, and we had fun until last fall. That was when Trick proposed to me. He took my hand in his, told me he wanted to kill himself, and asked if I would do him the honor of joining him and making it a double suicide. I snatched my hand away and ran like hell. I’ve been looking for normal ever since.

I wanted my mom to go on her vacation. I told her I was glad she was going. That was when I thought she’d let me stay at home by myself. I was sixteen. Come on. I didn’t need a babysitter. She agreed with me, but she said I needed something. The Blue Honey School of Girls, her alma mater right in our own little town, reopened after two decades just in time for me to attend while she was gone.

Whoopee.

My mom left this morning, and I forced myself to go up the steps to the big old yellow house. What kind of school was in an old yellow house anyway?

All of my former friends were probably out swimming in the creek or still sleeping, more likely. And here I was standing in front of a strange house wondering how I had gotten to this place in my life.

Walked down Oak Street and hung a left at School Road, Molly B. That’s how you got here.

I knocked on the door.

“Hahaaaaaaaa!”

I jumped back and almost dropped my suitcase.

What was that? It sounded like a crazy person going crazier.

“Steady, Molly,” I told myself.

It was only a strange bird in the trees. Or the wind. Or a madwoman in the attic. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. This was where I had to be.

So here I be.

The door opened and a tall older woman smiled at me.

“Hello, Molly,” she said. “I’m Sister Cleodora. Come on in. How do you like our greeting? Sister Melaina rigged that up so it cackles every time someone knocks. It’s especially fun at Halloween.”

She held the screen door open for me. I stepped inside the house.

“Come meet the others,“ she said. She walked ahead of me, and I followed. She wore a dress that looked as though it was made of butterfly wings. Fake butterfly wings. I mean, she didn’t look like someone who would pull the wings off a million butterflies just so she could have a pretty dress. Although, really, I didn’t know what someone like that would look like.

We went into a large room with lots of windows. Blue walls. Blue furniture. Two girls sat on one of two blue couches. Two older women sat on the other couch.

“Molly, this is Sister Melaina,” Sister Cleodora said.

A thin woman with short salt and pepper hair stood and held out her hand to me. I shook it.

“And Sister Laurel,” Sister Cleodora said.

Three sisters? Had my mother sent me to a convent?

The other woman on the couch--Sister Laurel--stood and shook my hand. She had silver hair pinned up into a French twist, and she wore slacks and a shirt with a colorful scarf.

“This is Artemis Monaghan,” Sister Cleodora said, indicating the girl on the couch with blonde hair, dark roots, and black eye shadow. “Artemis, this is Molly Kelly.”

The girl nodded to me and cracked her gum.

“Artie,” she said. “I go by Artie.”

“And this is Diana Noble,” Sister Cleodora said.

Diana was curled up on one end of the couch, trembling slightly. Small. Short brown hair. She hopped up and shook my hand when Sister Cleodora said her name. Her grip was firm, slightly sweaty.

“Hello,” Diana said.

“Molly, have a seat,” Sister Cleodora said.

I set my suitcase down and then sat on the couch between the girls. Sister Cleodora sat in a chair. I looked around the room. I didn’t see any religious stuff. Seemed like my mom would have told me if this was a religious school. Especially since we weren’t. Religious, that is.

Mom visited the school without me a couple of times before she left. She wanted me to go with her, but I always came up with some excuse not to go, and she didn’t force the issue, which was unusual. Maybe she didn’t want me to know ahead of time that she was committing me to a monastery. A sisterary.

We sat in silence. I could hear my life ticking by.

Tick tock, tick tock.

Or maybe that was the clock on the wall.

Whatever.

“Now that everyone’s here,” Sister Melaina said, “let’s get started.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “Everyone is here? What about the rest of the students?”

“You are the rest of the students,” Sister Cleodora said. “For this summer, it’s the three of you.”

I think my mouth fell open. Just the three of us with these three old women?

No. That would mess up my master plan. The plan where I blended into the background of fifty other girls and sneaked home whenever I could. How was I going to blend if there were only three of us?

