Really, it was a confusing summer. I was working full-time at the Rite Aid, or as close to full-time as Terrence could manage for me. Bunny was always gone at her volleyball intensive. I began hunting flies in my aunt’s house. The screens were torn, but we would have baked without the windows open since there was no air-conditioning. My aunt said daily that she needed to go by the hardware store and order new screens, and the problem was always framed as a scarcity of time and wherewithal, but I knew it was a scarcity of money. I was unwilling to spend my own hard-earned cash to have new screens fitted, but I was willing to spend two dollars on a flyswatter and spend hours a day hunting flies. To narrow the scope of my mental activities to the tracking of a single aerial point in three-dimensional space was deeply soothing to me. I drove Jason half-insane. “You need to stop,” he would say, “you’ve been killing flies for like an hour.”
But I couldn’t stop because I was profoundly anxious, not because of Bunny’s weird Ecstasy date, for which she apologized the next day, assuring me that nothing terrible had come of it except that she’d had to feign flu and miss a day of volleyball. She was excited, thinking that now this boy Ryan would be her boyfriend, but the relationship did not materialize. Ryan returned her texts with one-word answers and then not at all, creating a sticky wound that eventually crusted over with bitter acceptance and shame. I could hardly bring myself to pay attention to this, so consumed was I by what was transpiring in my own life.
By the time I was sixteen and I got my first phone, I switched from Craigslist to Grindr, lying about my birthday and claiming to be eighteen. But as I aged, so did my Grindr profile, and now that I was seventeen, my digital representation was almost twenty. I tended to steer clear of younger men, afraid they would ask me questions about college, or notice cultural points of reference I did not share with them. A young man can tell the difference between a seventeen-year-old and a twenty-year-old in a second. But to a man in his forties, all the young are awash in a golden haze.
On Craigslist, the ads tended to spell out what the encounter would entail: “You come to my clean apartment and fuck my hairy ass. We watch porn and j/o with some edging, no kissing.” The ads were insanely specific, age, height, weight, dick length, cut or uncut; these statistics were displaced from sentences and laid out cold, separated only by the tiny knives of commas. They were clear about what they wanted in return: “You can have a small dick if you have a bubble butt, but if you have no butt, you must have monster cock. You must be 18–23 ONLY!!!” People advertised that they were “neg” and “on prep.” If they were offering massage, they were prostitutes. If they said they just wanted a friend, they were ugly. It became easy to navigate, and an ad that I was willing to respond to was practically a unicorn. I did not have a computer of my own, nor did I have a phone back then, so I was mostly browsing on my aunt’s computer after everyone went to bed. In short, Craigslist was like a massive yard sale, a flea market of sexual opportunities, most of which you definitely didn’t want, but you always knew what they were. Do you want this fat hairy man to fill you with cum? Do you want to stroke it with this insanely buff Nigerian dude at precisely 2:15 in his garage?
But then I got a phone, and the very first week I owned it, I got on Grindr, where there was less to go on. Almost all profile pictures were headless torsos, almost all profile descriptions were half a sentence of acronyms. Creating my own profile was terrifying. I had never had to for Craigslist, had always been an anonymous stroller through the bazaar. Realizing I would have to become one of these headless torsos, I took the bus to the mall, where I camped out in the dressing room of a Zara with a men’s section for forty minutes trying to find a good angle in the full-length mirror. With a little editing and cropping, I turned myself into a flesh violin like all the others and placed myself on the marketplace, uncertain how to say the things I needed to say: I can’t host, I have no car, I have no money, I have little experience and what experience I do have is weird and scary, I am a ball of nerves, I am terrified, no one knows who I really am, I think about killing myself daily, I like to read books, please don’t murder me.
Honestly, I was afraid of most of them, these floating photographs of dicks and hard-bodied torsos. Hey cutie, hey sexy, you ready to bend over? It was not a place where I expected to find love. Indeed, I was not allowed to have a boyfriend, even if I had somehow managed to find one. My aunt had once stopped me in the hallway and said, haltingly, “I don’t think I need to say this, but I’m saying it: No boys. No boys in the house.”
