I took my GED that February, after I heard that Tyler and the other boys I named had gotten one year of probation for almost beating me to death. One year of probation. It seemed so bizarre and useless to me. I had applied to ten colleges, all the state schools back in November, and some private colleges in January, and I agreed to let Ray Lampert help me with the admissions fees, even though I wanted nothing to do with him anymore. I drove Bunny’s Jeep all around L.A. She had left her iPod in the center console and so I listened to her music. On some level, I was acting like she was dead. On some level, I thought she really was dead. I think I was pretending everyone was dead. Bunny, Ray. Aunt Deedee. Anthony. Gabby. My mother. Even myself. Every metamorphosis is violent, even disgusting. That’s why you have to hide while it is happening.
I had applied to state schools, but I had no idea how I would afford even in-state tuition. My only hope, and it seemed like such a long shot I didn’t like to even speak of it, was a scholarship to a private college. I applied to four of them, and I got into two, with a full ride to one. Pomona College. It wasn’t Yale or Harvard, but it suited me to the ground. It was familiar and safe and free and even kind of fancy! When I moved into my dorm room, which I shared with a sullen young man named Trent, on the first day of freshman year, I felt like I had pulled off the most outrageous long con in the history of the world. And I was thrilled. I loved college. I loved every single thing about it. From the dining hall with its predictable, nourishing, bland food, to the library with its wonderful new-carpet smell, to reading Camus and studying calculus, college was for me in every way. There were free concerts, free lectures, there were art shows, there were barbecues. There were other out boys. I had never been so happy in my entire life.
I got a work-study job answering phones in the dean’s office, and I excelled. “What a phone voice!” my boss, Mariana, said. She was an overweight perfectionist with absolutely unbearable carpal tunnel pain. She wore wrist braces every day. She loved me, and I accepted her maternal affection with gratitude, even if I didn’t feel exactly the same way about her. She even liked my gayness and would bring all matters of aesthetics to me, as though I had some special expertise. Did I think the gray header or the navy header was more executive-looking for the budget memo? What did I think about this font for graduation name tags? On some level I found this insulting, she was stereotyping, but she was also not wrong that I was better than her at picking out which header looked good. Sometimes she bought me lunch, and she always tipped me off if she knew there was going to be free food somewhere around campus.
The first year living with Trent was somewhat miserable as he was frequently on drugs and prone to lapsing into slam poetry in regular conversation. He seldom bathed and never did his laundry so our room stank, not just of his sweat and crotch rot, but of a deeper, more earthy, troubling fecal smell. He also loved eggs, hard-boiled eggs, and he would boil a dozen and then eat them out of the pot of water as he sat on the floor, the shells and wisps of membrane scattered around him on the carpet. Still, early on in our rooming together, I had decided it was best to be straightforward and tell him I was gay and make sure he had no problem with it. I did not want to live with someone I felt unsafe around, but it took me several weeks into the fall semester to realize that I felt this way and to become sure that I had a right to it at all.
“I absolutely understand if you feel uncomfortable,” I said, “and I’d be happy to switch rooms, no hard feelings.”
“I think it’s righteous,” Trent said, and held up his skinny fist. “Gender is fluid and nonbinary, sexuality’s a spectrum. I’ve had sex with dudes,” he said.
“Oh,” I said.
“I fucked a tree once.”
“Did it hurt?” I asked.
“Not at the time,” he said, “but later it was pretty brutal. Mr. Happy was scratched up like a Dionysian sacrifice.”
“Wow,” I said.
Still, it was a radical improvement over living with Jason. Trent was bizarre and ridiculous and very, very annoying, but at the end of the year he wrapped me in a bear hug I hadn’t been expecting and whispered in my ear, “I will love you forever, homie, and always put light around you in my heart.”
We rarely saw each other on campus, but when we did he would smile and nod at me. After that first year, I became an RA, which suited me perfectly, bossing people around, having a single room, getting paid a small stipend for making sure we had enough toilet paper. I was queen of that dorm and I ruled our floor with an iron fist in a velvet glove.
