by Mona Awad
She doesn’t touch it, just looks at it.
“It’s probably from Caroline,” I say. “Cupcake?” I clarify, realizing I’ve never shared their actual names with her.
She blinks at me, expressionless.
“The blond one with the perfectly undertucked bob and the pearls and the blue orchid corsage on her wrist? You said she looked like a Twinkie. Or a child of the corn going to prom?”
“They all look like Twinkies to me, Smackie: fake-sweet, squidgy, unsurprising packaging. I’ll bet the ink on this thing is scratch-and-sniff,” she says, snatching the invitation from me, scratching at the cordially, and holding it up to her nose. “When did you get this thing anyway?”
“It was in my school mailbox this morning.”
“So that’s why you’ve been weird all day.”
“I just don’t know how to respond. I feel like if I don’t . . .”
“Here,” she says, and pulls out her Zippo and holds it at the corner of the shimmery invite.
“Wait,” I say. “What are you doing?”
“You’re not actually thinking of going to this party for dorks, are you?”
“No.”
“So,” she holds the lighter up to the invitation again, this time even closer, and looks at me. It starts to crackle.
“Wait, wait, wait.”
“What?”
“It’s just. Well, Workshop starts tomorrow.”
“So?”
“So it’s just going to be me and them again in class this semester. Just us five.”
“And?”
“I’m just thinking of how not to be rude. When I say no. I mean, I’m going to say no, obviously. It’s just . . . you know, these are the women in my department, my . . . you know . . . peers.”
“Whom you call Cuntscapades.”
“I just have to figure out the right wording. So they don’t think I hate them.”
She stares at me. “But Smackie, you do hate them.”
I look at her through my bangs, which she has encouraged me to grow over my eyes. Makes you look punk, she says. I look at her different-colored eyes, her bleached and feathery hair that is the antithesis of Bunny hair, cut asymmetrically and shaved in places, her fishnet veil that she wears like a threshold to be crossed only if you dare. And here’s what I realize: she would never wear mittens shaped like kittens or a dress with a Peter Pan collar. She would never say, Love your dress, if she fucking hated your dress. She would never say, How are you? if she didn’t care how you were. She would never eat a lavender cupcake that tasted like perfume or wear a perfume that made her smell like a cupcake. She would never wear lip balm for cosmetic purposes. She would never wear it unless her lips were seriously, seriously cracked. And even if they were, she’d still put Lady Danger on them, which is the name of her lipstick, this bright blue-red that looks surreally beautiful on her but when I tried it on once made me look insane. Her perfume smells like rain and smoke and her eye makeup scares small children and she wears pumps even though she’s at least two inches taller than I am and I’m a freak. Why? Because life is shorter than we are, she says, so why beat around the bush?
“I do hate them,” I say quietly. “So I should just say no. I mean . . . what do you think I should do?”
A faint smell of garbage rises up with the heat of the end of the day. I stare at her for a while, but her face is absolutely deadpan. She lights a cigarette. I gaze down at my legs in their bland, black jeans.
After what feels like an unbearably long time, in which a wind swooshes through her sycamore, a gusty wind that takes my breath away briefly, that reminds me that we’re near the ocean even though I’ve never seen it—but the Bunnies have, of course, because one of them has a Mercedes SUV and they drive there on the weekends and take pictures of themselves in Esther Williams–style swimsuits, laughingly wading together into the white crashing waves with arms linked—Ava says, “You should go if you want to go.”
“What? I don’t want to go.”
“But you also don’t want to be rude, right? These are the women in your department.”
She stares at me until I lower my eyes.
“Look, you don’t know what it’s like to be in class with them. To be in Workshop with them. Maybe they’re trying to make an effort this year. You know, to be nice or something.”
She snorts.
“I’m serious. And if I snub them, they’ll . . .”
“What? Tell me what they can possibly do.”
I think about last year. How they would look down at each story I submitted like it was a baby that just gave them the finger, and then side-eye each other for a long time.
It’s very . . . angry, they’d say at last.
Yes. Abrasive. For my taste?
