EW has a first look at the suspense novel set against the backdrop of a summer retreat.
“I didn’t want to writeThe Honeys I had to,” La Sala tells EW.
“Like Mars, I lost my own sister very tragically.
Ryan La Sala.Credit: Lauren Takakjian
Grief reveals the horror of everyday life; it makes the ‘normal’ monstrous.
And fear often relies upon the dark.
What prowls there, unseen?
‘The Honeys,’ by Ryan La Sala.Scholastic
Mars is unlike any final girl (or boy) you’ve ever encountered.
“I love you, Mars.”
Her voice crumbles in her throat.
In the moonlight from my window I can see the gleam of tears streaked over her jaw.
She hovers so close I can smell her.
Not her usual shampoo, but an un-right odor.
The rich sweetness of decay, like molding flowers.
You’re back?”
But Caroline and I haven’t met on our balcony in a long, long time.
It’s her, though.
Only Caroline would know I still keep the window unlocked, just in case.
I ask the shadow.
“Why are you home?”
I’m too sleepy to hide the hope in my voice.
Despite everything from this past year, I’m happy to see my sister.
I’ve waited so long for her to come back for me.
She lifts something above her head.
I recognize the shape, the catch of soft moonlight on rough metal.
It’s my iron sundial.
She must have grabbed it from my bookcase.
I use it as a bookend because it’s so heavy.
She stifles a sob, heaving the sundial high.
I reach for my phone on the nightstand.
“Caroline, what’s going on”
“Forgive me,” she sobs.
Caroline brings the sundial down on my hand, crushing nail and bone into metal and glass.
Pink lights.
From crashing and chaos.
I am slow and I am stumbling.
I cradle one hand with the other, feeling familiar skin bent into unfamiliar carnage.
The knuckles of my hands don’t match anymore, their twin-hood out of alignment.
Like Caroline and me.
She storms behind me.
She’s so close her stink overwhelms me.
All I can hear is her screaming.
It’s not her voice.
It’s not my sister.
It’s something wearing her skin, filling her flailing body like a pressurized water hose.
Dad calls up from downstairs.
I barely dodge the next hit, the iron sundial smashing into the floorboards beside my head.
My vision is fucked up, but in the brightness of the hallway I can see Caroline now.
She is filthy, her brown hair clumped with dust and debris.
She pulls something from her waistband and holds it over us.
My sister has brought home a knife.
But what scares me more are her eyes.
I see my Caroline.
So recognizable that my agonyeven my shockdissolves into relief.
Caroline cringes, and it’s all the warning I have before she plunges the knife toward my face.
I twist but a seam of fire rips open in my ear.
Now I scream, but I can’t hear it, can’t hear anything through the white-hot pain.
I feel the house tremble under my back as Dad hits the top of the stairs.
I feel Caroline get dragged away.
I roll to my side and use my good hand to heave myself onto the banister.
I stare into the chandelier that hangs into the great drop of our entryway.
The lights are still pink, the world still blurry.
The whole house spins beneath me like I’m the center of an unbalanced carousel.
I am powerless as I watch Caroline kick and bite at our dad.
Unreal characters that have broken into my life for this improvised horror.
Mom stands in her doorway, another imposter.
She claps both hands over her mouth, frozen.
I want to scream at her.
Want her to help.
Caroline sinks teeth into the meat of Dad’s hand.
The glass shatters over her, but she never stops moving.
Not for a second.
She plunges toward me, the carpet twisting beneath her shoes as she tries to get her footing.
But she’s too close, too out of control.
I know what will happen before it happens.
She falls into me, arms hugged tight around my shoulders.
The banister snaps and we hurtle backward.
The ceiling fills my view.
We fall through the chandelier; then the chandelier is falling with us.
When we hit the floor, Caroline hits first.
She breaks beneath my body.
I am wrapped in her arms, her hair, in the sweet stink she brought home.
The silence and the stillness scare me more than anything else.
I struggle free, broken crystal biting flesh from my naked thighs, my knees.
In the wreckage, I stand.
I look at my sister.
She’s covered in my blood.
Her body curls into itself.
Her face is the last thing to stop twitching.
One eye half-lidded, the other flung wide open like a doll.
Caroline is looking at me when she dies.
And she is smiling.
Chapter 2
When we were five years old, Caroline gave me a little pink calculator.
It was shaped like a cat and had candy-bright buttons.
She liked it, but I loved it, and she loved me, so it became mine.
Growing up, she was always like that.
Generous and maybe a little too insightful about what people wanted.
Caroline got in trouble, and I got a hobby.
It was our joke.
One year it was an old-school abacus in exchange for neons.
Then the sundial for thermosensitive metallics.
And finally, my favorite: a 1987 Mayfair Sound Products calculator, made in Japan.
A blocky machine bigger than my hand.
Pleasantly heavy, with noisy buttons.
And all I gave her was royal blue.
