Bunny’s head is too heavy and it hurts.
“Trazodone,” Andrea says. “That Trazodone knocked the crap out of you. That shit is no good. I keep telling them. Trazodone is no good.”
“I don’t know,” Teacher disagrees. “I do okay with Trazodone. But forget Seroquel. Seroquel turns me into a zombie.”
“If Trazodone works better for you than Seroquel, then you are the exception. But for everyone else, Trazodone is the worst. I keep telling them. No matter what, I am a nurse. They shouldn’t blow off what I tell them, but do they listen?”
“No,” Josh says. “They don’t listen. No one listens,” and Bunny lets her head drop to rest on the tabletop. Drifting from consciousness, she hears Andrea say, “They hand that shit out like gumdrops, but they give me grief over codeine. Codeine. Big fucking deal.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Chaz asks.
“Big fucking deal to that, too. Who hasn’t tried suicide?”
“I tried,” Howie says. “I almost did it. I would’ve done it.”
“We know. Pam saved your life,” Andrea says. “You can shut the fuck up now.”
No matter that Bunny cannot stay awake. To go to her room to sleep is Not Allowed. Like a boxer in the ring having taken one punch too many to the head, she wobbles and weaves her way to the living room, where she drops into the big armchair. Too tired to notice the strands of Nina’s hair that cling to the nubby upholstery, Bunny falls into a deep and troubled sleep. She dreams of harsh fragments of light stabbing the soft darkness, and that her brain is a steel ball rolling loose in her skull; the visual depictions of a violent headache.
Who knows for how long she slept, but she wakes to find Josh sitting in the chair across from her. He is reading The Atlantic from fourteen months ago. “You missed lunch,” he says.
Bunny sits upright and wants to know, “What time is it?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I saved you a sandwich. Peanut butter.” He holds out the gift of a sandwich for Bunny to take, and he apologizes that the bread is going stale.
She puts the sandwich on the seat of the chair next to hers. “You’re a good person,” she tells Josh. “You don’t deserve this.”
“None of us deserve this,” Josh says, but Bunny disagrees. “I do. I don’t know what I did, but I must’ve done something terrible. People don’t like me.”
“I like you,” Josh says, not in a coy or flirtatious way, just as a simple matter of fact, which fills her with gratitude; gratitude which escapes without warning, without so much as a catch in her voice, in a rush of tears spilling over, as if Bunny were a fountain and the flow were perpetual. He aches to touch her, to comfort her, as he aches, as all of them ache, to be comforted, but even if it were Allowed, he’d be afraid. He imagines that to hug her would be like what happens when a man dying of starvation eats, when he eats too much and his stomach explodes. Still, to die from too much food is far nicer than to die from no food, not so much as a bite of a plum. He watches Bunny cry. He wishes she would eat the peanut butter sandwich.
It’s often genetic, this disposition of melancholy. In the winter months, Josh would come home from basketball practice after school to find his mother sitting in the living room, in the dark. He’d turn on a lamp. One lamp in a dark room casts the saddest glow, and Josh would kiss his mother on the cheek. Always, she was listless. Always, she said, “You’re a good boy.” Always, he made supper. Supper, she called it. Not dinner. Supper. Canned soup with crackers and cheese; spaghetti; scrambled eggs, and together they ate the supper that he prepared. After supper, he would go to his room and cry. The dog he had as a boy used to lick his face dry. If there were a dog here, the dog would lick Bunny’s face dry, too. Then, the dog would eat the peanut butter sandwich that is sitting on the chair.
But, there is no dog.
“Andrea is right about the Trazodone,” Josh says. “You should tell Ella not to give you Trazodone again.”
Bunny nods, and then she asks, “Does it scare you?”
Josh isn’t sure what Bunny means by “it,” which “it” scares him, but whichever it is, it doesn’t make much difference. “Yes,” he says.
He picks up the peanut butter sandwich and holds it out to Bunny. “You have to eat something.”
Bunny accepts the sandwich, but instead of taking a bite, she tears off a piece of crust, which she studies like she suspects there is something off with it. Mold or poison. When she is more or less satisfied that it is safe to eat, she pushes the crust of bread into her mouth, as if her mouth were already full.