Amanda

Amanda always wondered what it would be like to drink a whole glass of honeysuckle juice. To squeeze each bud clean into a glass, one after the other, while the sweet nectar accumulated and beckoned.

There is a honeysuckle bush near where she runs now, close to the school, not too far from the lab on the ocean that she walks to each morning for work. But, she feels, she can’t hardly kneel down right on the path like that, for like an hour, harvesting honeysuckles. It’s probably wrong to pick them, anyway, if you think about it, at least not before they’re ripe, but then how could you tell if they were ripe or not? That’s something you should know.

You should harvest them in greedy handfuls and draw the nectar in the privacy of your car, Mandy. That’s what you should do. Go back for more if you need to, and you probably will need to, but just go when no one’s looking so that no one can ask you what you’re doing with protected honeysuckles in the middle of a nature conservation compound. And if they ask, say that you’re doing an experiment on honeysuckle nectar, that you work for the lab. Point to it. Technically, you’re telling the truth.

It reminds you of when you had Meetu and all those other girls over for a camping sleepover, when mom bought snacks for eight and you guys all stayed outside in the backyard on a ten-by-ten blue nylon square and talked about boys. When you slept in nets and bugs spray to keep the insects off, and made rings and necklaces out of the abdomens of lightning bugs to pass the time. Meetu ran around the yard all night in circles screaming Banzai. When you kissed her as a joke that night, she had put honeysuckles in her braids. You didn’t care whether they were ripe.