by Rita Delude
“So, how was your date with Honey last night?” Trevor asked.
“Movie and ice cream, nothing special,” Henry said.
“Nothing special. I bet. That’s one hot babe,” Cory added.
“Did you get any?” Seth asked.
“Henry Sawyer never kisses and tells,” he answered as he landed a three-point shot and the others groaned.
“I want to get myself a piece of that, but Tara would kill me,” Cory said.
“You’re not engaged or anything,” Seth encouraged as he passed him the ball and Cory laid it up for two points.
“Yeah, but I really like Tara. You aren’t engaged, either, Seth. How about you ask her first and see how Mandy reacts?”
“I’m not willing to take that chance.”
“You might as well. Mandy’s already pissed. She gave Honey a hard time last night at Rick’s.”
“What?” Seth yelled, and everyone stopped.
“Yeah, she confronted her right there in the shop and accused her of trying to hit on every guy in the school.
“Wow.” “Oh!” “Wooh!” Sounds of surprise and shock came from all around. Mandy was the most easy-going lady in the junior class, by far.
“Well, I haven’t done anything to make Mandy jealous. And I won’t. But I know you got Beth pissed. I hope it was worth it.” Henry hung his head and made no comment. Had it been? Honey was nice. She picked a movie he would like; Beth always picked romantic comedies. She was pretty, not any sexier looking than anyone else really. Except, he guessed, that sexy thing she did with her lollipops. That drove him crazy. He suspected it drove the other guys crazy too. He wondered if he could have another chance with her. Likely not. He’d gone too far, assumed too much. Insulted her. She’d likely not speak to him again. And he wouldn’t blame her.
“Earth to Henry, do you want to play or not?” Seth broke into his thoughts.
“Sure, sure.” They went back to the game and played for hours working up a sweat despite the cooling temperatures of fall.
After breakfast, the Delano family took a hayride at a local farm, picked their own apples, and watched as the owner’s wife pressed drop apples into cider. Later, they went home and made apple crisp, apple pie, and caramel candy apples. They shared some with their neighbors, Clarence and Hazel Dwire, who were an elderly couple who lived next door and had invited them to dinner the first evening they moved in, insisting they should have a home-cooked meal their first night in New Hampshire. It was the Dwires who had made Honey believe they had found the right home.
And being so busy all that Sunday made her forget, a little, about her disastrous date of the night before. She’d certainly have something to talk with her new shrink about the next day after classes.
Chapter Ten
Dr. Sandra Bechard met Honey in the waiting room, which was empty, and walked her down to her office. Honey had only had to interact with a receptionist who had taken her insurance card and had her fill out some simple forms. Apparently, her medical records and psychological records had already been forwarded to Dr. Bechard’s office. Honey followed just two steps behind during the walk down the plushly carpeted corridor. She liked this tall woman’s confident walk, her long red haired braid that she worn down her back instead of scrunched up in an old-lady’s bun, her pale skin, pencil skirt, and comfortable sneakers. There was a nice mix of homey and professional that made Honey think this lady had possibilities. The black rimmed glasses that she apparently only needed for reading topped off a look that Honey wished she could pull off.
After they passed four other closed doorways, they came to one that was open and Dr. Bechard asked Honey to step inside and take a seat, any seat. She did but not before checking out the place. The office was twice the size of her former shrink’s, who was part of a consortium with twenty-two counselors, MD’s and PhD’s, who shared about fifteen offices, so none had his or her own private space. This woman clearly was allowed to do her own thing. On one wall, she had beautiful 11 x 14 photographs of mountains framed and labeled with dates and elevations. Another wall was covered in a blue and purple quilt made of fabric strips that radiated out from the center like fragments of sunlight, the wall in front of her desk was all window with a view of the center of town and a few small shops, and the other wall was a giant white board with a shelf holding markers of many colors.
“Wow! This is quite a room,” Honey said.
“You like? I do. I’m a climber. These are the highest peaks I’ve reached. I’ve got many more to conquer. This quilt my mom made for me when I opened this office. I love it because it’s from her, they are my favorite colors, and because I can’t even sew a button, so I’m amazed at how she can put together something so intricate, and this wall is for you to do anything you want with. Use it or not as you see fit,” she said as she pointed to the whiteboard.
“Thank you,” Honey said, “but I don’t think any whiteboard will help me.” She sat then in one of the more comfy looking chairs in the room and Dr. Bechard, who asked her to call her Sandy, sat in one across from her.
“Why is that?”
“Well, I assume you read what happened to me. My Uncle Pervert Peter changed my life forever. I’ll never be the same. Writing something on a whiteboard won’t bring the old me back.”
“That’s true. You’ll never be exactly the same. But I’m not exactly as I was this morning. I’m changed by everyone I meet, and you are too.”
“But not in that way.”
“Good or bad. Every experience we have leaves an impression on us, shapes us. It’s what we do with that that matters.”
“What am I supposed to do with what he did to me?”