Exactly. Sort of in love with its own outsiderness? Its own narrative of grittiness? Of course, that could just be me. (Small smile of deference.) Still. I do wish it would open itself up a bit more.
“Look, I’ll go for like an hour,” I say. “Tops. Just to make an appearance.”
“Whatever.”
“I’ll text you pictures of their apartment so you can see how hideously twee it is.”
She nods. “Sure.”
“You could come along if you want,” I offer lamely.
“Don’t sweat it, Smackie. You couldn’t pay me all the money in the world to attend that little soiree. Speaking of which, you oughtn’t dally. Better hop along.”
“I’ll be back soon. Like later tonight even. Anyway, I’ll text you.”
She says nothing, just frowns into the book she’s cracked open, like the book made a face at her, stuck out its tongue.
“Hey,” I think I hear her say as I’m starting to climb down the ladder from her roof, but when I look up, she isn’t looking at me. She’s still staring at her book. The wind picks up again, stirring the pages, turning them this way and that, but she keeps reading like she hasn’t lost her place at all.
4.
How long have I been standing here, outside her front door, staring at the tuliplike flower she drew next to the brass bell and the loopy letters that comprise her real name? Long enough for the sky to grow darker. The street to smell sweeter. The shadows to get thin and grow teeth. I can hear well-schooled female laughter drifting from an upstairs window. I shift my weight from right to left. Turn back. Not too late to turn back and watch the family of raccoons make their way down Ava’s drainpipe, as they do each evening. Cheer on the little one who is always afraid to go down. Come on, little one, Ava and I always say, raising our drinks to him. Be brave. Be bold.
Her neighborhood is obscenely beautiful. I cannot help but observe this as I stand on her marbled steps, flanked by stone griffins, beaks open in midscreech. A line of stately houses, a canopy of grandly bowing trees. Just a block from campus, off a poshly quaint street lined with bistros that offer champagne by the glass, cafés that make the cortadas with the ornate foam art that all the faculty drink, shops selling cold-pressed juice and organic dog treats. Unlike my street, which smells of sad man piss, hers smells of autumn leaves.
As I stand here, my finger poised over the bell, the laughter morphs into hellion squeals. Four distinct shrieks. I hit the bell, not because I want to but because it’s getting cold out here and this town, even in Cupcake’s neighborhood, is ridiculously dangerous after a certain hour. I don’t need to look up to feel the fact of four heads suddenly appearing in the upstairs window, flanked by billowing white curtains. Four heads full of white, orthodontically enhanced teeth. Hair so shiny it will blind you to look at it directly, like an eclipse. My phone buzzes with a text from an unknown number, the emoticon of a monkey with its hands over its eyes. I think: I should go, I should go, I should go. But I stay right where I am. I wait. I wait so long the sky gets darker still. The sweet smell of the street acquires a tang of rot. Leaves from a nea
rby luxury tree fall and I count them falling. One. Two. Three.
5.
I am staring into the eyes of the one I call Cupcake. Because she looks like a cupcake. Dresses like a cupcake. Gives off a scent of baked lemony sugar. Pretty in a way that reminds you of frosting flourishes. Not the forest green and electric blue horrors in the supermarket, but the pastel kind that is used at weddings or tasteful Easter gatherings. She looks so much like a cupcake that when I first met her at orientation, I had a very real desire to eat her. Bite deeply into her white shoulder. Dig a fork in her cheek. Tonight, she wears a dress of cerulean blue patterned with sinuous white clouds and one of her many matchy cardigans. Blond hair freshly flat-ironed. Lips shiny but colorless because lipstick is for whores, Bunny, I have heard her say and I really couldn’t tell if she was joking or dead serious. Glinty pearls around her neck that she never takes off. She’ll often gently tug on them in Workshop while reading aloud from her work—the most recent iteration of which was postfeminist dialogues between herself and various kitchen implements.
