The very moment I turned sixteen and could work legally, I had gotten a job at the local Rite Aid, mostly because it was only seven blocks from our house. To have a job, to earn money, to be able to afford my own food and clothing, was essential, but it was apparent that no one was going to teach me how to drive or give me a car to learn on, and so my employment options were geographically limited. I applied to the Starbucks, to the Rite Aid, and to the North Shore Fish Company, but the Rite Aid was the only one that called me for an interview, and when they hired me, I considered myself lucky, even though the job was painfully boring and going to work without makeup on, with my septum piercing tucked up invisibly inside my nose, caused me to feel vulnerable and nude.
As it happened, I fell immediately and hopelessly in love with my manager, Terrence, a soft-spoken father of four and former high school quarterback with floppy blond hair, who was perpetually both gentle and stoned. I loved him impersonally, abstractly, like a character in a book who, by virtue of their very distance from you, their belonging to a different world that you may never yourself enter, enflames your longing all the more. I didn’t want to fuck him exactly, though I would have (quite enthusiastically) if asked, but I was borderline obsessed with him. He carried a one hitter in his pocket, and I feared that something tragic might happen to him, specifically that he might commit suicide, though there was nothing definite that led me to believe he had plans to do so. His wife was bossy and exuberant, his four children happy and demanding, and certainly loud when they visited the store, but I got the sense that, even though he was overtly grateful for his life, he could see that he was lucky to have them and to have a steady job, he was also someone who found life’s beauty inextricably mixed with sadness. He was devoutly Catholic, and it always seemed to me that this informed the development of his personality, the way he liked to clasp the hands of the staff as we said goodbye, as though the hands were the conduit through which blessings could be communicated.
Whatever it was, it made Terrence kind, so patient with his staff that it bordered on the saintly, and he would ask old women filling their prescriptions or buying stool softeners about their days and then he would listen, listen so intently that they felt pierced by him, and I got the feeling that he really did find their days interesting to hear about, and that he loved them, loved all of us, even as, at the end of the day, as he folded his long legs into the driver’s seat of his pale blue minivan, which was always covered in dust, he found it all a bit too much, too hard to take, and he would fumble with his one hitter as though the smoke were medicine, an asthma inhaler that would force his lungs open and allow him to keep sipping the air amid the pandemonium of the living.
One night in July, during the summer between junior and senior year, I was working the register when I saw Bunny and another girl come in with two boys. It was around seven at night, which was a busy time for us, even on weekdays, because we had excellent prices on liquor and wine, and the line for the register looped around the front of the store, with mostly men and some women holding cases of beer and multiple wine bottles awkwardly in their arms like cold, abstract babies. It had come as somewhat of a surprise to me how pervasive alcoholism was, even in our picture-perfect town. On the one hand, it was a relief to know that what had happened to my own family was not singularly shameful, but I was also taken aback to learn that the majority of people found their lives so dreadful as to need to enter a near stupor every night in order to continue living it. It did not give me much hope about my own adulthood.
I hadn’t been seeing Bunny lately because she was doing a volleyball intensive at Cal State Fullerton for the summer, and she often didn’t come home until eight o’clock at night, and then was so tired she just collapsed after sending me a few weird gifs and strings of heart emojis. I did my best not to resent her unavailability because I also knew this summer was a turning point for her. She had finally stopped growing, maybe, possibly, at least it was thought by her doctor and repeated frequently by Ray Lampert that she had stopped growing (Ray was always strangely gleeful about Bunny’s size, like she was a 4-H project or an Amazonian orphan he had adopted from Themyscira; he told anyone who would listen that his daughter, his baby girl, was taller than him now), and whether this was true or not, her growth had at least slowed enough to allow her to regain her coordination, and she was learning her “new legs,” as she called them. She could now jump vertically twenty-nine inches in the air, which was better than most pro football players. Even as boys seemed more out of reach than ever, the Olympics had come back into view, and she seemed psychologically able to handle this exchange.
So I was surprised to see her, and I was even more surprised to see her with two boys I didn’t know well, and the girl, who I vaguely knew was named Samantha because she had been in my biology class freshman year. I disliked having to ring up people from my high school. It was a small town and a small school, and while I didn’t know everyone’s names, I always knew them by sight and they knew me, and it was awkward that they were buying things and I was selling things, that they had money to spend on items they didn’t need, and I needed money so badly that I was wearing a blue smock.
As I continued to ring people up, I watched them move through the store. I couldn’t tell if they were stoned or drunk, but I knew they were not normal, were giggling and looking around the store like it was an alien planet. Bunny had picked up a stuffed toy, a lion Beanie Boo with huge plastic eyes, and was cuddling it even as one of the boys was prying it from her hands and putting it back on the shelf. “Ooh, gum!” the dark-haired girl said. “Gum sounds amaaazing right now.”
