by Mona Awad
It was the perverted giant who let her into my building. She went upstairs and sat outside my front door waiting for me to come home, figuring at some point I’d come home, I’d have to, but then I didn’t.
I try to picture her sitting on the floor of my foul-smelling, narrow hallway, her very long legs in their ripped-up tights with nowhere to go.
“You really did that?”
She doesn’t dignify that with a reply. Tells me how she even went to Warren, inside the actual buildings. And you know I don’t go there. But she went for me. Called my name in those polished halls. Looking for me. Her friend. Opened the doors to perfumed bathrooms. To classrooms with their own fireplaces. Walked into god knows how many lectures about stem cells and archaeological findings in Egypt, and she called my name there too. Screamed it. No one did anything. Perhaps they thought she was a performance artist.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”
At first, she thought I was avoiding her because I was mad—even though she had no idea what she could have done to piss me off so much. But as the weeks passed she started to really worry. She was even going to file a missing person’s report. She was afraid to go to the police because of some previous unpleasantness. But she was going to do it anyway. Even if they arrested her, she didn’t care. She thought maybe I’d been the victim of the Random Decapitators, a supposed band of roving homicidal maniacs. She never really believed they existed. Thought it was just unfounded rumor, an urban legend, an elaborate frat-boy hoax. But when I disappeared, she got worried. That maybe they did exist, that they cut off my head and put it in a locker or something and it was stinking up some marble hallway. That happened here once. It actually did.
“But then I saw you,” she says. “Finally.”
On the green. Sitting there on the light-splashed grass with the bonobos. I was alive. My head was still on my body. I was fine. Or was I? We were in a circle, the bonobos and I. Doing some of sort of weird huddle hug. The expression on my face was . . .
“What?” I ask, though I don’t want to know.
She looks away, embarrassed for me, I guess. I feel a hot swell of something like shame flood my cheeks.
“I almost didn’t recognize you. You looked . . . shorter. Also, you were wearing . . .” Her eyes dip down to my prancing kittens. “Anyway.”
She says she waved at me. Called my name. I didn’t turn around, even though she was sure I’d heard her. Then she screamed “Bunny,” for kicks, and I did turn around. We all did.
“You looked right at me. You looked right at me and then you looked away.”
I don’t remember this. I try to tell her how I don’t remember this. “I really don’t. I promise. I didn’t see you. I must have not seen you.”
She just stares at me.
“I’m sorry I worried you. I am. I feel terrible. Really I do.” The words fall from my mouth like so many dead leaves. I hear the deadness in them, the crackle. The truth is I feel nothing. It’s like I’m looking at her from the opposite end of a very long tunnel, from the very bottom of a deep, dark well. She’s peering down at me from way up high and shaking and shaking her head. What the hell? Why? Why did you fall into there, Samantha? What’s wrong with you?
I don’t know, is my only answer. It just . . . happened.
“I guess I got wrapped up,” I hear myself say now.
“‘Wrapped up’? In what, exactly?”
I think about the other evening at Bunny’s house with Beowulf VII. We were sitting in the window seat at twilight time, drinking Bunny’s best mead. I was drinking mead; Beowulf was sipping appletizer out of a Dixie cup (actual alcohol upsets them, we’ve found, Bunny). How he complimented me endlessly. Took my hand in his black-leather gloved ones and told me I was the shiningest light he’d ever seen, did I know that, Samantha?
Yes. I knew that.
And if I ever needed food, he would hunt for me. Did I know that, Samantha?
Yes. I knew that too.
Tell me everything, Samantha, everything. I’m listening. I really want to hear and see and touch and know you in every way that respects you.
Do you?
Oh, yes, Samantha.
Everything I’m feeling?
Samantha, everything.
I was drunk. I was bored. Beowulf looked like Donald Glover with blue voids for eyes. I stared at his broad but slightly misshapen shoulders, hidden under his Brooks Brothers suit.