I think she’s going to greet me like she usually does, like I’m an unfortunate patch of gray sky from which she should soon take cover, or a tall, mildly disease-ridden tree—it is so sad and creepy about my bare and unseemly branches. Normally if she and I catch sight of one another in the halls or around campus, she’ll draw her Christopher Robin cardigan closer, clutch her books tightly to her chest as though, tut, tut! Looks like rain. Oh, hi, Samantha, she’ll say, looking around at anything like it might be a buoy that will save her from the fact of me standing right in front of her. A telephone pole in the distance. A gnat only she can see. Frankly, I don’t know what I did to get on the wrong side of Cupcake. Perhaps she sensed my hunger when we first met and has understandably kept her distance.
But tonight, Cupcake smiles at me. Her pink-and-white face lights up. “Samantha, hi!” As if she’s actually delighted to see me. I’m a jewel-colored cardigan. I’m a first edition of The Bell Jar. I’m a marzipan squirrel. I’m a hairdresser who knows exactly, exactly, how to handle her carefully undertucked bob of golden hair.
“So glad you could make it. Bunnies! Look who’s here! She came!”
* * *
—
She takes my hand—actually takes my hand—and leads me into her giant living room, which is what I pictured and not what I pictured. Lots of soft, lush, cushiony fabrics. Ceilings that stretch up and up and up. A white fireplace in which she was has placed a vase full of delicate pink blossoms. They’re all sitting around a candlelit coffee table as though they’ve been kept waiting for a guest. Creepy Doll, aka Kira. Vignette, aka Victoria. And of course, the Duchess, who in another life is merely Eleanor. On my way over, I’d envisioned various nightmare scenarios of what awaited me. I feared they might be naked, reclined on whimsical furniture out of Alice in Wonderland. Or else in pastel lingerie, using Anaïs Nin erotica as fans. Massaging each other to the music of Stereolab. Obscure yet erudite porn projected on some massive screen. Reading sex manifestos from the seventies using pastel dildos as mics. A tiered tray of erotically themed cupcakes, I had no idea. But instead, they’re just sitting in a circle like it’s Workshop, wearing their usual clothes, notebooks clutched in their laps like purses. Normally when I enter Workshop, they give me tightfisted Hi’s, little upward jerks of their lips, making me feel, as I take my seat, like a portentous fog has somehow settled into the room. But this time they’re all looking at me and smiling like I’m the actual sun. Smiling with the whole of their mouths and eyes.
“Samantha!” Creepy Doll gasps. “You’re here. We thought you got lost or something.”
Lost? I look into the amber eyes of the one I call Creepy Doll. Because she reminds me of the creepy dolls I used to want when I was little, with their saucer eyes and their velvet dresses, their Shirley Temple curls of blood-red hair and their Cupid’s-bow lips molded into little pink oh!’s of wonder at the world. Writes fairy tales about girl demons, wolf princes, the cozy phantasmagoria of her native New Hampshire. Collects antique typewriters, each of which she claims has its own unique “ghost energy” that she channels into her stories as she types, head tilted back, eyes closed. She is the literal doll-pet of the other Bunnies. Sits curled in their skirted laps like a cat. Purrs when they pet her, makes hissing sounds when they stop. Her voice is the feathery baby voice of children in horror films. I have heard that same voice go down about five octaves when she thinks she is alone, become deep as a well. Out of all of them, she is the first to usually extend a social hand to me in the form of a random troll emoji, or a last-minute invite to places they already are.
Hi Samantha, We’re having bento boxes. You’re welcome to join ☺
She’s also the only Bunny who attempts to talk to me at social functions. She’ll come up to me and ask me questions like little digging hooks and while I’m answering, she’ll nod and murmur cool while her eyes flit from side to side. Like she is a child who has dared herself to knock on Boo Radley’s door, and now that he’s opened it she isn’t sure what to do, should she run?
Now, though, her golden eyes gleam goodwill. By far the most obscenely beautiful of them all, the most strangely sexy. Still wearing the leopard print cat ears that her fellow Bunnies drunkenly plonked onto her head last Halloween (I saw the pictures on FB). A black dress patterned with white ghosts that have what appear to be blobs of blood for eyes. Surely she knows I didn’t get lost. They saw me standing outside the front door for a good fifteen minutes.