At bottom, I thought she was right. It wasn’t even because I was gay that my love, my body, my touches, needed to be contained. It was because I had been born of a woman who could stab a man in the chest with a fruit knife at three in the morning because she had run out of other ideas for how to make it stop. Maybe there were some truly clean people in the town. There seemed to be. But I suspected most were like me, were like Ray Lampert, were like my aunt even, chasing after a middle-class dream that would have spit her out like a seed. To live in North Shore was to be committed to pretense. Committed to this beautiful, fake, wholesome dream, because even though it was a dream, it was so much better than anything else.
There was a certain category of man on Grindr, in his forties or fifties, who was looking for the validation of youth, no strings attached, but was not an official daddy, would not expect to buy me or control me. Men who wanted a golden hour with a young man so that they could remember something about themselves. So that they could feel a way they used to feel. And who couldn’t understand that? Far from being the kind of person who requires his conquests to be physical perfection, I was instantly reassured by their sagging bellies, their imperfect mouths and receding hairlines. I preferred to be the beautiful one in these fragmentary encounters.
Some of them were acting out something in their own lives that caused them to be casually mean to me. “You should go to the gym more,” one guy said when we were done. “Your hips make you look like a fucking woman.” All of that hate and abuse heaped on young gay boys, where does it go but into the gay boy? Where it stays, and becomes a kind of pattern, like a crystal, causing other psychic material around it to conform to its structure. No one has ever said things as casually cruel to me as gay men, online or in person. That is how I, too, learned to be cruel, and while I try to contain those impulses, to quarantine those patterns, I can feel them growing in there in the dark.
But for the most part my lovers were kind, if somewhat detached. Sometimes they even claimed to love me. When I broke up with dear Ed of the tiny penis, he told me I was breaking his heart, and the idea that his heart had ever been involved struck me as so absurd I accidentally laughed.
But that summer I began to see someone seriously. The relationship was obviously doomed; he was forty-five, I was seventeen. I could not imagine what his life was like or how I fit into it. I suspected he was married because he wore a ring, but whether to a man or a woman I wasn’t sure, and I was hesitant to ask too many questions for fear of puncturing the flimsy skin of whatever dream contained our goings-on.
His name was Anthony, and he was long-limbed with shinbones so bony and unpadded they looked like the bottoms of canoes. His hair was already mostly silver gray and he wore it in a late-Pierce-Brosnan quiff. Honestly, he was a snack in a dad-core way, radiating the confidence of a man who knows how to bandage a skinned knee. He was easy to smile, quick to compliment, as un-coy as it is possible to be.
He said he dreamed about me, that he couldn’t wait to see me again, that I was perfection. He called me Adonis, he called me Butterfly, such ridiculous and extravagant pet names that I blushed. He wore jeans from Costco. He was wild about wiener dogs and would cry out whenever he saw one. He loved sports and was always asking me if I had caught a particular football or basketball game, and when I told him I didn’t like those things, he was never offended, in fact, my lack of interest seemed to delight him, and he would say, “Of course you don’t, of course.” He was a corny, corny man, and he appalled me, and I loved him, the deal clinched in my heart before I could object.
We first met at a park, at night, the big one in the center of town, where the baseball and soccer fields were. Even though it was full dark out, the stadium lights of the fields kept the park weirdly bright, and as I walked to meet him, my shadow followed me in triplicate. I didn’t normally meet dates in North Shore. I liked to meet up in a neighboring town where there was less chance of being seen. But I also liked the safety of a public space and being within walking distance of home, so when he proposed meeting at the park, I said yes. He was already there, sitting on a bench, and I recognized him from the pictures he had sent me.
The first thing he said to me was: “I am so nervous to meet you, I don’t think I’ve been this nervous in years and years.”
“Oh?” I said, sitting down next to him, not too close, but not too far either.
“So I have to thank you for that much already. What an experience. To meet a beautiful young man at night in a park. I mean, wow.”
I laughed. “You not get out much?”
“No,” he said, and smiled at me. “I do not get out much.”
I think that was when I noticed the wedding ring, or maybe I only noticed it later. The memory has become so romanticized and blurred in my mind that I tend to remember him as I knew him later. But at the time, I think I worried he was somehow deranged. He smiled so much. He was wearing a truly ugly sweater, color-blocked cashmere in shades of dog poop and amber.