My sophomore year, I began dating a junior named Evan. He was a poet and he had handsome ears that were just on the verge of being too big but were instead distinctive. He lived off campus in an apartment because his parents were rich. He was lean and he had curly brown hair and a face that was delicate without being feminine. He had big fat lips like a little kid’s. He was very good at being adorable. I’d never met someone who could make it seem cute to have failed at something. Once, he forgot to pay his electricity bill for several months. “Michael, I, like, forgot there even was electricity. As, like, a force in the universe. What is electricity, I don’t even know!” He was a vegetarian. He was never mean to me. Not once. Not even in a single conversation was he once slightly mean. In fact, if he thought he had accidentally slighted me, he would apologize profusely. He often picked me wildflowers and gave them to me as a surprise.
Despite these things, I never managed to fall in love with Evan. I cared about him. I lusted after him. I loved his narrow buttocks and his delicate, ticklish rib cage. I loved the large oblong brown mole on his pale forearm. But I did not fall in love with him the way I fell in love with Anthony, and I wondered if maybe I was too happy to fall in love, too already fulfilled.
I did see Anthony again while I was in college. It was the summer between sophomore and junior year, and I texted him out of the blue, and said: I just wanted to say thank you for our time together. I don’t think I was grown up enough to thank you at the time, but I think in many ways you saved my life.
We texted back and forth, and he mentioned he would love to get together for lunch nonromantically to catch up, and I said I was driving out that way to drop a friend off at LAX, which was true, and we agreed to meet in North Shore at a sandwich shop where they made their own bread that Bunny and I used to go to all the time.
I lied to myself that I was not nervous about this encounter, but I changed my shirt five times before taking my friend to the airport. I didn’t want to reopen the romantic door with Anthony, and at that point Evan and I were still technically together, although I already knew it was mostly over, but I did want Anthony to be impressed when he saw me. Gone was my septum piercing, gone the black eyeliner. I had cut my long hair at Evan’s insistence, but it was very chic the way the girl had done it, short on the sides and long and floppy on top. I had a tan. I had muscles. I was wearing shoes made out of actual leather. I was terrified.
It wasn’t just seeing Anthony. It was being in North Shore again. It was being in a place Bunny had been. By that point, she had been released from prison, but I knew she wasn’t in North Shore anymore, so it wasn’t that I was afraid to run into her. I was afraid of the memory of her, but also the memory of who I had been. I found my own self unfathomable and grotesque. How had I subsisted on so little? How had I lived hunched over in fear of my very self, scuttling about like a crab? I felt ashamed that I had ever been anything other than I was now.
I was also, on some level, upset that the town still existed. That people went on living here as though nothing had happened, which was absurd, obviously. I kept expecting to be recognized, but I met no one I knew. The town, I saw, had gotten richer. Its metamorphosis was almost complete. On every block there were only one or two of the old houses clinging to existence between the mansions.
The sandwich shop was exactly the same, its ambient air temperature as hot and weirdly humid as ever. I recognized the woman behind the counter, though I did not know her name, but she didn’t recognize me. And then I saw Anthony at a table in the back, and I knew all of a sudden that I was wildly happy to see him. Just to look at his face produced ripples of joy in my solar plexus. It was involuntary. I walked over, and he looked up from his book. “Good golly Miss Molly,” he said.
“I’m so happy to see you,” I said. I was busy looking at him, and I was beaming stupidly as I took the chair across from him. He looked older, but it was hard to say why. Perhaps it was a softness in the jaw, a feebleness in the neck. He had lost some weight and his shoulders were narrower and more bowed. But he was still smiling at me with those wonderful, slightly crooked teeth. I had not known I would recognize his teeth. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I can’t stop looking at you.”
“I can’t stop looking at you either,” he said.
“It’s okay, it doesn’t actually matter what we say.”
“No, it doesn’t,” he agreed.
I suppose I had thought that I dreamed it. That I was so desperate for love back then that I was willing to project it onto even an old man who lied to me. But it was still here, whatever it was. I didn’t know whether to call it love or joy or just connection, but it was all of those things, and it was generated by our proximity, like an electromagnetic field. I had never felt anything like it with anyone else, and the fact that it was still here—what did it mean?
“I brought this book for you,” he said. He flashed me the cover. It was a book of Adrienne Rich poems. I liked Adrienne Rich, but I didn’t have any of her collections, so I was happy. It seemed so amazing and wonderful. That he would bring me a present. As though he had known all along that it would be like this, exactly the same as it had been, only different.
“I don’t know how to say this,” I said, “and I have no intention of entering into a romantic relationship with you again, but this is weird. Is it just me?”
“No, it’s not just you,” he said.
“I still love you,” I said. “But not like—”
“I love you too.”