I watched them as they got in the long line for the register, as they pawed through the items lining the display, picking up miniature-size hand sanitizers as though they had no idea what they were, examining alien writing on packages of candy. They were each buying a soda and a variety of snacks, and Bunny had picked up the toy lion again. “I can’t believe you’re buying that,” the girl said to her.
“Look at his eyes,” Bunny said, and smiled into his plastic eyes as though she could see real emotion there, some enchanting vulnerability. “I mean, I have to.”
I did not like any of this, and I was extremely anxious not to be the one who rung up their purchases, but I was relieved to see that when their turn came they each paid separately, and Bunny hung back, timing it so that she could come to my register. Terrence, my manager, was in his office, so I was relatively unobserved, and I skipped the canned lines I was supposed to say to her: “Did you find everything you were looking for?” And started with: “What the hell are you doing here—are you high?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and I saw that her pupils were huge, and I knew whatever she was on, it was more than weed, more than vodka pilfered from someone’s mom. “Ryan asked me out on a date and then we went to the mall and then we all took these pills, and I feel amazing, but now I’m really scared. Am I okay? Is everything okay?”
“You need to go home,” I said. “Just tell them you have to go home and then walk there—do not drive. Just walk home. I get off in two hours, I’ll come take care of you.”
“I don’t know how,” she said. I had rung up her items and bagged them, and there was a limited amount of time left for us to talk without holding up the line.
“What do you mean you don’t know how? You’re at Rite Aid. It’s seven blocks. You’ve walked from here to your house a million times.”
“I think I would get lost,” she said.
“It wants you to swipe your credit card,” I said.
She fumbled with her wallet and swiped her card.
“You are not good to be hanging out with boys like this. Do you understand? You need to go home. Bunny, are you listening?”
She nodded, and I could tell she was on the verge of tears. “How long have we been in this store?” she asked me.
“Ten minutes,” I said.
“Oh good,” she said, “I thought we had been in here for hours!” And then she laughed, and I knew she was not going to go home. “There is,” she said, and paused, “some kind of shadow on your face.”
“There’s nothing on my face,” I said.
“You look so sad!”
“Take your card and fucking go,” I said.
“Why are you mad at me?” she asked, but she took her card and put it back in her wallet. Her friends were waiting for her by the exit, holding their bags, cracking open their sodas, giggling.
“Just go,” I said, so angry I was getting tunnel vision and my heart was pounding.
As soon as she left, I felt guilty for getting angry at her, and guilty for not doing more to protect her. And yet, I knew that this was the world. I knew that this was what teenagers did. I knew that Bunny was so desperate to be seen as sexually attractive that she probably would have had sex with one of those boys stone-cold sober, even if they had Cheeto breath and there was bad lighting. I had no reason to suspect those boys had drugged her in order to get in her pants, no reason to imagine them ignoring her protests as they took it too far, no evidence that she would wind up scared and missing pieces of her memory the next morning. Bunny didn’t need my protection. She could probably pick up one of those boys and throw them. And I had no knowledge of those particular boys and whether they were a good or a bad sort. I knew only that one of them was on the wrestling team and they both took Spanish. I hoped that they would all go to someone’s house and eat too much candy and watch a movie whose plot they couldn’t follow. I hoped they would get lost staring at someone’s fish tank, saying things like “Isn’t it crazy that fish exist?”
Still, I must have been visibly perturbed because toward the end of my shift, Terrence put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed the muscles there and they twanged under his fingers like guitar strings. “You poor thing,” he murmured. “Do you want me to see if Lisa will close for you?”
“Uh, no, it’s okay,” I said. I had already texted Bunny several times and she had not texted me back.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Just worried about my friend. But I’m sure she’s fine.”
“You’re such a good guy,” Terrence said, and I knew he was more stoned than usual, and I felt like I was in a nightmare where everyone was on drugs but me. Except that it was not a nightmare, it was quasi-factual, because everyone present in that Rite Aid, every one of my coworkers and customers, was, if not already drunk or high, planning on becoming so within the next few hours.
Was I a good guy? Was Terrence a good guy? In many ways he was the kindest person I knew, but I also was aware that he was nothing but a sad, doped-up manager at a small-town Rite Aid, and that if he was the best guy I knew then there was really no hope at all for anyone.
“It’s fine,” I said. I wanted to work the extra hours. I needed the money.
When I got home, there were no lights on in Bunny’s house. I knocked on their door, rang the bell. It had been a hot day, but now the air was cool and the wind was picking up. I texted her from her front porch. I was still sitting there when Ray Lampert suddenly materialized in the darkness, having evidently walked home instead of driving.
“Michael, my man!” he cried. And I regretted all of my life choices leading up to that moment so intensely that I felt I was internally collapsing.