“Are you nervous to meet me?” he asked. “You probably do this all the time. I don’t mean to say—well, not all the time! But you have done this before, this internet dating.”
“Of course,” I said. I thought of telling him about the time I met up with a date only to realize we had already fucked each other once before and not liked each other much. “Oh, it’s you!” we said. And then we fooled around, even though we didn’t really want to.
“It feels like it’s happening completely outside the bounds of normal life,” he said, excited. “I had no idea they kept the park this bright at night! I think that may be adding to the surreality of this encounter for me, if you will forgive me for going on and on like this. I’m so sorry. How do these things normally go?”
“There’s no script,” I said.
“See? No script!”
“None!” I laughed.
“You could say anything to me. I could say anything to you.”
“You could,” I admitted.
He screwed up his face like he was thinking hard, an eight-year-old in a spelling bee. “Oh, man, I can’t think of anything good,” he said. “Wait, did you know there are different sizes of infinity?”
“Isn’t that impossible?”
“Precisely not. Okay, imagine the first infinity, the regular one, just one, two, three, four, and on and on to infinity.”
“Yeah.”
“Now, in your head, circle all the prime numbers. If your first list goes on infinitely, then your list of primes would also go on infinitely, even though it is a smaller infinity than the infinity of the original set.”
He smelled like clean laundry. “You could make, actually, an infinity of subset infinities,” he said.
I felt then this wild, jerking, insane hope that manifested as an intense desire to get his pants off, to press him into me, to seal the cosmic deal, but really it was some buried healthy part of me that saw that he was kind and good and smart and thought he could save me.
“I like your nose ring,” he said. “Very brutal looking.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Do you want to go to your car?” I asked. A jogger ran past.
“Well, that had been my plan insofar as I had a plan,” he said, “but now that I’ve met you, I think we need a new plan.”
“Oh,” I said, stung. It was a measure of my inexperience that I had never been turned down before, and my first reaction was not sadness but rage that fizzed behind my closed mouth as though I were a shaken soda can.
“You are so young, and I knew that, but I just, you know, twenty looks a lot younger than I remember it being.”
“I’m not some innocent,” I said.
“I realize, I realize,” he said. “I just want to take my time. I want to replace everything I imagine about you with something real that I know about you,” he said. He thought for a moment. “That’s what I want.”
“Okay,” I said. And maybe if I were the me I am today, I wouldn’t have found that so compelling. But the idea of someone wanting to know me, to know the real me, to see me as I was when I was so invisible and so dedicated to my own invisibility—it was everything I’d ever wanted and always assumed I would never have.
“Can I take you on a date?” he asked. “A real one?”
The next day, I called in sick to Rite Aid. Anthony picked me up in his Porsche and took me to a lunch place in Santa Monica so fancy it made me queasy. I didn’t know what to order, I felt I had waited a beat too long to remember to put my napkin in my lap, I was having a full out-of-body experience, I squeezed lemon in my water and it squirted in my eye, blinding me. Anthony laughed and laughed. “Now you’re the one who’s nervous! Oh, I am so sorry. This was the wrong place. I don’t know why I thought this was the place to take you.”
I had my cloth napkin, which I had dipped in my water glass, pressed to my eye, but the pain was not abating. “This place is lovely. This place is like a dream of where a guy would take me.”
“That’s what I was going for!” he cried, and after that the lunch was easier. When we had finished and were driving back to North Shore, he asked if I had anyplace that we could go. Aunt Deedee would be at home sleeping before her bartending shift. But Bunny had given me the key to her house. While Ray was hardly ever home except late at night, and while Bunny’s whereabouts were dependably easy to track, she was at that volleyball intensive from seven to seven, there was always the risk that Ray, who spent his days going from house tour to house tour, from meeting to meeting, might swing by for something he needed or had forgotten, and it was a measure of my insanity that I took such a risk so confidently.
I let Anthony into Bunny’s house and showed him around. I did not mention that the house was not mine. I wanted Anthony to think I came from a place like this. “This is the living room,” I said. “This is the kitchen.”
“Who’s that?” he asked, pointing at a picture of Bunny.
“My sister.”
I led him to the spare bedroom, or as I liked to think of it, the “Madame Butterfly Suicide Sex Suite,” and I jumped on him and pushed him down on the bed. I loved how large his rib cage was, and I could feel his big lungs inflating and deflating in his chest, his big heart hammering inside him. I wanted to get his shirt off, so I could get as close to his skin as I could.