I’m feeling like we should get the hell out of here, I whispered to him. Do some drugs and fuck like rabbits in that patch of woods out there. At this, his face crumpled and he wept.
Bunny, you have to stop asking them that, Bunny said from the loveseat. She was sitting with her boy, who was bluntly stroking her hair with the back of a brush.
You know it only upsets them, agreed Bunny. Her boy was curled in her lap like a cat. She was dropping bits of freesia into his mouth that he kept failing to catch.
Or the other night when, bored with the compliments, the tell me everythings, I said to the one we called Big Rig, No, you tell me something for once!
Something? I— And then his head exploded.
Or last night, when I tried to peek under Lancelot’s black leather gloves to see what the hell was under there. Stumps of flesh? Claws? Hooks? And he bit me. Actually fucking bit me on the shoulder and then the hand. Hard. I screamed and Lancelot screamed and then Bunny grabbed the ax while I covered my eyes and said don’t, don’t, please. And then Bunny had to take me to the hospital because is the risk of rabies gone after a bunny-to-boy transformation? We googled and googled, we consulted our fairy-tale and myth anthologies to no avail, and in the end we thought it was best to seek medical treatment just in case, even though I should just let you die, Bunny, because I told you, haven’t I told you so many times to leave the hands alone? And then all the way there we had to get our stories straight. My pet rabbit has gone off the rails. I don’t know what got into him. And Don’t forget to cry, Bunny growled at me, her long silver hair swept up with spiky flowers, her cobalt eyes black with anger, her face and her dress splattered here and there with bits of blood even though she’d worn her axing apron, the one lined with real pearls that said Kitchen Diva in pale pink cursive. I’d ruined her date. But what sort of date is it, really, Bunny? I thought. I mean, if you never even touch hand flesh, let alone fuck? Isn’t that more of a Disney ride than a date? But this I kept to myself even though my mouth was wide open and the mutinous words were on the tip of my tongue, just waiting for my throat sounds to push them out into the air. I stayed silent.
Really I should just let you die, Bunny, Bunny said to me again. And I agreed. Yes. She should have. That she didn’t is the most wondrous kindness.
Well. Because I love you, Bunny. Actually. You’re actually my favorite.
You’re my favorite too, I lied. But in that moment, I meant it. I meant it so much I cried.
And then she took my injured hand and kissed it with her cold, balm-y lips.
Just remember, please, that Creation is a heavy responsibility. And the Work, though necessary, though vital, though cutting edge, is also volatile, dangerous, not at all to be taken lightly.
Yes, Bunny.
And I thought of Chuck E. Cheese. When my father took me there once for my birthday and we watched the mechanical animal band sing. How after they were finished, I tried to ask them questions about their instruments and they just stared at me with their dead eyes and—
“Smackie!” Ava shouts.
“What?”
She grabs the menu and holds it up even though I know she knows everything on it, even though we already have our food. I’d like some deep fried hare heart, please? she said to the waitress.
Some what?
I’d like a green tea.
“I’m leaving,” she says.
Suddenl
y I feel all the cold rain on my body. My heart becomes a tight fist in my chest.
“Leaving?”
My phone starts buzzing again.
“You better answer that,” she says.
“Wait. What do you mean you’re—”
“Answer it. Otherwise they might call the Bunny police on me. Have me arrested. Put me in Bunny jail with all the other not nice people.”
“Ava.”
“I wonder who my cellmates will be? People who don’t coo hard enough at duckies? Cupcake non-enthusiasts? People who prefer their food normal size and are indifferent to sprinkles?” She’s blowing smoke rings at me shaped like warped hearts.
“What do you mean you’re leaving?”
She looks at me. David Bowie. That’s the name of the singer whose eyes her eyes remind me of. “I mean, I’m leaving here,” she says. “The Lair of Cthulhu. Sketch City. Whatever you’re calling it now. I’m leaving it.”