“What do you do? I understand you were a great student. Exceptional even. Then your grades slipped when Uncle Pervert started abusing you. That makes sense. He was messing with your mind, not just your body. Have you gone back to being exceptional or are you allowing yourself to be mediocre?”
“In this new school, they have me in advanced classes. My English teacher invited me to be in his Creative Writing class. I’m doing well. Although, I have to say, I hate math.”
Sandy laughed then. “Who doesn’t?” And Honey laughed too, and it felt wonderful.
“What do you do for fun? I hike. My mom quilts. What do you do?”
“I used to ride; my sister Annie and I would bike for twenty-miles or more on most Saturdays and Sundays with my best friend, Sylvia, and her friend, Tina, back in Maine."
“How’d that make you feel?”
“Invigorated, healthy, free.”
“That’s what hiking does for me. Are you doing it now since you came to New Hampshire, I mean?”
“I haven’t done it for a long time. Uncle Pete used to pick me up on weekends and take me off my parents hands telling them he’d take me to amusement parks, the beach, whatever.”
“Did he do those things?”
“Oh, yes, at first nothing weird happened. We just had fun together. I thought because he and Aunt Phyllis didn’t have kids he just wanted to borrow one. That’s what my parents thought too. But then, after months of that, things changed.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No, I did all the talking for the recording for court. The bastard could have just pleaded guilty and got sentenced but NOOOOO, he insisted he was innocent and Aunt Phyllis insisted I was a liar, so we had to go to court. Because I was still underage, I didn’t have to face him in court, but I still had to tell my story, and the jury watched me on tape. He made it as humiliating as possible. He took everything.”
“No, he didn’t take everything.”
Honey stood up then and stood tall over Dr. Bechard’s chair, towering over her thin figure. “How can you say he didn’t take everything from me? I was a virgin. I wanted to be one when I got married. That was my plan.”
“I’m sitting here looking into your beautifully angry face and into your incredibly powerful eyes, and I see you are so alive with
emotion, so smart, and so able to live and breathe, that I know he didn’t take everything because he didn’t kill you. You’re alive, and as long as you are alive, you have mountains and roads to ride, classes to take, friends to make, and so many things to live for. Younger than you, I was raped by my next door neighbor. And it was horrible. I thought for a while that I’d die from the pain he caused. But finally I realized he hadn’t killed me and with him being in prison he couldn’t kill me. It was then that I decided to live every day and be as happy and productive and daring as I could be because I wasn’t going to let him or anyone take my happiness away ever again.”
“Someone did this to you?” Honey asked.
“Yes,” Dr. Bechard said and nodded her head as tears fell slowly from her eyes. Honey bent down then and fell into her lap, and they held each other for a very long time in that purple overstuffed chair in her very comfortable office.
Chapter Eleven
By the time Honey got up, wiped her eyes on one of the tissues Dr. Bechard (Sandy) offered, her hour with her was up for the day, but Honey knew she’d found the right psychiatrist and that she could tell her anything, and there was a lot to tell, including about how the girls were treating her and last night’s disgusting date with Henry. She made an appointment for the following week. Sandy walked her in the opposite direction and led her to a back door, so she would never meet up with anyone but the receptionist in the front office. Honey liked that too.
Classes got better and better. Math would never be her strong suit, so she and her dad, an engineer who hated the reports he had to write for work, helped her nearly every night with Calculus. Her senior year she wouldn’t be required to take another math class, but he was strongly suggesting that she take statistics.
“It’s the one class you’ll need all your life to understand things like surveys, elections, government reports, trends, etc. You’ll thank me for it, and I’ll be here to help,” he promised.
“I’ll think about it, Dad,” was all she could promise him. Senior class signups didn’t happen until May. Before then, she had to get through many more important things, like whether or not she’d be invited to prom and if she was whether or not it was just a trap for someone to think she’d put out for prom night, or if it was a serious invitation by someone who liked her for being her. But, of course, she wouldn’t be telling her father that. Sandy would get an earful on that question.
At first Henry was like a shadow again, all apologies for making assumptions he shouldn’t have and begging to have another chance for a second date. Finally, one day at lunch when she was headed for the courtyard where she could find some quiet on one of the granite benches and read Pretty Bones, a paperback she’d picked up about a girl whose parents ran a funeral home, she turned to him and said, “Look, Henry, you’re a nice guy, but you’re not my type okay? I’m not going out with you again, so you can just go back with Beth and make her happy, and maybe that will make the other girls happy, and I won’t be some pariah around here. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I said ‘no’ when you asked me for a second date, at least a hundred times and ‘no’ means ‘no’ period.” She turned then and took her book and backpack to the farthest end of the courtyard to let him know she really was serious. She didn’t even look back to see his reaction. That might have given him hope that she might care about him. Of course, she did care about him, but she meant what she said. She didn’t want the other girls to be mad at her because of Beth, so she had to make Henry think she was just not into him.
Once Henry backed off, Cory came into the courtyard the next day and started up a conversation.
“What are you reading?”
“Pretty Bones by Erin Lee.”
“Any good?”
