Bee Cup

When I was in high school I literally lived up the street from my boyfriend. He had a treehouse in his backyard and if you climbed around the largest branch you could also sneak into the house from the second floor. It’s probably why I have bad knees. So one evening when I woke up to something hitting my own window, I was startled to say the least. First of all, my room was in the attic of my house. Second, there were no hearty trees near the windows of my house, because my dad said he didn’t like the way they cluttered the yard and had them cut down a few years after we moved in. The first time I heard the knock, I decided I’d imagined it. I tried to go back to sleep, blanket over my head, burrowing towards the foot of the mattress. The second time was insistent, a bit desperate, and I thought whatever ghost needed in that badly could use my help. I turned on the lights and went to the window. Henry was there, a few rungs down on the ladder my dad used to clean out the gutters. 

“Took you long enough.” he almost growled as I slid the pane of glass up and he slipped in around me.

I looked at the iPod dock next to my bed, glowing away. “Excuse me, for not being hospitable at 3 in the morning.” I closed the window behind him. He toed off his sneakers, abandoning them unceremoniously and dropping into my bed. This felt too intimate, like his room was our room but my room was mine alone. I sat at the edge of my bed, tugging down the terrycloth shorts I’d worn to bed, but he hadn’t registered how little I was wearing. “Just...wanted a chat, or…” 

“Couldn’t sleep. Thought your place would be better.” He still had his hood over his head.

“Okay.”

“Okay.” He repeated, and held the covers open. “Come lay with me?” I thought about the Beach Boys song, already knowing we couldn’t really fall asleep like this. I climbed in anyways. A lot of things would be nice if they were different but for tonight, for now, we could at least be together.  

Honestly, though, my parents wouldn’t have noticed if Henry came stumbling down the stairs and made himself a cup of coffee in the morning. His parents were well-adjusted enough that they knew we weren’t always telling the truth about where we were. Mine were so far up their own asses that if they did register the extra teenager in the house, they’d lose their minds. As though there was a reputation to lose. As though there were paparazzi outside our windows waiting to write an expose on their failure as parents, as though THAT was the breaking point for our family falling apart in the public eye. As though responsible, 3.8 GPA Henry with his own, much better bedroom down the road, would ever stay the night in our mess without something major going on.

My family didn’t talk about the fact that my mom slept on the couch or that my dad never came right home after work. Instead, my dad yelled at me for leaving my sneakers all over the floor and my sister for opening every box of cereal instead of finishing one at a time. They complained about the broken lock on the back door and the way nothing ever grew in the yard instead of keeping their voices down when they got into shouting matches about their incompatible sex drives. Henry and I should have been the least of their worries, but projection is much easier than reflection. 

So Henry climbing in through my window in search of comfort made very little sense. 

“You have a lot more pictures up than last time I was here.” I collaged when I was stressed out. 

“Well, the cast of Lord of the Rings is...sprawling.” 

“Hmph.” He grunted. When Henry got stressed, he got upset about how easily I developed crushes. 

“I can’t underrepresent any member of the fellowship, okay?”

“I thought it was just the hobbits.”

“I only want to be a hobbit, yes. But the ring needs the whole fellowship to get to Mordor.” 

“Hmph.” He grunted again.

I shrugged against his chest. “My room, my rules.” Every surface I could get my hands on was covered in magazines I’d cut apart and shoved back together. There were mix and match ads for drinking more milk and neon colored sneakers with fat platforms. I reassembled headlines, filled teacups with bees and put historic photographs on the display screens for gameboys. I colored in panda bears with highlighters. I don’t know that I had an artistic process besides “annoying”. I WAS a teacup full of bees. I kept things brightly colored and humorous and dreamed of an idyllic life with warm bread and cheese and fireworks that turned in to dragons. It didn’t take much to get me to sting, especially if you went after the honey I’d so carefully harvested.

Henry was just bees. He untangled himself from me and rolled away. “Yeah. I guess it would be unbalanced if you only included the ones you wanted to make out with the most.”

I sat up in bed. I was too tired for his buzzing. “What happened?” 

“What do you mean?” 

“I mean why are you here? Why didn’t you just call and have me come to your window, as usual?”

“I don’t know. Needed a little walk. Wanted a change of scene.” The door below us slammed and I noticed Henry’s flinch more than the sound. “How do you deal with it?” 

“My parents acting like teenagers? I go to your house.” I smiled, but I knew if I could see Henry’s face he wouldn’t be smiling. “I don’t know. I guess I’m used to it by now.”

“Have they always been this way?” I thought about that question. 

“I guess not, I mean I can’t imagine my mom sleeping on the couch during, like, their honeymoon. But then again, I can’t really imagine them any other way.” I thought about it again, and I genuinely couldn’t imagine my parents enjoying each other’s company. Even on vacations, my mom always had something to complain about and my dad blew up over the littlest things going wrong. Even as I got older and started understanding things a little better, I never got why their fuses were SO short. “People don’t change that much. So yeah, I guess they’ve always been this way, to some degree.” I tugged his shoulder so he had to roll back and face me. “What’s going on?” 

He chewed on the inside of his cheeks. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean something at home is different, but I can’t tell what it is. I just know I don’t want to be there.” 

“Hm.” 

“What?”

“I don’t know. It’s 3am.”

“Hm.” He closed his eyes. “Thanks for letting me in. Can I stay?” I nodded. There’d be hell to pay, but that was a problem for Future Me. 

Henry was overreacting, and when we did get caught in the morning I was grounded but I just ignored the rules and my parents either forgot or gave up trying to enforce it.

In that moment, though, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the hypothetically shitty things Henry was about to go through. As I got angrier and angrier, Henry fell asleep with one arm slung over my waist.  I pretended to read an old paperback by moonlight.  Why do parents start throwing hissy fits when we are actually in the most complicated parts of our lives and need a little extra help? 

Henry’s parents weren’t like mine. They always encouraged him to read widely and learn deeply and go off curriculum. The first time his family had a lively discussion about oppression at the dinner table, I almost puked. I asked my parents who they were voting for once, and they told me it’s none of my business, even though I could tell based on the words they used and the stuff they yelled about in the car. I stopped asking questions, especially the ones I didn’t want to know the answers to. 

Henry reacted to every little change like he was one of those machines that reads trembles in the Earth. That night, he was curled up in my bed, not detecting anything. I brushed his bangs off his forehead when the sun finally rose over my windowsill and he snuggled tighter into my hips. Henry did not like being coddled in public, but here with just me he almost purred from the attention, even as he slept. A few more doors slammed downstairs and the car started up. I could feel Henry tense in my arms like he was listening to his own future unfold rather than my present. 

I didn’t want to think about a version of Henry that didn’t care the way I didn’t care. And when, eventually, I started crying a little, I still didn’t realize that caring was never the problem.