“Come in, come in,” he said, fumbling with his keys.
“That’s all right, sir,” I said, already standing and trying to edge past him down the steps to the sidewalk. He grabbed me by the shoulder and shook me like I was a dog toy. “Get in here,” he said. “Don’t make me spend the rest of the night alone. I’m not ready for it to be over! It can’t be over. You know why? Because we won’t let it be over!”
And it was exactly like when Bunny would grab me in the pool like an alligator and pull me under, only now, instead of drowning, I was inside a gaudy living room, watching Ray Lampert fumble with his phone trying to put a Patsy Cline record on the Bluetooth sound system, as he told me about how it had been stand-up comedy night at the Blue Lagoon and some comics had come from L.A. and that was something he had always wanted to try: stand-up comedy. I could not imagine anything more horrible than Ray Lampert doing stand-up.
“Where’s Bunny?” he asked, as he poured himself a glass of wine.
“I don’t know. She didn’t answer my texts, so I’m guessing she’s asleep.” It was always best to sprinkle your lies with truths.
“We’ll let her rest, then,” he said. “She’s so tuckered out from those practices. It’s a long day, she’s there from seven to seven just about.” His pride in her caused his face to become beautiful, and for several seconds I could see him as a younger man, the kind who would marry the prettiest, well-brought-up, good and sweet girl he could find, determined to earn her, to make a place for himself in this world, to build this house for her. The kind of man innocent enough to think that an all-black bathroom was compelling and chic. I had come to understand, somehow, over the years, that it was Ray and not his wife who had decorated their house. His touch was everywhere, in the grandiose marble and the gilt end tables, the oversize art reproductions in bold colors hung on every wall as though they were real paintings. He had tried, with a teenage boy’s imagination, to conjure a rich man’s house, and then he had made it a thrilling reality in every detail.
“Hey,” he said, “you wanna see pictures of Bunny as a baby?”
I had already mentally imagined at least a dozen ways this night could go, but I had not imagined Ray would suggest something I would actually want to do. “Of course!” I said.
He paused, gave me a smirk I couldn’t interpret. “You want me to pour you a glass?” He gestured with the wine bottle.
“Oh, that’s all right,” I said.
“C’mon,” he said. “I won’t tell if you don’t.” And he got down another jumbo wineglass and poured enough red wine in it that a goldfish could have comfortably swum around in there. I felt ridiculous, though I accepted the glass. I had no intention of drinking any of it, but I did not wish to be rude. “That’ll put hair on your chest,” he said. Before I could think about it, I said, “What I’ve always wanted—chest hair.”
I was worried this would offend him, but instead he laughed uproariously and clapped me on the back.
He led me to his office, that wonderful wood-paneled room that no one ever seemed to spend time in, and pulled down from the shelf two fat black leather-bound photo albums. We sat, he on the big brown tufted chair, I on the ottoman, and he opened up what seemed to me another world. No one my age had printed photos, our childhoods were on memory cards, but Ray Lampert must have been a man who liked real cameras and developing film. The pictures were of an overexposed, brightly sunny, ’90s world I could hardly recognize. He skipped hurriedly past the photos that interested me most, which were the wedding photos and early pictures of Bunny’s mother before Bunny was born.
There was one large photo of Bunny and her mother that hung in the upstairs hallway, a posed portrait with a black background that must have seemed modern at the time. The woman I saw there was a pretty ice bitch: small features, pearly skin, glossy brown hair, an oatmeal-colored sweater. Bunny was dressed in a white T-shirt, both of them were wearing jeans, and they stared at the camera with a certain smugness, like they were members of a select club. But these more candid photos showed Bunny’s mother, her name was Allison, to be silly, goofy even, mugging for the camera, making the west side sign with her fingers. She had a tattoo on her upper arm, though he flipped by too fast for me to properly see what it was; I thought a flower, something delicate and faded. In their wedding photo she was wearing a simple white cotton dress and holding a bouquet of Technicolor daisies, so happy she seemed delirious, and I had the overwhelming impression that she was some kind of white witch.
And then there was Bunny: a large, fat, potato-y baby, so big it looked like her mom was holding a Christmas turkey. She was often dressed in weirdly Victorian clothes, and even as a baby they had put black patent-leather Mary Janes on her tuberous little feet.
“She was such a funny little girl,” he said. “You might think she was a tomboy, but no, it was princess princess princess.” There was Bunny in a pink swimsuit and clacking plastic Minnie Mouse high heels dripping water all over the foyer. There was Bunny frustratedly peeling an orange at some kind of picnic table. There were Bunny and her mother, safe and rocking in a big white hammock, some beautiful, exotic-looking locale in the background. I saw that her mother had been a gardener, and their yard, assuming it was the same house, which perhaps it was not, had been a wonderland of plants before the pool was put in. I saw Bunny, perhaps five, pulling a carrot from the ground. On her head was a hastily twined crown of wildflowers that clashed with her red T-shirt.