“Hold on, hold on,” he said, “I want to look at you.” He slipped my T-shirt over my head. He unbuttoned my pants, and I shimmied off my jeans. He marveled at my calves as he peeled off my socks. “Every inch of you is perfection,” he said.
“Stop,” I said, laughing, because the idea that I was perfection was ludicrous. My leg hair was thin and weird-looking, my skin Mariana-Trench-pale. His chest hair was a sparse constellation of tight little curls and he had two small moles on his neck, and I liked to rub my cheek on them. His skin smelled yeasty and good, and I wanted to drag my face across every inch of him.
The most disconcerting part of it for me was that I had never had the experience of being both sexually turned on and happy at the same time. I kept thinking something was wrong. I kept breaking out giggling. “What?” he would ask.
“I just can’t believe we get to do this,” I would say. “I can’t believe it is allowed for something so wonderful to happen.”
When we had tired each other out, and I was lying cuddled up to his chest, and he was running his fingers up and down my biceps lazily, he said, “Whose house is this?”
“Mine,” I said.
“I don’t think it is,” he said. “You’re telling me you picked out this bedspread?”
There was no way I could claim I had picked out this bedspread. It was maybe the first lie in my life that I had decided I couldn’t possibly sell. I didn’t know what to say and could only blush.
“It’s okay!” he said. “It’s okay.”
I think he realized I was going to cry before I did. “Oh, Michael,” he said.
I was so embarrassed. Embarrassed to have lied, embarrassed to be crying. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I said.
“Not a thing is wrong with you,” he said.
And then the truth spilled out, and I found it was all easy to say. That this was my friend’s house, that I lived next door, that I lived with my aunt because my mother had been to prison.
“What about your father?” he asked.
“What about him? I mean, he didn’t even show up at the hearing to get us. I think that bridge is pretty well burned.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” he said. “A father’s love for his son—it’s not such an easy thing to throw away.”
In retrospect, so much seems obvious, but it was not obvious to me at the time. I fell head over heels in love with Anthony. We saw each other twice a week. Sometimes more. I was in a fever.
Anthony sent me a Frank O’Hara love poem in an email, and I mistakenly thought that he had written it, and that he loved me, but then he hadn’t written it, and I got embarrassed that I didn’t even know who Frank O’Hara was, and so I didn’t know if he did love me or if he was just sending me a beautiful poem.
Anthony didn’t want to do anything dark sexually, and the one time I placed his hand on my throat, hoping he would choke me, he withdrew it as though I had burned him, and said, “I hope it’s all right with you, but I’m not that sort of fellow.” He was always saying old-fashioned things like that, and when he gave me presents they were usually novels. He gave me Giovanni’s Room and Maurice. He gave me Mrs. Dalloway and Sons and Lovers. I read these books in such a fever that I have feared to ever read them again, lest the golden, irradiating magic they held for me be replaced with dusty, actual words.
Still, every time I saw Anthony, I was filled with dread. Dread that he would tell me we shouldn’t see each other anymore, dread that he would do something to hurt me, dread that I would accept it, dread that we would be discovered, dread that I was doing this at all, that I was so hungry, so desperate for love that I would do anything to continue to meet a grown man I knew nothing about and then treasure my memories of the encounter, playing and replaying them inside my mind, so I walked about my daily life as a zombie, there but not there, a hollow vessel filled with only the charmed air of potentiality those borrowed novels granted me. One night I killed seventeen flies, and Jason ripped the flyswatter from my hands, marched downstairs to the kitchen, and cut the swatting part right off it.
It was also the summer that Donna Morse and her son, Spencer, were murdered. Surely there must have been other murders during the time I lived in North Shore, but those were the first and only ones that I was aware of, and for weeks it was all we could talk about, not just Bunny and I, but the whole town. Waiting for your drink to be made at a Starbucks, whoever was standing next to you would suddenly say: “What a shame about Donna Morse, eh?” And then you would be talking about it with someone you didn’t even know.