“Maybe we knew each other in a past life or something,” I said.
“Maybe we knew each other in this one.”
We ordered sandwiches and the bread was as good as I remembered. They came in red plastic trays with wax paper. There was a fly that kept buzzing our table. The air was hot and steamy. It should not have been the most incredible lunch I had ever had, and yet it was. He told me all about Hank and his wife and his retirement. They had recently been on a trip to Prague, which he said reminded him of me because he knew that I would love it, and he made me promise that I would go someday and think of him. I told him all about college and Evan and my mother, whom I had recently begun talking to again.
“How’s Bunny?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
He was shocked. “Did you have a fight?” he asked. “You were so close.”
“No,” I said, feeling suddenly sick and unable to explain.
“Then what happened?” he asked.
I visited Bunny in prison exactly three times. The first two times were the first summer she was in prison before I started at Pomona. I was still living with Terrence’s family to save money. I slept on the couch in their den and I lived out of a reusable grocery bag that I kept in their laundry room. I had my life pared down to the bare essentials. Two pairs of black pants, two black T-shirts, and two white button-downs for work, my laptop. Everything else I owned, my books, my mementos, the rest of my clothes, were in a box in Ray Lampert’s garage, which in the end I never returned to get. It was just not worth it to have to look at his face.
I would have visited Bunny in prison right away, but being approved as a visitor takes time. It took time for Bunny to be assigned to a prison, time for her to go through the reception process, during which she was not allowed visitors, then time for me to fill out an arcane application, send it in, time to have my background check run and approved, time for them to notify Bunny and then for her to notify me. (Why couldn’t they notify me? Why did it have to go through her? Such questions have no answers.)
When, finally, we had secured that much, I discovered that I had to schedule my visit with her specific prison and that visiting hours were booked for the next two months straight. The prison was open for visits only on Saturday and Sunday, as well as four holidays throughout the year, and it booked up well in advance. I made an appointment for the first Saturday in June, the earliest I could get, and waited, carefully reviewing the extensive rules Bunny had forwarded to me.
I did not remember rules like this when my mother was in prison and we would visit her, but perhaps I was not aware of them because I was a child. Any bag I brought must be made out of clear plastic. I was not to wear denim pants or a blue chambray shirt. I was not to wear an orange top, orange pants, or an orange jumpsuit. I was not to wear a red shirt. I was not to wear forest-green pants or a tan shirt. I was not to wear camouflage. I must dress modestly. I was not to wear hats or gloves. I was not to wear shorts that were two inches above the knee. I was not to wear jewelry. I was not to wear a layered outfit. My keys must be no more than two in number and on a key ring with no attachments. I could bring a small unopened pack of tissues. I could bring up to fifty dollars, but it must be in one-dollar bills. I could bring ten photographs. I could bring a document no more than ten pages in length. If I violated any of these rules, I would be turned away from the prison and not allowed to see Bunny for our visit.
While some of these were easy to comply with (I did not own nor did I desire to don an orange jumpsuit), there were still so many instructions of what not to wear that I felt anxious I would forget one and accidentally wear a blue shirt or green pants. The list made me very upset. The list signaled a kind of crushing bureaucracy and micromanaged oversight that I had last experienced, in a much more mild form, in school. I felt dread that Bunny was living inside such a place.
The day of our visit I was extremely anxious. She was at California Institution for Women, which was in Corona, a full hour’s drive from Terrence’s house in Carson. I had never driven that far before, and I was still a relatively new driver, so the drive alone was terrifying to me, let alone worrying I would hit traffic or be otherwise delayed and miss my visitor’s appointment. If I was even ten minutes late, I would not be allowed to see her.
As I drove, I began to feel that this was insane. This level of scrutiny, of meaningless protocol. Why were visiting hours only on the weekends? What about people who worked on the weekends? I had had to get my shift covered by a coworker. Why were even the visitors of people in prison being punished? Because it was present in every communication from the prison I had received. This disdain for me. This weird fetish of control over me, and I was not even the one who had committed a crime.
And then I would think: She’s in for murder. She’s a murderer. You’re about to go visit a murderer. What do you expect, you friend-of-a-murderer. And she killed someone for you. In defense of you. It was only clear to me in retrospect that that was what happened.
By the time I reached the prison I was so anxious and my thinking so fragmented that everything struck me as surreal. The guards with Tasers. The metal detectors. The heavy locks on all the doors. The surveillance cameras in every room, in every hallway, on every corner, making sure that all spaces were universally seen. Nothing here could be private. Everything was monitored.
