by Rufi Thorpe
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, basically he is going to pay for her nose job, because, you know, insurance might not cover the very best plastic surgeon, so he promised to hook them up and cover the difference and all her medical bills and all that.”
Bunny looked a little bit green.
“Well, that’s good,” I said.
She nodded, not looking at me, and I realized she was about to start crying. “He told them he’d get them a house. He told them he’d make sure they got a house for below market. They’ve been trying to buy for like two years. And, basically, like, he bribed them. He fucking bribed them not to press charges. And I feel so sick, I keep thinking I’m asleep. Like, I can’t keep track of what’s real.”
“So you didn’t get arrested or anything?”
“No, well, the DA could still press charges. So I still have to go to the police station tomorrow morning. But that was basically the whole afternoon. Dad’s lawyer was over here prepping me.”
“Prepping you in what sense?”
“How to lie. Essentially. What to say.”
“What are you supposed to say?”
“That I went to hit her and then I fell and she fell with me and bonked her head and I crashed on top of her and she hit her head again on the bench on the way down.”
“And that’s not what happened?”
“Well, I mean, I don’t know.” She looked at me blankly.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I don’t remember most of it.” She was playing with the pendant of her necklace, a tiny silver hippo no bigger than her pinky nail, scraping it back and forth across the chain on her neck. “I remember being so mad at her and walking over to her, and then it was like waking up, I just sort of came to on top of her.”
“What happened anyway?” I asked. “I mean, what triggered it?”
The tiny hippo went scrape, scrape, scrape on the chain at her throat. Bunny’s eyes were unfocused and I didn’t know if she was thinking about how to answer or if she was completely zoned out. “Fucking hell,” we heard Ray Lampert yell in the kitchen and then a horrible clatter, like pots and pans falling from high up, and then glass shattering. We ran in to him, and then ran out of the kitchen just as quickly. He was taking plates out of the cupboard one by one and sending them sailing across the room to shatter on the marble floor. He swept the metal fruit basket filled with junk to the floor. He threw a full bottle of wine. We waited, crouched and panting outside the door of the kitchen. Just as suddenly as he began, he seemed to stop. “Fucking hell,” he said again, but this time slower and sad.
“What is it, Daddy?” Bunny asked from the doorway in her best good-girl voice, still too afraid to enter the kitchen.
“Ann Marie has a bleed in her brain.”
* * *
—
The CT scan Ann Marie had in the emergency room had shown a concussion but no hematoma, but then, just as they were getting ready to discharge her, she’d started slurring her words. Gotten real sleepy.
The result of the second CT scan showed a very small subdural hematoma in her occipital lobe. The result of the third CT scan a few hours later showed a slightly larger subdural hematoma in her occipital lobe. The bleed was growing and it was putting pressure on her brain. They were rushing her to surgery to drill a hole through her skull to try to relieve the pressure. And then she would be put in a medically induced coma.
Battery on school property was Section 243.2 in the California penal code. Even if Ann Marie’s parents didn’t want the DA to press charges, and who knew if Ray’s magical house promise would still stand in the face of a brain bleed, the state still could. It would all depend on the mind-set of the prosecutor. Prosecutors, Ray’s lawyer had explained, had almost unfettered discretion in which cases they prosecuted.
Their decision would depend on the seriousness of Ann Marie’s injuries, which were growing more serious by the second. And Bunny would be tried as an adult because the crime had been committed on her literal eighteenth birthday.
“I can’t fucking be here,” Ray Lampert said, looking around at the kitchen filled with broken glass. “I’m gonna go to Charity’s. I’ll call you as I hear stuff.” He shuffled through the glass in his slippers, trying not to pick up his feet or get cut. “Jesus Christ,” he said, before walking out the front door, still in his bedroom slippers, a glass of scotch in his hand.
“Who is Charity?” I asked.
“I don’t really know,” Bunny said. “I assume he’s dating her.”
Without Ray in the house, we were able to function more smoothly. We muted the news and began to sweep the broken debris in the kitchen into piles as we talked.
“I just feel so, so sick,” Bunny said. “What do I do? Do I go in there tomorrow and lie? How on earth can that be the right thing to do?”
“But if you tell the truth, what will happen?”
