Bunny

by Mona Awad

  “I missed you.” I say it with feeling. Too much feeling. “I tried to text. I thought maybe you left town or something.”

  “Nope, still here. Well, there was that really brief stint with Diego in Paris. He got me this coat.”

  “It’s nice.” I say it before I even look at her coat but now that I do, I realize it is a nice coat, a very nice coat, and I’ve never seen her in it before. Probably another spoil from the Warren dumpster but no, it looks too new. It’s got a fur collar. “Is that real fur?”

  “Rabbit.” She blows smoke coolly out of her nostrils like a dragon. “He skinned it himself. Don’t look so appalled, Smackie. That’s what they do in Europe. Anyway, it had a good life before he shot it. Lots of tall grass and hopping in the Bois de Boulogne or whatever.”

  She grins at me, her eyes shining. “Oh, how was your little sex party thing, by the way?”

  “Okay.”

  “Cool.”

  “I mean, it was super lame,” I add. “I don’t think I’ll be doing that again. Ever.”

  She looks at me. “You’re allowed to have fun without me, you know.”

  “I know,” I say. “But I really didn’t. At all.”

  She looks at me until I look away.

  Silence.

  When I look back at her, she’s staring up at the moon, smiling serenely at it like the moon is her new best friend, it’s telling her the most gorgeous things in the world, it would never betray her for some dumb cunts. I could never compare. I shouldn’t try.

  “I really missed you this week. I thought maybe you were upset with me.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because you went to that lame party?”

  When she says it aloud like that, it sounds utterly stupid. “No. I don’t know. Maybe,” I say.

  She laughs and shakes her head. “Don’t be an idiot.”

  She turns back toward the moon. “Unlike your new friends, I’m a grown woman.”

  “I know.”

  “I have my own devices.” She looks down the street as though she’s waiting for a taxi that will arrive and whisk her away any minute now. The street is dark, empty, aside from a few scared-looking undergrads walking quickly down the sidewalk, huddled together, their coiffed heads bent, purse logos shimmering in the dark. Probably venturing toward the one cool bar downtown.

  The tango music swells up again.

  “We’d better go back inside,” she says and moves to walk in.

  “I’m sorry I went,” I blurt out. “I would much rather have hung out with you.” It’s the truth. It’s so the truth I can’t even look at her.

  “Do you want me to be mad at you? Is that it?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Because I will be. Samantha, how dare you.”

  “Ava.”

  “Why oh why did you desert me for three hours?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Do you know I almost died? In fact,” she turns to look at me, “I am dead.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Oh yes. I’m a ghost now, Samantha. I died of a broken heart. I died of grief. It’s in the autopsy. And it’s all your fault. My tombstone reads, Friend Deserted for Evening. I didn’t invite you to the funeral because I figured you wouldn’t care.”

  “Ava, please stop—”

  She moves in closer. Cups her hands around my face. Her hands are cold and soft and strong through the mesh gloves that grate my skin. She smells like wet leaf, firewood, and green tea. Her hair is platinum feathers brushing my cheeks. Her eyes are runny and scary with makeup, both the brown one and the blue one boring into my skull. We’re swaying slightly like we’re about to dance.

  I remember how the first time we came to class, we were late and all the men had been taken. So the teacher said, You two, pair up! Take turns leading.

  Are you leading or am I? I asked Ava.

  Whatever, she said. We can both lead.

  Okay, I said, not knowing what to do. So I sort of followed and led at the same time. She was looking right at me sort of dreamily, happily, like what bliss, what fun, isn’t it? but I didn’t know where to look, so I kept my eyes on a peacock feather earring dangling from her left ear. It felt a little like holding a dream.

  I’m staring at that feather now though this doesn’t feel like a dream.

  “Samantha,” she says now, “I don’t care, okay? I really don’t. You want to go to a pretentious party and fraternize with bonobos, I honestly give zero fucks. I don’t care what you do or where you go, okay?”

  I feel my breath being knocked out of me. “Okay,” I say.

  She looks at me.

  Tears are suddenly running down my face.