I was processed and then put in a waiting room where there were four surveillance cameras, and I sat and waited. There were lots of families, lots of other people waiting. No one was talking except the little kids. It felt very much like the DMV except there were no windows and an eerie feeling that we could not leave. The time for my visit came and went. About fifteen minutes after my appointment time, I went up to the woman behind a plate-glass window and asked if I had somehow missed my name being called, but she just said, “Sit down and wait.”
“My appointment time was fifteen minutes ago, so could you check if maybe something is—”
“Sit down and wait and your name will be called.”
“But you don’t know what my name is, so how do you know it will be called?”
“Sit down or I will call security and have you removed.”
I sat down. About thirty minutes later, a guard came in and called my name, then led me down a long hallway with blue linoleum and into the visiting room. Bunny was already sitting at one of the tables, and she waved at me in excitement until the guard chastised her. “You can hug for up to ten seconds, and after that you can hold hands, but no other touching, nothing under the table,” the guard said when we arrived at the table. “When your visit is over, you may hug again.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, and Bunny and I hugged while the guard watched. She was so much taller than me that I felt like a child pressed up against her chest. She smelled like sweat. She was wearing a sky-blue, short-sleeve button-down shirt and dark teal trousers. Both items were bulky and ill-fitting, designed to mask any physical beauty that might accidentally become manifest. We sat down and looked at each other.
“Did you bring money?” was the first thing she said to me.
“I brought ten singles,” I said. “Is that enough?”
She nodded. “Okay, I want an M&M’s, a Doritos, a Sprite, and if there is any money left, then Sour Patch Kids.”
“Can I get up and walk over there?” I asked, nodding with my head at the vending machines.
“I think so, just do it slowly.”
I stood and the guard looked my way, I motioned at the vending machines and he nodded. I walked over and waited behind a woman and a five-year-old girl with sweet braids, who was getting Ding Dongs. I fed my sweaty dollar bills to the machine with shaking hands. What was I afraid of? Nothing in particular. But I hated this place powerfully.
I bought Bunny her treats. There was not enough left for the Sour Patch Kids. When I brought them back to the table she excitedly opened them and began eating and I felt that really she was more excited about the food than about seeing me.
“So how is it?” I said. “You look good.”
She did not look good. Her skin looked dull and she had a handful of tiny pimples on the left side of her face. Her hair was greasy at the roots. “It’s fine,” she said. “I mean, I get by.” She laughed.
“Do you have any friends?” I asked.
“A couple,” she said, licking up a palmful of M&M’s.
“It’s just so good to see your face,” I said, which was a lie. It was weird and sad to see her face. She didn’t look the same. But then she met my eyes fully for the first time, and the eye contact was so intense I felt I was falling, that if I didn’t concentrate I would lose consciousness. There was just her whole soul, right there. Looking at me. It was Bunny.
“I miss you every day,” she said, still holding my gaze, flowing into me.
“Do you get all my letters? Because sometimes you don’t write back,” I said. “And I never know if you don’t get it or…”
“Sometimes I’m too sad to write back,” she said.
And I started to cry. I looked up at the ceiling, trying to stop. When I looked at her again, she was still there, looking frankly at me, her eyes dry.
“I couldn’t tell you in my letters because they read them but I have a girlfriend in here,” she said softly.
“Get out!” I said, wiping my eyes, grateful to recover myself.
“She’s really cool,” she said.
“That’s amazing. What is she? I mean—what did she do?”
“She killed her stepfather because he was molesting her kid sister.”
“Oh wow,” I said, “I was kind of hoping you’d say drugs.”
She laughed. “Us murderers gotta stick together, you know.” There was a hint of a Jersey accent in her voice, and I had the impression this was a way the girls talked together to make each other laugh. Her attention was diverted for a moment as she opened the Doritos with holy reverence.
“I would offer to share, but my dad hasn’t put anything on my commissary in like a month, and all the food here has saltpeter in it to keep you calm, it’s disgusting. These chips taste like heaven.”
“They put saltpeter in the food?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know if they really do, but that’s what everyone says.”
“So does everyone know you killed someone?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Gives me massive cred in here.”
“Weird,” I said.
“I know,” she said, “they call me the Knockout. Because for in here, I’m pretty. I know you may not think I’m pretty, like, I’m not pretty out there, but in here I’m pretty.”