The older Bunny got in the photos, the less interested I became. By the time she was in middle school the only photos of her were taken before, during, or after games. There were no images of her not in some uniform or another. But those early photos of her fascinated me, and I wished I could go back and really look at the divide in her life: before her mother’s death, and then after. When she ceased to be part of a scene that her father was documenting and began to be posed artificially, always on her own. Was I imagining the sadness I saw in her smile? Or was it an effect of the camera flash, the glossy way the photos had been printed, that made her seem trapped in those images, sealed in and suffocating behind the plastic sheeting of the photo album?
“Thank you for showing these to me,” I said.
“Aw, thank you for looking at them! I don’t have many people to share these with.” While I objected to almost everything about Ray Lampert, in that moment I was able to really like him, to feel I knew him. His skin had the clammy sweet smell of my own father’s when he was drunk, and for a moment I missed my dad so intensely I became light-headed. The night my mother had been arrested, they didn’t let us go to the ER with him, maybe because he was so drunk. The squad car, my mother handcuffed inside, drove off; the ambulance, my father recumbent inside, glided into the dark, sirens like the call of a robotic whooping crane; and I assumed that Gabby and I would stay in the house. We had been alone in the house so many times, I didn’t even think about it, and I was horrified when I understood that we were going to be taken, against our will, somewhere else.
We were driven to some lady’s house in Torrance. She was a retired nurse with a mastiff named Cookie. We stayed with her for three days and no one came to get us. Why didn’t he come then? He could have waltzed in, flashed his photo ID, and legally claimed our lives. But he didn’t. What did he do during those days? Did he sit in our empty house and think about things? What did he decide?
After the first seventy-two hours, we were moved to another house, this time in Inglewood, a house full of kids, the oldest of whom was named Renaldo and who stole my pajamas. I was involuntarily extremely attracted to him, and I can still viscerally recall what it felt like to be that mad and humiliated and turned on at the same time. I found out later that Aunt Deedee tried to come get us in those first three days, but she didn’t have the right paperwork to prove she was related to us, and she had to wait until our detention hearing. But at the detention hearing, dear old Dad suddenly showed up. And the judge had to decide who to put us with: him or Aunt Deedee.
What did she say? What did she dare say in front of him, to his face? Had she seen the bruises on Viv’s neck? Had she noticed the way Gabby flinched when someone moved too quickly? I imagine him getting redder and redder—he was always angriest when he was ashamed—and blurting out, “This is bullshit, Your Honor, this is fucking bullshit.” He was like an eighteen-year-old who one day woke up in a thirty-five-year-old man’s completely fucked-up life. Whatever she said, it was enough. The judge awarded her custody, and set a jurisdictional hearing where my father would have a chance to defend himself and regain custody. But he never showed up at the court date they set, and I had not seen or heard from him since. I knew that if I did see him now, he would take one look at me and know that I was gay, and his shame and disgust would ignite in a whoosh, and all the love that had ever been there would be gone.
Bunny was lucky to have Ray as a dad. That’s what I was thinking when Ray’s phone rang. He checked the number. “Shit, I gotta take this. Business.”
I was surprised that business should take place at what must be past ten o’clock at night, but more surprised when he picked up the phone and began speaking in what I could only guess was Mandarin. He spoke a few phrases of greeting and then spoke in English again, all in a happy, reassuring, genial tone even as his face remained frighteningly blank and intense. The result was like bad dubbing in a movie.
“Very soon, yes. So grateful for your business. As always. Yes, old friends. Hahaha, yes. No, I sent them to your office. Cassie sent them. I’ll double-check, but I’m certain she sent them. All right.” He followed this with a few more phrases in Mandarin, then hung up, and without looking at me dialed again.
“Cassie, did you send Mr. Phong the blueprint files? Uh-huh. Did the wire transfer go through? Yeah, go ahead and send them, he’s waiting on them. Sorry to wake you up. All right. Catch you later, doll.”
And then he hung up and looked at me and giggled like a teenager. “I cannot possibly begin to tell you, Michael, how deeply fucked I am.”
“Is that right?” I asked, so nervous that when I crossed my legs, I sloshed some of the wine onto the Oriental carpet. “Oh shit, I’m sorry,” I said, leaping up, the red wine dripping down my hand and along my arm to the elbow.
“It’s all right, it’s all right, I spill wine on it all the time,” Ray said, but he looked tired suddenly, and I knew that the night was over. I brought him a roll of paper towels, and I tried to help him sop up the mess, but he shooed me away, and I left him there, crouched in the dim office on his hands and knees, scrubbing at the rug.