“Mom told me when she went here there were lots of other girls,” I said.

“There were,” Sister Melaina said. “We had a dormitory where some of the students lived and another building where we had classes. Those buildings are gone now.”

I can safely say that the three new students of the Blue Honey School of Girls were stunned.

“Well then,” Sister Melaina said. “Let’s get to know each other a bit. Let’s go around the circle, and each of us can say our name, where we’re from, and then at least one interesting thing about ourselves. Sister Cleodora, you want to begin?”

“Sure,” she said. “I’m Sister Cleodora. I’m from here, from this land. When I was seven, I licked a frog.” She laughed. “Just once.” She looked at Sister Laurel.

“I’m Sister Laurel,” the next sister said. “I’m from here. When I was nine, I told Sister Laurel that frogs tasted like chocolate because I wanted to see her lick a frog.”

“It did not taste like chocolate,” Sister Cleodora said. “Poor frog.”

They smiled at one another and then at us.

“I’m Sister Melaina. When I was ten, I told Sister Cleodora I’d give her my bike if she’d lick a frog.”

“It was a great bike,” Sister Cleodora said. “I had it for years.”

They laughed. Then they looked at us. I wondered if they had planned that little introduction. Easy for them. They all had the same interesting thing to talk about. I used to be interesting. I mean, I knew that when I was younger I was excited by things that happened in my life. I couldn’t remember any of them now.

“How about you girls?” Sister Melaina asked.

Diana sat forward and cleared her throat. “I’m Diana. I’m from Chicago. I won our school spelling bee three years in a row. Then I decided I didn’t want to be a contestant any more. I wanted to just sit in the audience and listen to the spellers say those wonderful words. I’m a sister to my younger brother Jake and I’m the daughter of my parents, Carey and Richard.” She shrugged. “And I like words.”

The sisters looked at Artie and me. I could not think of a single interesting thing about myself. I wasn’t about to say that I no longer had any friends. That wasn’t interesting. That was pathetic.

“I’m Artie,” she said. “I’m from Mars, originally, but I live in Seattle now with my parentals, when they bother to come home. Hell, when I bother to come home. I ran away from home when I was about 13 and spent half the night at the mall until the security guard finally caught up with me and called my parents. Best half night of my life.”

Everyone laughed except me. I was trying to think of what to say. The laughter died, and they all looked at me.

“I’m Molly,” I said. “I’m from here since I was five. I live with my mom.” I couldn’t say I saved my boyfriend’s life by telling my mom that he was about to off himself. Actually, I could say it, but I wouldn’t. Wouldn’t tell them that my best friend Maggie no longer spoke to me because she thought I should have handled Trick’s suicide proposal myself instead of telling my mother who told the school and Trick’s mom.

“You don’t have one interesting thing to say?” Artie asked.

I glanced at her. I was not going to like her.

“When I was five years old,” I said, “I dressed up as the invisible girl for Halloween. That’s like the invisible man only not. We spent a lot of time on my costume: black with reflective material all over it. At every house we went to, the adults ooh and ahed over my costume and gave me lots of candy. At the end of the night, I had more candy in my bag than I’d ever seen in my life, and I was so upset. I thought my costume was a complete failure. If it had done what it was supposed to do, no one would have seen me, and my bag would have been empty.”

Diana nodded. “I see your point.”

“Who would want to be invisible?” Artie asked.

I didn’t answer her. When I was a kid, my mom often talked about the Invisibles being all around us, Invisibles like Bigfoot, fairies, and all sorts of other unseen creatures of the Universe. I wanted to be invisible with them. Thus the costume. As the years went by, my mom stopped talking to the Invisibles, and I stopped looking for them. As I got older, I wanted to be invisible for other reasons: I wanted to walk around my town without being noticed.

“Thank you all,” Sister Melaina said. “This was a good start.”

“What are we going to study here?” Diana asked.

“We’ve talked with your parents,” Sister Cleodora said, “and we’ll talk with you later. Together we’ll figure out what’s best for you this summer.”

