saw what was parked there. It was a drone, the million-dollar, person-carrying kind, a giant muscled bug with a storm-gray glass windshield. The sight of its vicious little propellers made Marlow’s gut lurch.
Honey grinned at her. “Who’s afraid of drones now?” She climbed inside, white robe billowing in the wind behind her, and patted the passenger seat.
As they lifted off, Honey searched Marlow’s face, then nodded as if she was satisfied. “Good,” she said. She stole a sausage from Marlow’s plate. “I was worried you’d be mad at me for using you as an example.”
“I am mad,” Marlow said. “Or I’ll be mad, later. Right now I’m just working on not throwing up.” They were passing a tower that reminded her of a telescope she had as a child: round and stacked with narrowing layers, seemingly ready to collapse into itself.
“I figured you’re used to it,” Honey pressed. “Being used to sell something. You really changed the world, you know that, Marlow? Kids never kill themselves these days. You’d sooner hear of a child dying of cancer.”
Marlow wanted to eat a piece of bacon, just to give herself time to think up a response while she chewed, but she couldn’t—she knew it would come back up. “Kids don’t kill themselves for a lot of reasons,” she said. “They’re built not to, now.” She thought, with a jolt of nausea, of the mock-up of her and Ellis’s baby, the one they had left unfinished. “And they don’t have secrets anymore,” she added.
“You say that like it’s a good thing.” Honey smirked. “But admit it. You didn’t mind a little privacy last night.” She turned toward Marlow conspiratorially and pulled her knees up, like they were best friends at a sleepover. “You seemed to be enjoying yourself.”
Marlow looked at Honey. She felt her anger resurfacing. “Oh, yeah, it was a thrill,” she snapped. “I liked the part where I almost got raped.”
Honey pinched the last piece of bacon from Marlow’s plate. “Don’t be dramatic,” she said. “You shut that down just fine. I’m sure no one’s ever bothered to say this to you, they’ve been too busy making you eat pills and wear cardigans, but—Marlow, you can take care of yourself.”
Marlow jerked her face away, toward the window. She didn’t want Honey to see how much it meant to her, to hear someone say something like that, even someone who didn’t really care about her. It would shift everything between them Honey’s way.
Honey took both plates and tucked them somewhere out of sight. “You know, I went to Constellation specifically to fuck with you people,” she said, the way someone else might have said I went out there to major in mechanical engineering. “Back when we were kids, I mean.”
“Yeah, I picked up on that,” Marlow said. “Right around the time you drove my dad’s car into the ocean.” Her heart pricked at the word dad. But that was still Aston, wasn’t it? Even when she learned who her father was, it would be too late for that person to be her dad.
“And it wouldn’t have made sense to go home afterward.” They were drifting toward the Statue of Liberty, and Marlow swore she saw Honey give the statue a curt nod, like she was a coworker. “I had momentum,” Honey said. “I was famous, all of a sudden. But fame was not enough, you know? I wanted something else. I couldn’t have come up with the word, back then, but I’m big-time now, I have a good vocab.” She smiled. “Influence. That’s what I wanted.”
She kept talking, and, theoretically, Marlow was dying to cut her off. But another one of her just-unearthed feelings was perking: curiosity. She was parched for details. So she let Honey go on, and Honey went on: after Marlow bit her, she didn’t go back to War, back to the brothers and uncles and the boys she would have married, all of them with the same frowns, the same dark dust in their wrinkles. She wouldn’t go back to the rancher with its squinting, shutterless windows. She wouldn’t go back to the creek—the crick, as she said it—at the back of the property, the one that had dried up so bad over the years, it didn’t cover her parents’ ashes when she chucked them in. Age nine, straw-armed, she had to go back to the house to fill a bucket at the laundry room sink.
Instead of going home, she came to the island passing beneath their feet,