Donna had gone to North Shore High, but several years ahead of me and Bunny, and we did not know her directly, though we knew of her, mostly in the sense of a negative example because she had gotten pregnant and then married and dropped out of community college. North Shore could have been a launching pad for her, but it was not, and like my aunt she was a vestige of a poorer past, clinging to the town like it could save her. She was overweight and her hair was dyed bright red, like a Raggedy Ann doll’s. Aunt Deedee told me that Donna Morse had been hooked on drugs, but got sober when she got pregnant with Spencer. Now she nannied around for families who didn’t mind if she brought Spencer along.
Our main source of info about the murders besides the local paper was, of course, Ray Lampert, who, being a fixture at the Blue Lagoon, was a sponge for gossip. And so it came to be that we heard every detail of what happened from his gross lips as he sat hungover at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, trying to choke down a microwave burrito to keep from throwing up. That was something that happened during those high school years: Ray’s stomach started to go. He was always throwing up, and Bunny was always telling him to go to the doctor, but he never would make an appointment.
According to Ray, Donna Morse had gotten a divorce from Spencer’s father, Luke, because of domestic violence. “He wasn’t so much a puncher as a grabber,” Ray said, wiping bean splatter from his chin with a paper towel. “He would just grab her and go. Smash her into things, like bash her head into the microwave, wham, wham, wham. Her cousin said the worst was when he threw her against the furnace and one of those metal screws, like, cut her face open. That’s why she had that scar.”
I did remember the scar. It ran down her cheek like a pink tear trail. I would see her and Spencer come into the Rite Aid all the time, and I remember I used to judge her because she would buy him full-size candy bars, even though he was only three.
“Why was he even over there?” Bunny asked. “What the fuck was Spencer doing at Luke’s house if he was this violent turd?”
“Court mandated,” Ray said. “Visitation.”
“It makes me so mad!” Bunny shouted. “I hope whatever judge granted him visitation has nightmares for the rest of his fucking life.”
“We’re all gonna be having nightmares for the rest of our lives,” I said. That was how young I was. I thought I would never forget. I didn’t know how things faded, became simple facts, until they were things you hardly thought of anymore.
On a Saturday night that August, on a weekend Spencer was court mandated to spend with Luke, Donna got a call from Luke’s cell phone. She heard Luke’s voice in the background, “Tell her.” And then her son’s shaky little voice, “I’m gonna die tonight, Mommy,” and then she heard the gunshot. But she didn’t believe Luke had killed their son. Many times in the past, Luke had baited her, pretending to kill himself on the phone in order to get her to come over. The idea, however, that he was firing a gun in the same room as her son made her blood run cold, and she called 911 as she set out on foot to his apartment complex, which was only a few blocks away. She did not own a car.
They played the 911 call on the local news. She argued with the dispatcher, who told her to go back to her home. “The police are coming, ma’am, they are on their way.” “I can’t wait. I can’t wait out here when my baby could be in there hurting, please, I can’t.” “You must return to your house.” But she didn’t return to her house, she went into Luke’s, and she screamed as she saw her three-year-old boy bloody on the carpet, his face and most of the right side of his head missing. They did not play the rest of the 911 call because it was too graphic. Luke didn’t shoot her with the gun, though he still had four rounds, but he beat her to death by slamming her head into the kitchen counter over and over again. When the police arrived, he had just finished shooting himself in the head. They heard the gunshot as they broke down the door.
It was so terrible that it seemed to be from another world. I remember, too, a quote from the medical examiner that wound up in the paper, describing Donna’s skull as not just fractured but turned into a “mosaic of bone chips.” The violence was otherworldly. We couldn’t understand how someone could have performed it in a place that was so familiar to us.
“Doesn’t it seem weird,” Bunny asked one Sunday afternoon, a rare one that I wasn’t working at Rite Aid, as we sunned ourselves on her back patio, our skin glistening from the pool. “Doesn’t it seem weird that it was Donna Morse?”
I knew instantly what she meant. Donna, who was neither beautiful nor smart, who had not said one interesting thing as far as either of us could ever tell, seemed an unlikely object for such all-consuming desire. That was what we thought somehow. That all of this violence was over Donna, was, in essence, her fault, as though Donna were the gunpowder and Luke a helpless cannon, a series of mechanical pieces inexorably igniting her. If she had been beautiful or capricious, mysterious or charming, we could have understood how someone could have fallen so in love with her that it drove them to murder.