“Perhaps you feel as though you need a port in the storm,” Sister Laurel said. “A place where you can figure out who you are. We want to provide such a place for you. This house and the land will be your home for the summer and you are welcome to explore it and make it your own. We won’t have formal classes, but we hope your time here will be a great learning experience. As we get to know you, we’ll know better what your needs are.”

The sisters smiled at us.

Oh geez. This was going to be worse than I thought. They wanted to talk with us. They wanted to be a part of our lives.

I did not want to talk with them. I did not want to talk with anyone. I hoped my mother hadn’t told them anything about me. And if she had, the sisters had better keep it to themselves. I didn’t want any of them to know about Trick. Or Maggie. Or any of the sordid details of my life.

“Maybe the best thing for me would be to lay around and do nothing all summer,” Artie said.

“Maybe, Artemis,” Sister Cleodora said.

“Artie,” she said. “My name is Artie. No one calls me Artemis.”

“Why not?” Diana asked. “That's a goddess name. Like mine. I have a goddess name too. We’re like goddess sisters. Maybe our mothers were friends so they decided to call their children the same name, only different. You’re the Greek version of this particular goddess, and I’m the Roman version. Of course I don’t know where that leaves Molly.”

“Are you off your meds or something?” Artie asked.

“What do you mean?” Diana asked.

Artie ignored her. She looked at the sisters. “What if we don’t like it here?” she asked.

“You are all here voluntarily,” Sister Melaina said.

“We are?” Artie asked.

“We emphasized to your parents that we would only do this if you all came voluntarily,” Sister Cleodora said.

“If you say so,” Artie said.

The sisters glanced at one another. Then Sister Melaina said, “You can leave any time. If it doesn’t feel right and you want to go, we’ll call your parents and they can come get you. For the first week, we’re asking you not to use your phones or computers. We don’t have a television, except to use for movies, and there is no advertising in the house. We want to try a little experiment. Would that be acceptable to you?”

“It sounds like a brave new world,” Diana said. “Let’s do it!”

“It doesn’t sound fun at all,” Artie said. “It sounds boring.”

“But you’ll try it?” Sister Melaina asked. She looked at each of us in turn.

I nodded. “As long as I can call my mom sometimes.”

Artie made a face. I knew she wanted to say something rude like, “Momma’s girl.” But she didn’t. I didn’t care what she thought or what she said.

“I’ve lived here since I was five,” I said. “I’ve never seen any blue honey. So why’s it called the Blue Honey School of Girls?”

“Our ancestors have collected blue honey from the bees for hundreds of years,” Sister Cleodora said, “maybe even a thousand years, and they called themselves the Blue Honey Clan. That’s where the name came from.”

“Can we see some blue honey now?” Artie asked.

“Sadly, there is no more blue honey,” Sister Laurel said.

I think it was Sister Laurel. I was having trouble telling them apart. Almost like they had one personality but in three different bodies.

“About twenty years ago our bees disappeared,” Sister Cleodora said. “We tried other bees. But the hives never took again.”

“This town was known for its blue honey,” Sister Melaina said. “I’m surprised you never heard of it, Molly. It was sold in all the story, gift shops, restaurants. People came from all around to get the honey.”

Restaurants? Gift shops? We had one restaurant where the drunks went to sober up. And one flower shop where people went to get flowers when someone died. It wasn’t a one horse town. It was a one jackass town. A lame jackass at that.

“Why would people come here just for blue honey?” Artie asked. “What was the big deal? Someone could use food dye and make blue honey.”

Sister Melaina shook her head. “Blue honey was special. Our people believed blue honey had magical properties.”

“What magical properties?” Diana asked. She leaned forward, and Artie momentarily stopped snapping her gum.

“What does it matter?” I asked. “The honey is gone. The so-called magical properties no longer exist--if they ever did.”