“I’ll probably go to jail. I don’t know. I don’t have any priors.”
All I could think about was my mother. I pulled out the trash bin from its built-in cubby and began to ferry the bigger pieces of broken glass and porcelain into it. Everything was dripping with wine. “Bunny,” I said, “judges don’t like violent women. I don’t know how to say this. My mom cut my dad superficially with a fruit knife and she got three years. If a man had done it, if it was just a regular domestic violence dispute and the woman who got stabbed, he probably wouldn’t have even seen the inside of a jail cell.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe that’s an exaggeration. But that’s what it seems like. I mean, look at Luke and Donna Morse. How was he not in jail for beating her all those times? My mom said it’s different when it’s the woman who’s violent. It strikes people as abnormal. Like, it’s natural for a guy to just ‘lose his temper,’ but if a woman does the same thing, then it’s a sign of something deeper wrong, like psychologically or almost metaphysically.”
Bunny continued sweeping. The broom’s bristles were getting stained by the wine and it seemed like maybe we were just making a bigger mess.
“But I deserve to be punished,” Bunny said.
“Listen, I trust you. I trust you to be punished. I trust you to learn from this and move on and make it right, and I trust you to accept and live through whatever winds up happening. What I don’t trust is for the system to deal fairly with you, because the system—well, the system will just not deal fairly with you.”
“So you think I should lie?”
“I think you should follow the advice of the lawyer you are lucky your father retained for you.”
“And I should allow my dad to bribe Ann Marie’s parents?”
“Could you stop him?” I asked.
Bunny laughed. “That’s the real joke, all these years I thought I was somehow ‘keeping him in line,’ like I was the one running everything. Like I had any control over what he did or didn’t do.”
“Okay, if we get the big pieces in, then I’ll get the dustpan for the little pieces, and then where’s the mop? We should mop because the wine is seriously gonna stain this white marble.”
* * *
—
It was only as we were saying good night that I found out.
We were on her porch. It was late and cold and the town was hushed enough that you could hear the Pacific in the distance, roaring as it hit the shore. Crickets chirruped. “I’m just so sorry,” Bunny said, twisting up her hands inside the sleeves of her sweatshirt. “I know my heart was in the right place, but I wasn’t thinking. Obviously. I mean, I just wanted her to shut up, I wasn’t thinking about how my, like, attacking her would make it even bigger gossip.”
“Don’t apologize,” I said. I thought she was talking about the gossip of her biting Ryan Brassard’s ear. I thought she was talking about how now ther
e would be two strikes against her, the bite and the attack, that she would be seen as a monster.
“Does your aunt know?”
“I have no idea,” I said honestly.
“Well, just let me know how it all goes at home. I know she kind of knows you’re gay, but I mean—I just assume if I didn’t know you were dating someone, then she doesn’t know you were dating someone.”
It was like the moment in a dream before something terrible happens and the perspective shatters and you start seeing everything from three different camera angles at once.
“Oh god, you didn’t know,” she said. “I thought for sure you knew. I knew you saw Naomi and the team, and when I texted you I already thought you knew and I said I was sorry and you said don’t be silly, so I thought you knew.”
“Well. Obviously, I don’t know.”
“The reason I attacked Ann Marie was because she was talking about you.”
All the darkness of the night was trying to get inside my mouth.
“I guess she saw you and some guy kissing in a car. And she recognized you, but she also recognized the guy. I guess he used to work with her dad at SpaceX and he’s like sixty, and she was all, ‘I went to that guy’s retirement party! He’s a fucking geezer, it’s so gross.’ And I just—I just wanted to shut her mouth. I just wanted to make words stop coming out of her mouth. She was calling him a pedophile and, like, how could you be into it, and I—”
I was nodding, rapidly, as though that could help the shame disperse more quickly through my bloodstream. I knew instantly that Ann Marie had been telling the truth—that she really did know Anthony. No part of me considered for even a moment that she was wrong, that she had been mistaken when she recognized him. It was a small world, a small town, a small piece of a big city. Of course he had lied to me. Of course he was older than his profile, just as I was younger than my profile. He had fucking gray hair for lord’s sake! Of course that’s why he was always available in the daytime. He didn’t have a job because he was fucking retired. He was looking for something secret on the side because he was in the closet, probably married forty years. He probably had kids. He probably had kids older than me. That was the shame—that I had known and refused to know, and now someone had turned on the lights to reveal that I had been humping a doll, not something real, but something false, constructed by my own wishful thinking.