Panic courses through me. You can’t, you can’t, you can’t. “When?”
“I don’t know yet. Soon.” She looks out the window like she could go right now.
“You can’t!” I shout, and I hear the crack running down the middle of my voice.
“Why can’t I?” The look she gives me is challenging.
“Because . . .” Because something very important. Where are the words? My words are far away. The words I need are high and floating in the sky like so many out-of-reach balloons. I want you to stay. I don’t want you to go. Why can’t I pull these words down from the sky?
“Because?” she prompts.
“I thought you liked it here,” I say at last, lamely.
She makes a face. “I hate it here. I don’t whine about it the way you do but of course I fucking hate it. Warren leeches off this place like a zombie. I’m tired of being Bunny feed. I’ve actually been thinking about it for a while, if you must know. But I was worried about leaving because . . .”
“Because?”
She looks at me.
“Because of Dolores,” she says at last, smiling fondly at the waitress, whose tired back is to us. She’s in the middle of screaming at a cook. Dolores keeps a knife tucked in her bra, which she’ll whip out at the slightest provocation. There are men who come in here just to see Dolores drive its tip into their unwiped table.
“I didn’t want to leave her here alone with the Warren pricks who treat her like she’s some gritty attraction.”
“You never told me you were thinking about leaving.”
“You’ve been hard to reach lately.” She runs a hand through her feathery platinum hair. I notice a bald spot the size of a coin on the side of her head. At the sight of it, I feel a terrible ache.
“Please don’t go,” I say.
She reaches across the table. For a second I think she’s going to stroke my face, but instead she takes off the heart-shaped sunglasses I forgot I was wearing and puts them on. Two hearts over her eyes. The world goes from dark pink to a gray-white hellscape under grimy diner lights. She’s the only beautiful thing in it.
“What can I do to make you not go?”
But she’s looking past me at the front door. “Cover your ears,” she says to me.
“Why?”
“Do it.”
But before I can bring my hands to my ears, I hear it. Pressing on the sides of my head like little screws being twisted into either temple.
“BUNNY?!?!?!”
* * *
—
They rush over to our table, their shiny eyes wide, their faces warped with concern and relief.
“Bunny, thank GOD!”
“We were looking ALL over for you!”
Caroline. Kira. They look as out of place in the diner as two pieces of Easter confection in the apocalypse. Fawns lost in a forest of fanged shadows. My heart rises and falls at the sight.
“I—”
“We were totally going to call the police.”
“Or campus security or something.”
“But then Eleanor was like, ‘Don’t worry about Samantha, it’s Samantha. She’s not like us. She’s seen things.’ So we didn’t.” Cupcake looks out the window and waves. I turn and see Eleanor and Victoria are outside, hanging out by Eleanor’s SUV, watching us through the cracked glass. Thank god you’re safe, Eleanor mouths through the window, pressing her hands to her chest. Victoria just stands beside her with her mouth open like a fish, blinking at me.
“But we texted you,” Caroline says.
“At least a thousand times.”
They look at Ava, seeming to notice her for the first time. Her dark clothes, her veil, her mesh-covered fingers gripping a cigarette like she could easily take out an eye with it. And would be happy to. Then they look back at me.
“So what happened anyway?” Caroline says. “You were with us and then you were just . . . not with us.”
“Like you were . . . kidnapped . . . or something?” Kira says. She turns and gives Ava a tight, uncertain smile. “We didn’t know.”
“We were scared for you, though,” Caroline adds.
“So scared,” Kira says, sneaking another glance at Ava, who stares back so pointedly, so menacingly, that Kira turns away like she’s been slapped.
“What happened, Bunny?” Caroline says.
“Yes, Bunny, what happened?”
Explain this, please.
I become aware once more of the dryness in my throat.
“Well, I—”
“She almost got gored by this giant wolf boy,” Ava says, cigarette dangling out of her mouth. “He had these super-white teeth and these fingernail knives like Freddie Krueger.”