“It’s like, just get another girlfriend,” Bunny said.
“They had a kid together,” I said, but I wasn’t even sure what such a bond entailed. My own father had seemed to find it easy enough to let us go. They had gotten divorced while my mom was in prison, and he had certainly never contacted me again. Whatever life he lived he must have found sufficiently distracting to forget us. And as a child I had felt his love as physically as the heat of the sun. So where had it gone?
“Phh,” Bunny snorted. “Like he loved the kid.”
Did fathers love their children? It seemed only some of them did. Others were immune somehow, or they could turn it on and off, and we assumed that because of Luke’s violence, or perhaps because of the tattoo of a giant angry moon on his calf, or perhaps because he wore a beanie even in summer, that he was the kind of father who felt nothing for his offspring, or who felt the wrong things. We saw him often enough at the dog park, which was right off our street. He had a sandy-colored pit bull named Pecan. But even Hitler had a dog.
“She should never have let Spencer go with him,” Bunny said. “She should have fought harder in court to keep Luke from getting visitation.”
“She should have listened to the 911 dispatcher and stayed out,” I said. “Spencer was already dead. She couldn’t save him. She was already too late.”
Donna Morse had not been smart.
If she had been smarter, she would have succeeded in not being murdered.
Bunny and I were smart. Something like that could never happen to us. We would never let our own murderous fathers get out of hand. Our murderous fathers were more refined, confined themselves to smashing vases and brief bouts of strangulation.
Bunny was especially hung up on why Donna hadn’t fought him off harder. “How could you let yourself be slammed into the kitchen counter like that? I mean, after the first few times, aren’t you like, enough, get off me?”
“Maybe he was stronger than her,” I said.
Bunny shook her head. She couldn’t imagine it. She couldn’t fathom it. What it was to be physically weak. To be overpowered.
“I think she was waiting,” she said. “I think she assumed he would stop. That it would be like all the other times, and he would slam her head once, twice, but not keep going. But she’d seen the kid already. How could she not know he was going to take it all the way? She thought she could calm him down. That was her mistake.”
Donna made false calculations. Donna had failed.
There was no discussion of whether Luke had been smart or not smart. There was no discussion of what Luke should have done. Luke was, somehow, not a person.
We needed to pretend violence was something we could control. That if you were good and did the right things, it wouldn’t happen to you. In any event, it was easier for me then to demand that Donna become psychic and know how to prevent her own murder than it was for me to wonder how Luke could have controlled himself. It was easier for all of us that way.
When school started, I was mostly concerned with how I would continue to see Anthony, since we could meet only in the daytime due to my housing situation, and we could not meet at his place because of his marriage (I presumed; he never actually said as much). Still, we often talked of ways we could sneak away, a fake camping trip with a fake flyer I could show my aunt, though I did not mention to him that my aunt would never believe that I wanted to go camping. We would go, he said, to the Hotel Angeleno, which was a round turret with windows on all sides so that every room had a balcony overlooking Los Angeles, and we would go to the Getty, he said, and look at the art together.
It was senior year, and for all my classmates the specter of the future loomed, but for me the questions, over where I would live, what I would do, whether or not I would go to college and how, were kaleidoscopic and overwhelming. The relationship with Anthony had unseated me from my usual pragmatism and suddenly anything, even impossible things, seemed like real possibilities. Maybe I would get into college and get a free ride and live in some kind of idealized dormitory setting, and Anthony and I could go on dates, and maybe he would take me to the symphony, and maybe we would fly to Paris together, and after brief, wrenchingly beautiful sodomy, we would eat croissants and notice together a stray cat dans la rue.
Maybe I would become homeless and begin to prostitute myself in Inglewood and eventually be murdered. Maybe I would go to community college and continue living with my aunt and working at Rite Aid and would stop seeing Anthony altogether and my life would go on much as it had. All of these futures seemed equally possible to me, and I spent my days lurching from one scenario to another, and so I did not exactly notice that some kind of vicious gossip was going around the school until the third or fourth day of the year, when I saw a fat, ruddy-faced boy named Scott, who was on the wrestling team and who was rumored to have absolutely chronic ringworm, snap his jaws at Bunny in the hall and growl, “You can bite me anytime, girl.”