  “Smackie,” she says softly.

  But I’m walking away, stumbling then running. Even though the night scares me. Even though I hear her calling my name as I walk off into the night. I hear her calling me back, but I don’t turn around. I want to show her I’m not scared. I’m not scared of the weird man who is suddenly coming toward me, screaming LONELY I’M SO LONELY! I can walk away into the night alone. Without her. With very quick steps. With galloping steps. I feel my phone buzz in my pocket. I pull it out, thinking it’s her. She’s saying, Come back. She’s saying she didn’t mean it. Instead, on the screen is a text from a number I vaguely recognize. Words flanked by tulips and open-armed ghosts.

  U coming 2nite? :D

  11.

  Samantha,” Cupcake says, pressing her palms into my cheeks so hard she almost breaks my face. “If we braided your hair, would you kill us?”

  She’s wearing a Peter Pan collar dress she tells me she ordered off the internet called All She Wants To Do Is Prance. A peachy-nude lip balm, which I am drunk enough on Bunny punch to let her smear onto my lips with her little perfumed finger. We’re in Creepy Doll’s living room, which is all done up with high-school-dance-style party decorations. Crepe paper dangling in ornate arrangements from the ceiling. A tower of mini cupcakes and a backlit bowl of bright punch on a nearby table swaddled in white gauze. Kate Bush roaring from every speaker. Wuthering wuthering wuthering heights. A mirror ball turning slowly above their Arthurian-inspired updos.

  They answered the door wearing pastel dresses that bell out into gauzy blobs. Corsages on their wrists. Because it’s Prom Night, didn’t I know? And the theme is These Dreams. All the graduate students do it, Samantha. It’s a thing, didn’t you know? Also, we wanted an excuse to wear these, they say, holding up their white-gloved hands and wriggling their fingers. We didn’t tell you, Samantha, because if we told you, well—

  “We didn’t think you’d come.”

  “But you did come.”

  “And we’re so glad.”

  “The problem is you’re not dressed.”

  Can we dress you? they ask me, leading me by the hand into the bedroom. Also, there’s this hair we saw on the internet that would look so good with your face oh my god. Do you mind? Don’t kill us.

  I think of Sissy Spacek covered in pig’s blood as I watch Creepy Doll go through her closet to find the dress that, according to her, I’ll love so much I’ll want to have its dress babies. I look around her bedroom—the walls lined with her many typewriters, her various prints of fairy-tale wolves and mythical creatures, an altar that is billowing a strange-smelling smoke. I drink more punch. Think, This is nice, isn’t it? Their hands pawing through my hair, twisting it into faux medieval configurations. Don’t be so stuck up and dour, Samantha, I tell myself. Don’t be suspicious. They’re probably just being nice. This is their way. You should be nice too.

  “Thanks for this,” I say, as I watch Cupcake in the mirror, drunkenly twisting my hair into an updo quite like theirs. Fucked-up dos, my mother called them, the favorite of prom monstresses and bridezillas, the bane of her ex
istence—and mine, for she’d sometimes practice on me in the evenings. The salon clients who requested them were nothing like the Bunnies, of course—they were much poorer, had no knowledge of Latin, abject theory, or the lute—but on their faces the same palpable desire for some kind of impossible transformation that embarrassed me to behold, that always made me look away. That is, to my horror, on my own face now.

  “No worries, girl. We’re glad you came.”

  Creepy Doll looks at Cupcake braiding my hair in the mirror and smiles. I notice her red hair has been twisted into a viselike knot on top of her head and affixed with a ribbon. What I can see of her scalp is bright pink.

  “So tell us about your prom, Samantha,” Creepy Doll says. “Did you hate it?” She makes an anticipatory ew face that welcomes me to make my own.

  “We picture you hating it.”

  “Or being way too cool for it.”

  “I didn’t hate it.” I loathed it with my whole soul.

  “Did you have a date?” Cupcake asks me, tugging so hard on my hair, a tear slides down my cheek.

