HONEY GIRL by Morgan Rogers is a stunning #ownvoices debut, a charming, lyrical, and introspective romantic coming-of-age story about Grace Porter – millennial, Black woman, astronomy Ph.D. – who wakes up after a wild night in Vegas married to a woman she doesn’t know.
Strait-laced and structured all
her life, Porter now faces life without a plan for the first time ever. Between
her disappointed military father, the competitive job market, and a consuming
sense of aimlessness, finding and falling in love with her wife across the
country seems to be the only right answer. But Porter’s problems are just as
big in Brooklyn as they are anywhere else, and she realizes she’s going to have
to face adulthood whether she’s ready or not.
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One
Grace wakes up slow like molasses. The only difference is molasses is sweet, and this—the dry mouth and the pounding headache—is sour. She wakes up to the blinding desert sun, to heat that infiltrates the windows and warms her brown skin, even in late March.
Her alarm buzzes as the champagne-bubble
dream pops.
Grace wakes in Las Vegas instead of her
apartment in Portland, and she groans.
She’s still in last night’s clothes, ripped
high-waisted jeans and a cropped, white BRIDE t-shirt she didn’t pack. The bed
is warm, which isn’t surprising. But as Grace moves, shifts and tries to
remember how to work her limbs, she notices it’s a different kind of warm. The
bed, the covers, the smooth cotton pillowcase beside her, is body-warm.
Sleep-warm.
The hotel bed smells like sea-salt and
spell herbs. The kind people cut up and put in tea, in bottles, soaking into
oil and sealed with a little chant. It smells like kitchen magic.
She finds the will to roll over into the
warm patch. Her memories begin to trickle in from the night before like a movie
in rewind. There were bright lights and too-sweet drinks and one club after
another. There was a girl with rose-pink cheeks and pitch-black hair and, yes,
sea-salt and sage behind her ears and over the soft, veiny parts of her wrists.
Her name clings to the tip of Grace’s tongue but does not pull free.
The movie in Grace’s head fast-forwards.
The girl’s hand stayed clutched in hers for the rest of the night. Her mouth
was pretty pink. She clung to Grace’s elbow and whispered, “Stay with me,” when
Agnes and Ximena decided to go back to the hotel.
Stay with me, she said, and Grace did. Follow
me, she said, like Grace was used to doing. Follow your alarm. Follow your
schedule. Follow your rubric. Follow your graduation plan. Follow a salt and
sage girl through a city of lights and find yourself at the steps of a church.
Maybe it wasn’t a church. It didn’t seem
like one. A place with fake flowers and red carpet and a man in a white suit. A
fake priest. Two girls giggled through champagne bubbles and said yes. Grace
covers her eyes and sees it play out.
“Jesus,” she mutters, sitting up suddenly
and clutching the sheets to keep herself steady.
She gets up, knees wobbling. “Get it
together, Grace Porter.” Her throat is dry and her tongue sticks to the roof of
her mouth. “You are hungover. Whatever you think happened, didn’t happen.” She
looks down at her t-shirt and lets out a shaky screech into her palms. “It
couldn’t have happened, because you are smart, and organized, and careful. None
of those things would lead to a wedding. A wedding!”
“Didn’t happen,” she murmurs, trying to
make up the bed. It’s a fruitless task, but making up the bed makes sense, and
everything else doesn’t. She pulls at the sheets, and three things float to the
floor like feathers.
A piece of hotel-branded memo paper. A
business card. A photograph.
Grace picks up the glossy photograph first.
It is perfectly rectangular, like someone took the time to cut it carefully
with scissors.
In it, the plastic church from her blurry
memories. The church with its wine-colored carpet and fake flowers. There is no
Elvis at this wedding, but there is a man, a fake priest, with slicked back
hair and rhinestones around his eyes.
In it, Grace is tall and brown and narrow,
and her gold, spiraling curls hang past her shoulders. She is smiling bright.
It makes her face hurt now, to know she can smile like that, can be that happy
surrounded by things she cannot remember.
Across from her, their hands intertwined,
is the girl. In the picture, her cheeks are just as rose-pink. Her hair is just
as pitch-black as an empty night sky. She is smiling, much like Grace is
smiling. On her left hand, a black ring encircles her finger, the one meant for
ceremonies like this.
Grace, hungover and wary of this new
reality, lifts her own left hand. There, on the same finger, a gold ring. This
part evaded her memories, forever lost in sticky-sweet alcohol. But there is
it, a ring. A permanent and binding and claiming ring.
“What the hell did you do, Porter?” she
says, tracing it around her finger.
She picks up the business card, smaller and
somehow more intimate, next. It smells like the right side of the bed. Sea
salt. Sage. Crushed herbs. Star anise. It is a good smell.
On the front, a simple title:
ARE YOU THERE?
brooklyn’s late night show for lonely
creatures
& the supernatural. Sometimes
both.
99.7 FM
She picks up the hotel stationery.
The cramped writing is barely legible, like it was written in a hurry.
I know who I am, but who are you? I woke up
during the sunrise, and your hair and your skin and the freckles on your nose
glowed like gold. Honey-gold. I think you are my wife, and I will call you Honey
Girl. Consider this a calling card, if you ever need a—I don’t know how these
things work. A friend? A—
Wife,
it says, but crossed out.
A
partner. Or. I don’t know. I have to go. But I think I had fun, and I think I
was happy. I don’t think I would get married if I wasn’t. I hope you were, too.
What is it they say? What happens in Vegas,
stays in Vegas? Well, I can’t stay.
Maybe one day you’ll come find me, Honey
Girl. Until then, you can follow the sound of my voice. Are you listening?
Excerpted from Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers, Copyright © 2021 by Morgan Rogers; Published by Park Row Books
About the Author
Morgan Rogers is a queer black
millennial. She writes books for queer girls that are looking for their place
in the world. She lives in Maryland and has a Shih Tzu named Nico and a cat
named Grace that she would love to write into a story one day. HONEY GIRL is her debut novel.
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