Bunny stared at him, as expressionless as a mannequin, and then slowly rotated toward her locker and opened it.
“What was that about?” I asked her.
“Nothing,” she said, but I noticed that her head was wobbling on her neck oddly, as though the muscles had given out and she was having to keep her head perfectly balanced upon the nub of her spine. She seemed, if anything, not upset but ill.
“Did he say you could bite him?”
“Yes,” she said, and closed her locker and walked away from me, her head still carefully balanced on her neck as though it might tumble off.
A few carefully posed questions throughout the day provided me with the rest of the story. It was regarding Ryan Brassard and the night I had seen them together at the Rite Aid in July. In none of the stories I heard were drugs ever mentioned. In none of the stories were the other boy or the girl, Samantha, mentioned. In one, the setting had been Ryan’s bedroom. In another, it had been Ryan’s car. In all of them, Bunny had behaved somehow inappropriately. She was a slut. She was begging him for it. She jammed his hand down her pants, or she had stuck her too-large hand down his. She had writhed like an animal, she had squealed or made noises like a pig. In all of the stories, the crescendo of the action was that she had bitten him on the ear, nearly drawing blood, or in some versions actually drawing blood. Ryan had gotten scared of her and dropped her at her house. In one story, he had not even done that, just told her to get out of his own house, slamming the door in her face. She was disgusting. She was a whore. One boy speculated to me that Bunny must have a huge vagina, and he would like to see it, as he imagined it was the size of a cow’s vagina.
I texted her repeatedly, but she did not reply. I knew she had volleyball practice after school, and so I went to my shift at Rite Aid but asked Terrence if I could leave early, and since I rarely made such requests, he complied, and by seven p.m. I was knocking on the door to Bunny’s house desperately, pounding really, forgetting altogether that they had a doorbell, as though I were afraid to find her murdered inside.
When she swung open the door, I almost fell. She stared at me with some confusion, her face blank and pale, her lips almost white. Her hair was pulled back in a sweaty ponytail. She was still in her gym clothes, her kneepads pushed down around her ankles, and she didn’t say anything, just stepped back so I could come inside. I could see she had been watching TV, and spread out on the coffee table were Cheetos, cookies, what looked like part of a muffin, a can of AriZona iced tea. She had not been crying. She had been eating.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” she said, and threw herself on the couch.
“What happened?” I asked.
“What, with Ryan?”
“Well, yes. And, I mean, everything! Bitch, do you want a hug?” I asked, standing there, not knowing whether I should sit down or where.
“No, thank you,” she said. Her eyes were glued to the TV.
I didn’t know what to do. Wasn’t I her friend? Didn’t I have the right to expect to be her confidant? I sat down on one of the pretty French armchairs. “Did you bite him?” I asked.
She shut her eyes.
“Bunny, what the fuck happened that night?”
“Whatever he said happened, apparently.” Her eyes were still closed. I heard the air-conditioning click on. I got up, stood over her on the couch.
“I am your friend,” I said. “I don’t care if you bit him! I’m not going to judge you! I just want you to let me in, and—” I must have been shouting at her, though I hadn’t meant to, because her eyes snapped open and she lunged at me, pushing me so that I fell awkwardly over their coffee table and then she was on top of me, sitting on my stomach, pinning my hands to the floor above my head.
“I don’t want to fight you,” she said, “but I really do not want to talk about this. I thought it was normal, okay? I read it in Cosmo.”
I could hardly breathe; she was so heavy on top of me. I gasped, nodded.
“I got carried away and I bit him on the ear, but I did not make him bleed, I just bit him too hard, okay?” She was shouting down into my face.
I nodded. Tried to take a deep breath so I could talk. “It is normal,” I said. “People do bite each other’s ears when they make out.”
She looked at me quizzically. “They do?”
I nodded. “I can’t breathe,” I said. “Could you?”
“Oh, sorry,” she said, and clambered off me, grabbed the sad bottom half of the muffin, and began peeling its wrapper as she sat back on the couch. “All day long I’ve been cursing that fucking Cosmo article, like, why put something in there if it’s not true? I mean, some of that stuff always made me wonder, like about licking balls, do guys like that? Licking balls?”