  “I went with my best friend at the time.” Alice. A lazy-eyed goth girl with whom I used to skip school to go read horror novels at the library. Alice showed up at my door wearing a skull-and-roses ball gown and her Day of the Dead tiara. I wore a floor-length black silk halter dress with a fire-breathing dragon on it that I thought was oh so cutting edge when I first came upon it at Goodwill. But when I put it on that night, saw my shoulders bared, the flames coiled around my cleavage, it made me feel weirdly shy. All night, I folded my arms over the dragon’s forked tongue in profound embarrassment. Ava would have rocked it, of course. Thrown her shoulders back. Added spiked heels. A Lady Danger lip. A cigarette holder I’d never have the balls to wield. I think of Ava standing in the dark outside the tango class. Smackie. I’m sorry. Come back. Didn’t she say come back?

  “Oh,” Cupcake says. “That’s cool but kind of sad?”

  “What about that hot boy you told us about?” Creepy Doll asks. “The one you were hardcore obsessed with in high school? The one you died with all the time? Was he for real?”

  I stare at her little heart-shaped inquiring face. “He was more like a composite,” I lie.

  “Oh. He felt so real. What was his name again? Rob something?”

  I want to snatch the name, a name I wrote in all kinds of ink in every notebook I owned from grade ten through twelve, from her little bow of a mouth.

  “Rob Valentino?” she says.

  “Valencia,” corrects Cupcake. “We totally stalked you on the internet.”

  “We hope that isn’t creepy,” Creepy Doll says.

  “No.” Of course it’s fucking creepy. The four of them huddled around a screen, drinking champagne and eating mini cupcakes, scrutinizing what photos of me they can find. Not many, thankfully.

  Through the open door, I can see the Duchess and Vignette in the living room, dancing and laughing with four conspicuously handsome young men. The men stare intently at me with vacant eyes the blue-green of glacial lakes.

  “Kira, shut the door, will you? I need to concentrate on this hair.” I feel Cupcake gently running her fingers through my hair as though I’m a skittish horse she wants to groom. Part of me wants to swat her hand away. Instead, I close my eyes.

  “Is it the same Rob Valencia you’re friends with on FB?” Creepy Doll asks me as she goes to shut the door. “The prematurely balding one?”

  “Yeah.” He hardly ever posts. When he does, it’s disappointing. A song I don’t love celebrating the arrival of Friday. A picture of a cocktail also celebrating the arrival of Friday. A picture of him and other businessy-looking people at a table groaning with tapas. He appears to be in some sort of sales but I don’t look too closely. He’s had the same profile pic forever. Him in front of some Spanish church steps, shirt collar open, looking as tall as he does in my dreams.

  “Well,” Cupcake says, massaging the back of my neck a little, “he does look a little like Zeus.”

  “Samantha,” Creepy Doll says, putting her hand on my wrist, “I’m sure Rob really wanted to go to prom with you.”

  “Of course he did. He was probably just super intimidated.” Now she’s pulling on my hair again. Tying it into what feels like elaborate knots.

  “Like we were last year,” Creepy Doll adds.

  “You were?” I gasp through the pain.

  I think about last year. Them looking at me from opposite shores of the room during functions. All of us waiting outside the Cave before Workshop for the Lion to come and unlock the door. They always sat on the floor in the hallway waiting, slumped against the wall as though they didn’t have the energy to stand, their legs had given way, surrounding the grandfather clock like dolls someone forgot to put away. Smiling at each other. Chatting softly about the night before using so many GRE words. Falling silent when I approached. Looking up, up, up at me, I was so tall. In my jeans and a T-shirt featuring some jaw-bearing animal. If they thought I was wearing that to intimidate them, they were not wrong. Sometimes one of them—usually Cupcake or Creepy Doll—would say something to me while the Duchess and Vignette exchanged looks.

  I like your bag, Samantha, Creepy Doll might say. Where did you get it?

  I didn’t know how to take that. How could she possibly like my bag?

  Just this place. In a basement.

  Oh. Cool.

  I like your earrings, Cupcake might say. Even if I wasn’t wearing earrings.

  What was I supposed to say? So I just stared at her.

  What did you do last night, Samantha?