“I think you’re pretty,” I said, but I was so disturbed I didn’t know what to say. “How’s your dad?” I asked, even though I had consciously planned not to ask about Ray.
“Well, he had to sell our house,” she said. “And he lost his business. But he’s finally out of the last of the IRS debt, and he just bought a condo in Lake Forest and he’s doing real estate down there.”
“He still has his license?” I asked.
“He never lost it.”
“It’s just so unfair,” I said. “Sometimes I can’t get over it. That you’re in here and he’s buying a condo and probably drinking scotch with Swanson.”
She shrugged. “Is what it is.”
“Do you forgive him?” I really wanted to know. I did not forgive him. In fact, the more time passed, the more my heart calcified against him.
“Some thoughts are just too expensive to have,” she said.
I didn’t say anything, just looked at her. What a magnificent animal she was even now, all two hundred pounds of her, across the table from me, licking Cool Ranch dust from her fingers. “It’s kind of like long-distance running,” she said. “You have to keep your mind under control. You can’t start thinking about when it’s going to be over or what hurts or you’ll lose it and your form will get sloppy and soon you’ll be winded and you’ll stop before you’ve given it everything you’ve got.”
“So, like, you can’t think about when you’ll get out?”
“Exactly.”
“You can’t think about whether it’s fair or unfair that you’re here?”
“Exactly.”
She was giving prison everything she had. She was determined to survive this. It seemed to me so honorable, to be committed to life in a place like this. I wasn’t sure I would be able to do what she was doing.
“You’re too good for this world,” I said.
“No, I’m not,” she said, and smiled.
The next time I visited her was in late August, right before I started at Pomona. We had an okay time. I knew what to expect from the prison protocol and was less freaked out. We talked, I bought her snacks. This time I brought a whole twenty-five dollars in singles and we both gorged on Snickers and Gardetto’s.
“I haven’t had an orange soda in years,” I said.
I promised I would visit every month. Pomona was right next to Chino, it would hardly be a drive. I told her I would send her all my books I read, and it would be like she was going to college with me, and we could have a book club by mail.
But then I started college, and I did not visit her. I was absorbed by my new world. I also didn’t want to go to the prison. It was as simple as that really. I didn’t want to go, and so I didn’t, even though I knew I should. Our pattern had always been that I sent two letters for every one she sent me, but now it dropped to an equal one-to-one ratio. And then it began to slip further, and I would wait sometimes a week or two weeks to write her back. I did not visit her again until the spring semester of my freshman year, on a Saturday in March.
The moment I saw her, I knew she was on drugs. Her eyes were glassy. The muscles in her face were slack. I didn’t know what drug she was on, but I knew she was on something.
“What did they do,” I asked, “put you on lithium?”
“What? No,” she said, after hugging me.
“Seriously?” I leaned in and whispered, “You’re not on drugs?”
“I swear,” she said, “I’m not!” She laughed and I knew she was lying to me. Everything was different. The way she looked at me, the way she laughed, the way she talked, the way she held her shoulders. She had this new snicker that was near silent, just bursts of air through her nostrils.
“Well, how are you?” she asked, oddly formal. She was hostile, but she was smiling. I didn’t know what to do.
“I’m fine,” I said. “How are you?”
“Oh, I’m great, I’m fucking great, I’m taking this amazing course on Sartre and the existentialists.”
“No, really?” I asked, leaning forward.
She laughed. “No. Get out. They don’t have that shit here. That was straight from one of your own letters, you don’t know your life?”
“I’m sorry I haven’t been writing as much,” I said.
“Oh, believe me, I get it,” she said.
“I meant to,” I said. “School is just really busy, and I have a job, and between the two—”
“No, don’t apologize,” she said, “I’m the one who should apologize. Everyone in here told me it would happen. They told me, eventually your friends, your family, they will stop thinking of you as you, and start thinking of you as a prisoner. The letters will stop. They won’t put money on your books. Eventually, they will look at you just like the guards.”
“Bunny, no,” I said.
“And I thought maybe that would happen with my dad, and it did. Believe me, he stopped visiting long before you did. But I didn’t think it would happen with you. Because I thought we were real friends. I fucking told people that. Whatever, I would say, you don’t know him. But then you did what they all do. So it’s me who should apologize,” she said. “Because I was the one who was wrong.”