“Some guys,” I said, sitting up.
“Or, like, they said to put an ice cube on a guy’s dick.”
“That sounds pretty terrible,” I said.
“That’s what I thought!” she cried. She finished the muffin and threw the limp, crumb-covered liner on the coffee table like it was a used tissue. “It’s all just fucking bullshit, you know? And he didn’t act weird that night! I mean, he said ow when I bit his ear, and I said sorry, but we kept kissing after that! So I don’t get how it was some big deal!”
“Was that your…first kiss?” I asked.
“Yes. Yes,” she said, “that was my first goddamn kiss and I was, like, I don’t know if that pill was really Molly, but I was loopy, and I thought he, like, loved me, like we had this soul connection, and I told him stuff, stuff I totally shouldn’t have told him, and I’m so stupid, I can’t believe I was that stupid.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Like about my dad throwing up all the time and how scared I sometimes was that he would crash the car like my mom and then I’d be an orphan, and you know, I don’t even spend that much time thinking about that stuff, but somehow I was just talking all about it.” She shrugged, shoved another handful of Cheetos into her mouth.
“Oh, Bunny,” I said.
“Don’t say that,” she said, raising an orange-dust-covered finger at me and shaking it. “I am not a victim. It’s not like they put a gun to my head and told me to swallow that pill. I knew it was drugs!”
“I know, but this really isn’t your fault. I think Ryan is making a really big deal out of something that seems pretty normal.”
She seemed to grow calmer, and she began licking the cheese dust off her fingers.
“So it is normal to bite someone’s ears?”
“Yes.”
“This is so frustrating! I thought it was! Why did he get so freaked out, then?”
I didn’t know. I had my guesses. “So how did that night end exactly?”
“Well, we were making out in his car, and I don’t know, there was this other part where we were all in the park, him and me and Samantha and that guy Steve, and then I don’t know where they went, only the idea was that they were going to do it, like, the big joke was that they were leaving us because they wanted to go do it, and so Ryan said he would take me home and then we were kissing in his car, and I bit his ear and said sorry, and it was fine, and then I got out and we were just outside my house, and I snuck in and went to bed.”
“And that’s it?” I asked.
“Well, yeah.”
“Did you, I mean, was there any other stuff that happened? Like sex stuff?”
“No!” she shouted. “Are you crazy? But, I mean, like, I was very handsy. I felt like a cat being petted, it felt so good to touch him and be touched, and I kept touching his hair which maybe bugged him?”
“And then what happened? Did you text him the next day?”
“No, well, he called me the next day, and he said he couldn’t be my boyfriend because I terrified him. Which, I was like, ‘In what way do I terrify you?’ But he just kept saying, ‘You’re not the girl for me, Bunny,’ and I was like, what do I do with that? I didn’t get it. But I must have—there must have been something about me, some way I did everything wrong, that just—just grossed him out.”
I was both angry and sad that she had not told me any of this before. She had never shown me the texts she sent him or anything, but I could distinctly remember her saying, “Gosh, I texted him like five times and he hasn’t responded. Isn’t that rude?” It had seemed humiliating enough to me, but now to discover that this had been a face-saving lie to cover an even more painful reality made me want to bite Ryan Brassard’s ear off myself. “What a fucking limp-dick loser,” I said.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“You just—you intimidated him!”
“I did not,” she said. “I scared him.”
“Bunny, nothing is wrong with you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Well, obviously I did.”
“No,” I said, and I reached out and squeezed her naked calf in my hand. “Do not eat this. Do not take this in as information about yourself. This is not valid data. This does not mean you are bad at sex, or you are gross, it means only that Ryan Brassard is a scaredy-cat, limp-dick, manipulative little shit who wants a girl who will just lie there quietly while he excites himself.”
Bunny laughed. “I don’t know. I mean, it’s pretty ballsy of him to have asked me out in the first place. He’s only five nine. Like, you have to at least give him credit for that.”
“Maybe he got scared by how turned on you made him.”
“Why would that scare him?”
“Maybe he’s secretly gay and he was freaked out because he thought you figured it out.”
“That’s only slightly more believable,” she said. And she took in a deep breath, blew it out, then said, “Wanna go swimming?”
And so we did, and I even let her almost drown me in an effort to buoy her spirits.