  Was this a trick question?

  Cool, they’d say to whatever platitude I mumbled in reply. Then they’d all nod and look at one another.

  “Totally,” Creepy Doll says now. “We still are a little bit. You’re so . . . Anyway, he’s probably been fantasizing about you all these years.”

  “He totally has. That’s a given.” Cupcake’s tugging and twisting my hair so hard my skull feels like it’s on fire. Every scalp nerve screaming.

  “Maybe he’s dead now because of you. Can you imagine?”

  “He is not dead, Kira. Stop trying to make everything into one of your ghost stories. He’s probably just utterly heartbroken because his life is ruined. But I’ll bet if he were here right now, he would be like, Samantha, oh my god, darling Samantha, dance with me. Have my babies, please.” She turns my screaming head around so that I’m facing the mirror again. In it is a woman I do not recognize. Her bangs have been pinned back. Her hair is the hair of queens from fantasy lands. There are tears in her eyes from the pain.

  “Oh my god, amazing,” Cupcake says with a sharp intake of breath. “I’m amazing. What do you think?” She isn’t asking me, she’s asking Creepy Doll.

  Creepy Doll looks at me, her trussed-up head tilted to one side. “I think that if Rob Valencia were here right now he would die. Especially if you wear this.” She hands me a dress patterned all over with little beheaded girls with blond beehive hairdos, their smiling heads floating next to their decapitated bodies. “Marie Antoinettes,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  They lead me into the living room, where the Duchess and Vignette are on the makeshift dance floor, being turned round and round by their handsome dates. Not at all like the sad students that swarm the tango class. No masturbatory sheen to their faces. No dingy shirts. No look of naked hunger in their glacial lake eyes. The Duchess presses a hand to her corsaged heart at the sight of me. Vignette just grins.

  “Perfect?” Cupcake prompts.

  “So perfect,” they say.

  “Samantha,” the Duchess says, taking my hands, like I’m infirm, “we have a surprise for you.”

  I have a vision of maggots exploding from a shiny, beribboned box.

  “What sort of surprise?”
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  They all look at each other and smile.

  “Make yourself comfortable and we’ll be right back, okay?”

  “Wait, what’s—”

  “Our friends will entertain you. Hugo, Beowulf, Blake, Lars, this is Samantha. Samantha,” the Duchess repeats loudly as if talking to someone who is nearly deaf or foreign or five.

  “Samantha,” they all repeat in eerie unison. They stand there blinking at me, while the Bunnies disappear through a door to the right of Creepy Doll’s bedroom in a cluster of giggles.

  We stand there for a while, me and these men. The room is spinning. Kate Bush is still singing “Wuthering Heights.” How long is this song anyway? The disco ball turns uselessly above our heads. I take some huge sips of punch. Look more closely at them. Beowulf looks like a young Marlon Brando, the other three vaguely like actors from teen TV. They’re all wearing dark blue suits. They’re staring at my hair like it’s a volcano that could erupt at any moment.

  “So do you guys go to Warren?” I ask, downing the rest of my punch.

  They look at each other. One of them, Lars I think, coughs in my face.

  Then, Beowulf says wistfully, “Your beauty is nuanced and labyrinthine like a sentence by Proust.”

  I laugh, but Beowulf looks dead serious. He raises his glass to me. I notice his punch is in a plastic sippy cup. That he’s wearing black leather gloves.

  “Melanie Shingler is a whore compared to you,” says the boy next to him. Blake. “Pigeon-toed. Bad eyeliner. I couldn’t see it then because I was a fool but I have since developed my perception.”

  He too solemnly raises his sippy cup to me. He’s also wearing black leather gloves, I see. They all are.

  Suddenly, I hear screams coming from above.

  “Jesus. What was that?”

  “Samantha,” Beowulf says. “Tell us about you, Samantha.”

  “Samantha, tell us everything, Samantha.”

  “Samantha, we want to listen.”

  “Samantha,” says Blake, taking my hands in his hands, “we’re dying to know.” He really does look like he’s dying. Maybe he’s drunk.