I feel my ears get hot. My lip begins to twitch. “Um. No. I—”
“Bunny, we didn’t really think that,” Vignette cuts in. She is seated in a chaise longue to the left of the Duchess, under a lamp shaped like a swan’s neck, the light of which illuminates her auburn tresses. Vignette, their sexy punk. The bluntest of the Bunnies. Her dainty dress countered by combat boots, unbrushed hair, a half-open mouth that never closes. Her cloudy gray eyes full of fuck you. Writes for shock value. Existential vignettes about Disney princesses engaged in blood orgies, feral girl-women crawling around on all fours at the bottom of Beckettian wells of the mind, munching Barbie doll parts. Looks stoned most of the time, as if she is perpetually enveloped in opium smoke. She was apparently a ballerina in another life, before she went off the rails, discovered conceptual art and slouching. Despite her translucent, blue-veined beauty that reminds Ava of skulls and me of the Victorians, she didn’t always dress like prettified confection. When I met her at our very first Narrative Arts welcome reception, saw another girl in jeans and plaid with a plastic cup of wine in her hand, which she was holding like she’d never held a cup before, I thought maybe she and I would be friends. I went up to her at a party once when she was alone, when she hadn’t yet been sucked into Bunnydom. Hi, I said. Hi, she said. And she looked at me like she was so grateful. We had a stammering conversation, which I prolonged by pretending to love Pilates. Soon we were just nodding our heads at one another, taking quicker, larger sips of our drinks, mumbling about how cold we heard New England winters could be. Then she excused herself to go to the bathroom. Since then, whenever we wind up together in a corner of a party she’ll look around like she’s trapped. All the doors in her face will close one by one. But right now, she’s looking at me the way she did that day when I first approached her, her face saying Come in, Come in.
“We did wonder if she got lost for a minute,” Creepy Doll insists.
“You wondered,” Vignette says, putting her delicate hand on Creepy Doll’s. “We just wondered if she was going to show. But here she is.” She looks at me. “Here you are, Samantha.” She gives me a half smile.
“Yes,” Creepy Doll says. “Here you are.”
They both look over at the Duchess, who is sitting on a loveseat upholstered in a soft plush velvet. Her head cocked to one side. Her long silver locks eerily luminous, swept up here and there, with what appear to be birds of paradise. She’s wearing a
white bell-sleeved smock trimmed with lace as though she is a graven image of a C-list moon goddess or one of those watchful-looking egrets I saw in the weeping willows at the zoo. The intricate lacework and the woven fabric reek of large amounts of money spent in a store that also sells crystals.
She’s staring at me with a neutral expression of infinite patience, the same expression she wears whenever I speak in Workshop. Of all of them, her prose is the most inaccessible and cryptic, etched on panes of glass using a dagger-shaped diamond she wears around her neck. She calls them proems. If forced to say something about her work in class, I’ll describe it as jewel-like and enigmatic. And she’ll look at me like she knows I’m lying. Like she’s my therapist, and I’m trying to pull a fast one on her, which she’d expected, but come on, Samantha, let’s get, you know, serious here. Like she knows I think I’m better than everyone else. Like my stammering shyness, my headphones, my dark, unassuming clothes, my politeness are all well and good but she can see through it, yes, Samantha, and what she sees, what it’s masking, is a very deep hate, a very deep rage, a very deep social bruise, what happened there, Samantha? Like she knows that I have nicknamed them all and, well, how sad, really. But being a moon goddess, a more highly evolved artist, a being full of nothing but love and tropical shore (though she is Upper West Side via Charleston), she’s going to tolerate it, love me from a distance all the same, wish me well on my stunted little path where I clutch my rage close like a book or a pet rat. We are all on our own paths after all, aren’t we?
My lip is twitching so violently I feel like I need to run out of the room. I contemplate it. I won’t even look for a door, I’ll just run and tear a hole through the wall.
Then she suddenly smiles at me, and it’s like an embrace.
“Samantha,” she says, “we’re so glad you could make it after all.”
The Bunnies nod on either side of her. I can feel Cupcake nodding at my side. Yes, so glad. So glad, their faces say. So.