Painfully inadequate, but she wore that color all the time, even after we stopped talking.
It is utterly smashed.
I don’t understand why.
I don’t need to understand why.
I sob as I sift through the mess, searching for each piece.
Death isn’t the end of a life, but the division of it.
When someone dies, their soul scatters into all the things they’ve ever given away.
You struggle to piece together what’s lefteven the things that hurtjust to feel haunted.
It takes me until sunrise to find every broken bit of the Mayfair calculator.
The house is quiet by then, Mom and Dad with the body at the hospital.
I face the pieces alone, laid out on my desk in the weak morning light.
There’s the brushed metal frame, the popped-out buttons, the emerald guts of circuitry veined in copper.
Cleaning the grime off was the easy part.
Now I’m trying to figure out how this goes back together.
If it goes back together at all.
I don’t know how anything in so many pieces could go back together.
My sister is dead.
There is just a sudden, shocking emptiness where her life used to be.
I venture to count the voids.
To trace their shapes.
When a person dies, you do this.
You venture to account for what’s gone.
Some of what’s missing will be clear right away.
Those I’m ready for.
But so much worse are the small, infuriatingly small gapsreally just pinprick holesthat Caroline leaves everywhere else.
Emptiness, fired through my memories like buckshot, so scattered that I can’t quantify what’s gone.
I can’t count it.
I can’t measure it.
My sister becomes a constellation of voids.
So I sit at my desk, for days and days.
And I stare at the pieces floating in the muted light of each sunrise.
Bent metal, plastic buttons, emerald guts, copper veins.
Pieces, parts of a former whole.
But now all I see is the new emptiness that separates them.
When I fear something, I study it.
Caroline would dance about it or probably write a poem.
Something dreamy and creative.
But I’m our logical half.
A killjoy, but smart.
Toward data and science.
Maybe even an anecdotal account from a primary source, if I got desperate.
No one will talk with me about what happened.
So I research death.
I learn about sky burials and water burials.
I glimpse her final, twitching grin, like a translucent film laid over my own face.
Not identical, but close enough.
Wewere twins, I guess.
That happens, too, according to my research.
Fuck the past tense, I guess.
Oh, and also: Fuck the upstairs banister.
After that night, I avoided even looking at the splintered breach where Caroline and I fell.
That was somehow worse.
An ugly feeling burned in me when I put my hands over the new wood, something like betrayal.
I watch the men hoist the crystal sculpture into place.
Same with the banister.
I should commend them for even going a day, but then I look up chandeliers online.
When our parents ordered their new chandelier, was their daughter even officially dead?
My mind answers in Caroline’s airy voice.Probably not, Mars, she laughs.
We hold the funeral in our home a day after the new chandelier goes up.
Like all things with my family, the funeral is a careful performance of obfuscation.
It’s the Matthias family way.
Our lives are beholden to the public eye, and I guess that means our deaths are, too.
As family and friends enter, there will be no sign of what happened here.
The crystal has been swept up, the debris vacuumed away, the blood scrubbed from the grout.
Not in this Lovely American Home.
Here, enjoy a canape, why don’t you?
“Mars, sweetie?”
Mom calls from inside the house, and it barely reaches me outside on my balcony.
The same one Caroline crawled over to get into my window.
I’m hiding out here, fiddling with the still-busted Mayfair calculator.
Are you up?"
Drinks are that way; the body of my sister is over there.
The reenactment starts at four o’clock, don’t be late!
Officially, Caroline did not die in our house.
She died two days later, in the hospital, when it became clear she wouldn’t wake up.
The tumor accounted for her “uncharacteristic behavior,” said the doctors.
Her death was inevitable, coming for her no matter what, once that thing took root.
In a way, the swiftness of her death could be seen as a mercy.
But they didn’t know about the attack.
No one does, and no one will unless I tell them.
Dad answered questions for me while they checked out my hand and swabbed blood from my hair.
Officially, I was crushed by my bookcase.
Dad was ready with the lie when the physician’s assistant asked.
Like I said: a performance of obfuscation.
And without Caroline here, I’m now unquestionably the lead.
Our duet has become my solo.
For all my sardonic theatricality, I never wanted this stage to myself.
It’ll be like this for the rest of my life.
I wonder if it will ever not feel like its own form of death.
It certainly feels like death today.
And at the center of the arrangement, a casket of polished cherrywood.
The same thing I thought when I watched the chandelier rise like a cold sun.
I was being sarcastic, the language Caroline and I shared behind our parents' backs.
Mom is being sincere.
She would have loved this.
As if Caroline spent countless hours vision-boarding her big day.
Her"Celebration of Life,“which is printed on the programs in big, loopy letters.
Caroline would’ve hated all thisthe performance, the programsbut especially the term Celebration of Life.
Caroline was a highly accomplished seventeen-year-old, but she was seventeen years old.
There is very little life to celebrate, certainly not enough to go around.
And I remember the way she laughed.I stop talking to her after that.
