The rabbit was a birthday gift. Charlie was turning nine, and it was something he asked for, so it was something he got.
“You feed it. You clean the cage. You make sure its water bowl is full,” his dad said, handing over a white furball with a pink bow around its neck.
Still chewing his cake, Charlie took in the armful of rabbit and cried, “So awesome!”
The party attendance might have seemed abysmal—there was Kyle and Alistair, of course, as well as Keri, out of politeness—but it turned out that they were the only people Charlie wanted to be there. They all sat, along with Charlie’s parents, at a picnic table clad with a striped nylon tablecloth in the Dwyers’ backyard. The cake, shaped like a tower, was vanilla with chocolate frosting.
“So rabbits are basically like cats, but they hop, right?” Keri asked as she dipped a finger in the icing and brought it to her mouth.
Charlie’s mom winced and pulled the cake out of Keri’s reach, while Charlie hugged the rabbit tighter and said, “No, genius. Rabbits aren’t anything like cats. They’re lagomorphs, for one. Lagomorphs and cats are sworn enemies.”
“Keep him away from all those strays you feed,” Kyle said.
“Duh,” Charlie replied.
“He’s a girl,” Charlie’s dad said.
“Huh?” almost everyone at the table replied.
“The rabbit is a female,” he said. “At least that’s what the vet told me.”
“I will name her Una,” Charlie announced. “It means the first of her kind.”
For the next few weeks, the rabbit named Una lived in a cage made of wood and chicken wire that Charlie’s father attached to Kyle’s clubhouse. Una was safe from cats, as well as coyotes, which were actually the bigger concern.
Every day, Charlie would give Una vegetables and food pellets and he would let her hop through the grass as he scrubbed her cage. He had always adored cats, as far back as Alistair could remember, but he had only recently started mentioning rabbits. And yet his passion for Una seemed genuine, even if she was a sworn enemy of his beloved felines.
* * *
Alistair came upon Una’s lifeless body early on a Sunday morning. Charlie was on a trip with his parents to visit a boarding school for the young and unique. Kyle had been left alone for the night and was therefore in charge of watching Una. “Can you check up on her?” Charlie had asked Alistair the day before. “I don’t trust him. He’s fifteen and he hardly knows how to bathe himself.”
The white fur around Una’s eyes was stained with blood. Frost lined the uneaten vegetables scattered throughout the cage. Alistair poked at Una with a stick, and the body yielded, but didn’t react.
He sprinted to the front door of the Dwyers’ house and slapped the bell. A red-eyed Kyle answered after the third insistent ring.
“Jesus, man,” Kyle said. “Where’s the fire?”
“I think Una’s dead,” Alistair said between wheezing breaths.
Kyle leaned against the door and closed his eyes. “Not possible,” he mumbled. “Josie came over and we took care of that last night.”
“I don’t know,” Alistair said. “She’s bloody. She’s not moving. Did you feed her?”
“Sure.”
“Did you let her out in the grass and wash her cage?”
“Of course,” Kyle said as he wiped his face with his hand and opened his eyes. “Well, I didn’t let her out, but I hosed the whole thing down pretty good.”
“You hosed it down while she was still in it?”
“Sure,” Kyle said. “That’s what you do with animals. I’ve seen them do that with elephants at the zoo.”
“I think she froze to death,” Alistair said. “Or had a heart attack, or something. Oh my god, what do we tell Charlie?”
“Lemme see her.”
Alistair led him out back, where Kyle stumbled and had to brace himself against the clubhouse as he said, “Oh man, oh man, oh man.”
Wrapping his fingers around the chicken wire at the front of the cage, Alistair gave it a gentle tug and said, “I was thinking, and this isn’t what we have to do, but what if we ripped a hole in the wire? And we buried the rabbit in the swamp? Pretend like a coyote got her.”
Kyle pounded a fist against the clubhouse three times, and then took three deep breaths. “If we do that,” he said, “no one can ever know.”
“I’m not stupid.”
Kyle put a hand on Alistair’s shoulder and squeezed it hard. “No one. Ever.”
“I get it.”
“Come with me.”
Kyle led the way into the clubhouse, where he pointed at a crawl space below the floorboards. “At the bottom,” he said.
Alistair reached down and pulled out a stop sign and placed it on the floor. “Is that the sign that went missing from Cheshire and—” Alistair started to say, but cut himself short.
Kyle glared at him and said, “Underneath that.”
Alistair reached down and pulled out a shovel. It clanged as he dropped it on the sign. He looked up and Kyle said, “Let’s get to it.”
* * *
That evening, when Charlie returned home with stories about how boarding school was for snots and morons, Kyle and Alistair invited him to the backyard and showed him the hole in the wire.
“I doubt she suffered,” Kyle said.
Charlie didn’t gasp or cry. He simply stared at the hole, at the bloodstained cage. Then he turned away. “Circle of life,” he said. “That’s what she gets for being a stupid lagomorph.”
“You’re not upset?” Alistair asked.
Charlie patted Alistair on the cheek like he was a little kid and he said, “Don’t you think I knew this would happen?”
There was another big gift that Charlie got for his birthday that year: a Nintendo. Leaving Kyle and Alistair standing in the yard, he went inside and turned it on.
Kyle kicked the clubhouse. “I’ve been done with this baby crap for years,” he said. “You and Charlie can have it.”
“What?”
“The clubhouse.”
“What about the stop sign?” Alistair asked. “It’s illegal to have that, right?”
Kyle rolled his eyes. “I’ll chuck it out in the swamp if that makes you feel better.”
“Someone could’ve crashed because you stole that,” Alistair said. “Someone could’ve died.”
“And that rabbit could’ve lived if you’d checked up on it last night. Could’ve is a helluva lot different from did. We never speak of that rabbit again, understand?” Kyle said.
The air was even chillier than the night before. Shivering in a T-shirt, his silence as good as a yes, Alistair checked the sky for constellations he might know—Orion, the hunter, was a favorite. Summer was still a few weeks off, but the stars were absolute marvels that night. They went on forever.