“Fascinating. This girl’s parents own a funeral home and she’s stuck there doing half the work, and she’s got some bone disease…” Honey stopped then when she realized he really wasn’t interested in the story at all, just wanting to start a conversation.
“Cory, aren’t you the guy people said just moved to town this summer?”
“Yes, we came down from Coldstream, New Hampshire though, not from out of state.”
“Same thing, though, you were new.”
“How did people treat you?” she asked and slipped her red lollipop into her mouth, dog eared the book she was reading, and set it down on the bench to give him her full attention.
“Well, most were great. I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven. In Coldstream, they didn’t like that my family was Japanese, so they ostracized us and made it hard for my parents to get work. I’ve got five siblings. They were brutal to my little sisters; I got in plenty of fights defending them. Happy to get out of Dodge, I was.”
“I hear a ‘but’ coming.”
“But, Seth, you know, Mandy’s guy, the junior class prez, he thought I was moving in on Mandy, which I wasn’t, and he went ballistic and called me ‘slanty eyes.’ I punched him in the nose and laid him out flat in front of like thirty kids at the beach. It was awful. Most popular guy and the new kid takes him on. Dumb really. Not the way to make friends, but I had had it, you know?”
“Yeah, I know. I’m sick of the girls thinking I’m trying to steal their guys. Henry swore he was breaking up with Beth ’cause of other shit, not me, so I went out with him. Now, the girls hate me. In fact, I think they hated me even before that.”
“They’re jealous. You’re new, smoking hot, and an unknown; they don’t know what to expect,” he said and sweat formed at his temples.
“Well, maybe if they’d give me a chance to get to know me, they’d find out I was just like them.”
“Maybe. I wish you luck with that. I mean, I like it here and all, so much better than Coldstream, but it’s a small town with roots that go deep. I’m lucky I play football well, so that helped get me accepted. If I didn’t, I might still be on the outs. Find yourself some way to be indispensable and that could help.”
“You sound like a fifty-year-old. So wise.”
“I’m a military brat. I’ve lived all over the world. Mostly, near and in big cities. This small town shit is so rare for me, but I see it for what it is. It’s got its great features and some really ugly cliquey ones. I wish you luck, Honey. Let me know if I can help. Let’s swap phone numbers, okay?”
“Okay, thanks, Cory.”
And they did, just in time for the bell to ring to say classes would begin in ten minutes. He was such a nice guy, she decided. And he hadn’t asked her out on a date, which meant that Tara wouldn’t be her mortal enemy any time soon.
But during a two-partner lab experiment, Steve Hill asked her if she’d like to go bowling and out for burgers on Friday night.
“Are you dating anyone now or recently?” she asked him.
“No, why?”
“I dated Henry and got in trouble because he’d been seeing Beth; I don’t want to repeat that mistake. Because I’m new here; I don’t know the lay of the land yet.”
“Nope, haven’t been together with anyone for six months. Is that long enough?”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Hey, you two, let’s see you get some work done,” Mr. Moses shouted over to them from across the room, and they scurried to look busy, yet they still swapped phone numbers. Whispers flew up around the room, that Honey couldn’t help noticing. She wondered if Steve did too and if he cared.
Things were looking up for Honey, a date with someone unattached. She couldn’t wait to tell Annie and Sandy about it.
Chapter Twelve
She told Sandy she had the date to look forward to, but she also told her about the date with Henry and how it had gone south, first with Amanda Pearson harassing her in Rick’s Creamery and then with him having his hands all over her at Preacher’s Hill.
“Well, first it’s great that you have something you’re looking forward to for this weekend, so there’s that. But it’s something that someone else is providing, this Steve guy from your science class
. I’d love it if each week you make it a goal to have something special to look forward to that you provide. You decide to do because you want to do it. It doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. It could be as simple as making time to give yourself a manicure or re-watching your favorite movie with someone you like. Could you do that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I never ask my clients to do anything I don’t do, so I set goals or projects for myself each week, sometimes each day too. This week, I’ve made plans to hike Mount Monadnock in the very southwestern part of the state. It’s not a high peak compared to those I’ve climbed around the world, but it’s one I’ve never been to, and I want to scale it.”
“Are you going with someone? Is that okay to ask?”
“You, Honey, can ask me anything.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I’m hiking it with my niece. She’s in town for the long weekend. She likes to hike but doesn’t get the chance much because she lives in New York City with my brother. So I thought it would be a treat for her and a something special for me too.”
“Let me get this straight. Because she didn’t come up with the idea and plan it, you wouldn’t count it as something special for her to look forward to, but you’d count it as something you’d look forward to. Am I right?”
Sandy laughed then and it was a full, deep laugh, almost like that of Honey’s dad.
“Got it. I’m not saying Mags can’t look forward to it, like you’re looking forward to your date with Steve, but since she didn’t initiate the idea and plan it, it doesn’t count toward her special plan for the week.”
“Do you have her make special plans too? It sounds like you do.”
“Well, yes, I do. And her special plan was to call, say she had an extra day off from school next Monday and ask if I would like some company. And, of course, unless I’m traveling for work or vacation, I’m always available to Mags.”