We stared at each other for a moment. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to have the conversation because she was high and I hated talking to intoxicated people. I had done enough of it with my own mother. You never got anywhere. They just got sort of stuck in a thought cycle, and if you were interrupting it or contradicting it, they literally could not hear you. They would do anything to just cycle through the thoughts again and stoke the anger and the hurt.
But that was only part of it. Really, I was so ashamed that I was almost unable to speak. I liked to think of her as hulking and invulnerable, but the truth was Bunny was a terrible victim. Ann Marie had been bullying her for years. The whole school had piled on the abuse. Ryan Brassard and the ear thing. And then what had lit the match of the whole powder keg was me. Was her love for me. Her defense of me.
And here she was, paying the price every day while I played around at college, examining texts and fucking boys and wrestling with the “big philosophical questions.”
I wanted to throw up.
“I brought money for snacks,” I said finally.
“That’s cool,” she said. “Buy me some Ding Dongs.”
I bought an obscene armful of chips and cookies and candy and sodas, and carried them back to our table.
“I want to say something,” I said, “that I’ve never said before, but I feel like we should really talk about it.”
She raised an eyebrow, cracked a soda.
“Thank you for defending me,” I said, my voice shaking. “When Ann Marie—thank you for defending me.”
She looked at me for a very long time. Then she looked at the table. She peeled open the slippery, thin skin of a Snickers. “You’re welcome,” she said.
“And also, also: I’m sorry. I am so sorry that all this happened to you. I’m sorry you’re in prison. I’m sorry Ann Marie died. I’m sorry for all of it. I’m sorry I didn’t visit.”
“Thank you,” she said formally, as though I had presented her with a ceremonial gift.
We talked more easily after that, but I knew things still weren’t right. I knew that the kind of transgression I had committed against her was large, was maybe the largest transgression I had made in my life. And I couldn’t undo it.
Worse than that, I found myself disliking her. Disliking her new affect, her new slang, whatever was going on with her glassy eyes. We didn’t have anything in common anymore, our worlds were so different. It was painful for me to hear about her world, and painful for her to hear about mine. Part of the social armor she had acquired to survive in prison was a nonchalant apathy that was anathema to intimacy. Every single thing I told her about my life she managed to imply was subtly stupid. Every single thing she told me about her life I was visibly troubled by. She told me about making pruno, about getting elastic strings out of the waistbands of underwear and making tiny woven rings with them, about tattoo guns made out of CD players, about some girl having an allergic reaction to calligraphy ink someone had snuck in. “Like, bitch, don’t put that in your skin, that’s for fountain pens and shit.”
I wanted to love her again so I could forgive myself and I could not, so I could not.
That day I left, and I didn’t go again. I didn’t write her, and she didn’t write me, except for one letter right before she was released, telling me I was her best friend and she hoped I still loved her. She signed it with a million x’s and o’s.
I did not know what to make of that letter. It was so saccharinely sweet that it was hard not to feel it was artificial.
I had always imagined that I would be there to meet Bunny when she got out. That it would be me and Ray, and we would take her to lunch and order the whole menu, and then go to Target and buy her all new clothes. I had imagined I would be part of her reentry into the world. But I was not. I didn’t hear from Ray. I didn’t know what her exact release date was, just that it was in October. I put my head down for midterms, and then before I knew it we were in December, and Bunny must theoretically be out in the world without me.
I started dating Evan that fall, and it was the following summer that I met up with Anthony and began a friendship with him that would last until his death from pancreatic cancer over five years later. I graduated from Pomona, class of 2015, and was accepted to the Graduate Program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell to do my PhD. My mother, Aunt Deedee, and Anthony all attended my college graduation, and there was no drama. It was as if none of it had ever happened. Anthony gave me a two-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary in a special box with a drawer containing a magnifying glass, and I had never received a better present. I still have it to this day. I moved it with me to Ithaca.
I loved upstate New York immediately. I loved the snow. A fresh snowfall never failed to make me feel like Lucy when she is first in Narnia, as though I had accidentally climbed into another world.
I dated. I fell in love with a man named Conor, who was balding and a little fat and the most joyful being I have ever run across. He saw the world, he saw it clearly, but to him it was still good fun. Even the sad parts of being alive were beautiful. And mostly human beings cracked him up. He wasn’t scared, scared of the darkness in others or in himself. He was so different from the other men I had dated. He was sane and capable. He was an engineer in robotics. He could cook only three things, but one of them was a delectable white chili. He had wide little feet and perfectly even toes.