“What? Oh my god!”
“Samantha, is this true???”
“It was terrible,” Ava says, kicking me under the table. “She nearly died. Luckily I happened to be in the alley. I pulled her away just in time. Before he raped you. And killed you. Then raped your dead body.”
I look at Caroline and Kira, staring at Ava, their mouths wide open. Ava just stares back at them, smoking.
“It was those kittens that set him off,” she continues, aiming the cherry of her cigarette at my dress. “He thought they were actual kittens. So he grabbed her thinking, you know, lunch. But then when he realized she was a woman of flesh, that awakened all sorts of other sordid appetites.”
They shudder, hold each other, grip each other’s hands.
“This is why we should never go downtown,” Caroline says.
“At least not to the mall,” adds Kira.
“You should definitely shop online from now on,” Ava says.
They look at her like she is definitely an Owie. But their eyes say she is something else too. A necklace gleaming in the tall grass that could be a snake. That could be a necklace.
“I’ve seen you before,” Caroline says, narrowing her eyes a little, tilting her head in a dreamy way.
“Have you?”
“At the Demitasse at the beginning of the school year. We saw her. Didn’t we see her?”
“Yes,” Kira says. “We saw you.”
They both stare at her with cocked heads, dreamy-curious eyes. Necklace? Snake? Snake-necklace?
Ava just stares back at them like she’s in the Paris metro. Any minute now she could take off her earrings and rise to her full, shadow-casting height.
“You’re Samantha’s friend.”
“Samantha, how come you never introduced us?”
“I bite,” Ava says, sliding out of the booth. “It’s a terrible, voluntary affliction.” Standing up, she dwarfs them.
“Where are you going?” I hear myself say.
She takes the sunglasses off and drops them on the table. She looks at them, then at me. “Air,” she says. “Just some air.”
“Wait,
I’ll come with you,” I say, moving to stand, but they corner me, Caroline plonking down next to me and Kira across, holding my hands tight, patting my damp hair, asking me five million questions at once. Bunny, are you okay? Did you really get attacked by a wolf boy? Who was he? What did he look like? Oh my god, is this the place where the waitress stabs your table? Are you deeply traumatized? Do you think maybe this experience will feed the Work?
“Was he hot?” (This from Victoria, who just joined us.)
“Bunny, he was not hot, also what kind of question is that to ask her right now?”
“Well, excuse me for not wanting to dwell on scarier stuff like if she thought he was going to decapitate her.”
“Oh my god, was he, Samantha?”
“Maybe. I don’t know,” I say. They ignore me. Their questions no longer directed at me, but each other. I spot Ava through the cracked window. She’s standing outside with Eleanor. Talking. Are they talking? I see Eleanor moving her lips like she’s speaking. And Ava appears to be listening, her expression cool. I feel my stomach sink, a surge of panic in my chest.
Ava turns away from Eleanor and sees me looking at her.
For a second, we lock eyes.
Then she walks away. Out of the parking lot. I’m leaving.
“Ava, wait!”
I climb over Caroline, run out of the booth and out of the diner, through its swinging, clanging door. Outside, there is no sign of her anywhere, no one in the parking lot but vagrants and Eleanor, staring at me with a cocked head, a sympathetic, curious smile.
“Everything okay, Samantha?” she says.
Samantha. When was the last time she ever called me Samantha?
“The girls were worried about you but I said don’t worry about Samantha. Give her the time she seems to need to grow.”
She’s looking at me with such smiling sorrow. Oh, Bunny. How far away from us you still insist on drifting. Even though I have killed for you now how many times. All the dresses I’ve given you. All our heart-to-hearts by a fire that kept you warmer than you have been in years. But I understand, of course, that you must have your little outsider moments. And look at us, we let you, even though, well, it upsets us, really. Naturally. It bores us too.