“Actually,” Sister Melaina said, “there is a jar of blue honey left. When the Blue Honey Clan first came here, they hid a jar of it somewhere on the property. The story goes that this particular jar of blue honey was from a thousand years ago, back when our ancestors were part of the ancient melissae who were priestesses to the goddess Demeter, the mother honey bee.”

“Melissa?” Artie said. “That’s my mom’s name.”

“Melissa means bee,” Diana said. “Or bee priestess. So does the name Deborah.”

“Deborah is my mother’s name,” I said.

“Were our mothers part of the Blue Honey Clan?” Artie asked.

“All the girls who attended the school were considered part of the Blue Honey Clan,” Sister Cleodora said. “We thought of them all as part of our family.”

“What about this blue honey jar they hid?” Diana asked.

“In the old country, the ancient melissae would use some of the blue honey in that jar to prime the bees if they ever stopped producing the blue honey,” Sister Melaina said. “It was to get the bees to remember how to make the honey. Once the Blue Honey Clan was here, though, the bees kept producing and they never needed priming. Our ancestors lost track of where they hid the jar. When our bees disappeared, we couldn’t find the jar.”

“You never actually saw the blue honey jar, right?” I said. “So you don’t know if it actually exists or not, let alone if it has magical properties.”

“You’re right,“ Sister Cleodora said. “We never saw the blue honey jar. But we did have blue honey, and it was amazing. The legend of the blue honey was that certain people who ate blue honey either went wild, could read the signs in nature to predict the future, or were healed and developed the ability to heal.”

“And you didn’t know if you were one of those people,” Sister Laurel said, “or what would happen when you ate the blue honey, so it was always a risk.”

“You said people came from all around to get the blue honey,” I said. “Did any of them predict the future, get well, or go wild?”

“Every once in while someone would tell us that the blue honey healed them,” Sister Cleodora said.

“Even ordinary honey has healing properties,” Sister Melaina said.

“I wish we had found that jar of blue honey twenty years ago,” Sister Cleodora said. “I miss the bees and the hives. There are wild bees all over the property, of course, but our bees were special.”

“When we were kids, our parents told us over and over that the blue honey jar was like Aladdin’s lamp,” Sister Laurel said. “Or like a falling star. You could make a wish on it and it would come true.”

“That was only a story,” Sister Melaina said. “They wanted us to get interested in the lost blue honey jar so that we’d go look for it! Our parents didn’t know where the jar was either.”

“If the honey in it is a thousand years old,” Artie said, “it must be rotten. Or else very valuable. If it could actually make wishes come true or really heal people, you could sell it and make a mint. I know a lot of people who would pay for something like that.”

“It’s not real,” I said. “There’s no such thing as Aladdin’s lamp or a magical wishing blue honey jar. People wouldn’t pay for something that silly.”

Artie shrugged. “People pay for just about anything.”

“Money isn’t everything,” Sister Cleodora said.

That’s what people said who were rich. If my mom and I had enough money we’d move away from this town. At least I would. I’d leave it all behind in a heartbeat.

“The blue honey is so much more than anything we can put into words,” Sister Laurel said. “I think of magic as the breath of the Universe--the creative flow of the Universe. Sometimes this breath, this magical exhalation, can be held and used. You’ve seen flowers, you see how they drink in the air and sun and earth--how they drink in the breath of the Universe and change it to nectar. Bees gather this nectar from the flowers. They take it back to the hive and make it into honey. By doing that, they’ve changed the breath of the Universe into food. In a world where so many of us feel malnourished, eating blue honey is the ultimate nourishment. It’s like drinking mother’s milk--only this mother is the Universe. Any kind of healing is possible. That’s magic to me, and that is blue honey.”

“Wow,” Diana said quietly.

“Well,” Sister Melaina said, “I think it’s time to show you around your new home.”

I stood and picked up my suitcase. Maybe I should try and find the lost jar. If the blue honey actually had healing properties, I could give some to Trick. If he got better, maybe everyone would stop blaming me.

I shook my head. Who was I kidding? Life did not work that way.

Labels: Blue Honey Clan, writing

0 comments

Friday, July 20, 2007

The Writing Life