It was after I had finished my master’s and was burrowing into the long deep years of my PhD when I ran across a YouTube video of Bunny. I would never have even seen it if I hadn’t been on Conor’s laptop. He first started watching UFC fighting because of Ronda Rousey, and he was still a fan, watching her old clips on YouTube, and in one of the recommended to-watch-next videos on the sidebar, I saw a freeze-frame of a woman who could only be a grown-up Bunny Lampert. The video was titled “Watch the Knockout Queen Mop the Floor.”
It was a boxing fight, in a ring instead of a cage. The fight lasted less than two minutes before the other girl was out cold. You could hear the fleshy slap of her body as she hit the mat. At the end, you could see Bunny go to her corner, and her trainer slapped her on the head with love, and then, clear as day, it was Ray Lampert standing there, smiling ear to ear, shouting at her, “You did it, you did it.” In a feverish trance, I watched all her fight videos. She was undefeated, 12 and 0, with 5 TKOs. Numbers like a young Laila Ali, or so every commentator of her matches liked to say. The early videos were mostly grainy, without commentary, all crowd noise. The more recent ones were obviously higher production value, televised with commentators, and in them she was wearing what became her uniform: pink satin shorts and a pink satin sports bra–style top. The Knockout Queen. I bet Ray had come up with it himself. Her most watched video had over a million views.
“This is my friend from high school,” I told Conor. “I know her.”
“Wow, how cool!” he said. “We should go to one of her matches.”
“They look like they’re mostly in California,” I said.
He laughed. “Oh, then we won’t go to one of her matches.”
“It’s just so weird—she was my friend,” I said. But I could not explain. I could not express what had happened and how formative it had been. “Her dad was really weird,” I said. “He was an alcoholic.”
“Oh yeah?” Conor said. “Where do you want to go to dinner?”
There was no one I could talk to about what had become of Bunny. Anthony was already very sick by that point; he would die just after that Christmas. I didn’t want to bother him with this, and he didn’t even know Bunny personally. I had kept in touch with none of our other high school friends, but I found myself curious about all of them, and I spent hours snooping through Naomi’s Facebook page. She had a little daughter named Tara. It did not appear she had ever gone to the Olympics. That bruised me somehow. Without consciously thinking about it, I had always counted on her to go, as if in Bunny’s place. But it looked like she had ripped off college’s face and fucked the shit out of it, and law school after that, and it was clear from her selfies with her (extremely hot) husband, from her food pics at fancy restaurants, from her adorable daughter, that she was living the good life, and that made me happy.
I watched Bunny’s fights over and over again. “This is unhealthy,” Conor would chime in.
“I am well aware,” I would say, “but I am in helpless thrall.”
And then I would watch her knock out girls again and again.
There was one fight in particular that haunted me. Bunny had her hair in cornrows, which made her look less prissy, and her opponent was a particularly dumb-looking pinheaded girl. In the close-up before the match when they touched gloves, you could see they were both already drenched in sweat. The arena must have been sweltering. Bunny was looking at the other girl like she wanted to kill her, like she wanted to smear her on the sidewalk. The other girl disgusted her. But her look was not heated. It was a chilly disdain. She would take this pinheaded girl apart.
And she did. The match was four rounds long, two-minute rounds, and Bunny was methodical and relentless the whole way through, even though they were evenly matched—the other girl had a dogged persistence and ability to take blows to the head that boggled the mind. You could see the cool intelligence in Bunny’s eyes as she evaluated the other girl’s habits, found her weaknesses. Even as she got tired and staggered, you could tell she was in control. When she finally knocked the pinheaded girl out, it was exaggerated and cartoonish; the other girl swooned as though drunk, her mouth hanging open, and then fell to the ground. The camera zoomed in on Bunny, who was smiling around her mouth guard and holding her fist in the air, walking in tight circles, trying to burn off the rest of the adrenaline.
I must have watched this video of the pinheaded girl a hundred times. The pinheaded girl did not look like Ann Marie. Her hair was darker than Ann Marie’s for one thing, and her eyes were not wide set. But it was the smallness of the head, and perhaps the way they were built, the angles of the shoulders, something. But I could not stop thinking of that pinheaded girl as Ann Marie.
“You are clinically depressed,” Conor told me.
“Maybe,” I said.