“I have to go,” I said. “It’s late.”
“Michael,” Bunny said.
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked. “Without your dad here?”
“He’ll probably come back before morning,” she said. “I mean, I assume he’s not gonna let me go to the police by myself.”
“Right,” I said. And I walked to the sidewalk and turned up my own front steps, so upset and surprised that I was both blind and numb, barely able to work my key in the lock, horrified at the idea of talking to anyone, of anyone even seeing my face. I could just imagine it, Ann Marie laughing and saying, “What a fucking pedo!”
Probably I would have had a torturous night under any conditions, but to have to exist in my current mental state, which was essentially a strobe of shameful images, imagining Ann Marie laughing, imagining other kids at school making grossed-out faces as they heard the story, imagining Bunny slamming Ann Marie’s head into the lockers over and over again, hearing Naomi’s voice, like celery wrapped in meat, like, just crunching, imagining Anthony kissing his children on the head, imagining Anthony attending his children’s high school graduations, imagining Anthony having sex with his wife, imagining Anthony teaching his kids to drive, buying them cars, when I would never learn to drive, and I would never be able to afford a car, and I would become a bus person, and I would not be saved; to imagine all of this in a fast-forward phantasmagoria while also sitting in the same room as my farting, burping cousin Jason, who was playing Call of Duty on his computer late, late into the night, wearing headphones, so all I could hear was his gross voice talking to his buddies through his headset and the plastic creaking of the controls as he hammered them, pretending to shoot imaginary people, was creating such a high-pitched distress inside my body that it seemed impossible that I could continue to lie there unmoving, scrolling through my phone.
I was obsessively monitoring the Instagram and Facebook accounts of everyone we knew. I wanted to know what was happening to Ann Marie, but I also wanted to know if anyone was talking about Anthony and me. If the gossip spread far and fast enough, it would enter my household, and I was genuinely uncertain if I would still be allowed to keep living there once Aunt Deedee knew that my sexuality was no longer merely theoretical (and therefore clean, sympathetic even), but now actual (and therefore dirty, saturated with human fluid, dangerous).
In the same way that certain brands of toothpaste house the component colors of the toothpaste in separate chambers before a compression pump unites them on the brush, my mind seemed to contain two contradictory paradigms that nevertheless existed simultaneously: 1. The gossip might stay contained to the world of high school, and there were pretty even odds of whether or not Jason, who would no doubt hear tomorrow that I was gay and making out with grandads in cars, would tell Aunt Deedee. After all, he told Aunt Deedee nothing else that went on. And even if he did tell her, couldn’t I deny it? The only person who had actually seen me was now in a medically induced coma. I could pretend it was just a vicious rumor. Maybe she would even feel badly that I was being bullied at school. I made good grades, I worked a job, I paid for my own clothing and food, and last month I had even paid her electric bill because she was a month behind. She wasn’t going to just kick me to the curb. 2. Her face would go dark when she found out. Jason would tell her immediately, and her reaction would be visceral. Hadn’t she told me? No boys in the house. And didn’t we both know that it meant: No boys? Sure, I hadn’t brought a man home, but I had behaved so foolishly that now the entire town knew I was thirsty for seniors. Jason would refuse to share a room with a “known homo.”
I had been living in a careful system of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and I had violated the agreement, and now the bonds of family and obligation would be null and void. In such circumstances, returning to my mother’s household would be out of the question. Just yesterday, I might have fantasized about running away with Anthony, but now that idea seemed flimsy and childish. Really, the best outcome I could possibly see would be if Ray Lampert would loan me the money to put a deposit down on a studio apartment and quit school so I could work full-time. And if he wouldn’t lend me the money, then perhaps Terrence would. And if Terrence wouldn’t, then perhaps I would live in a shelter. Didn’t they have shelters? Or maybe I could buy a beater car and just live in the car? I didn’t even know how to drive. The one thing that was tripping me up was that I couldn’t imagine staying in North Shore. I would have to get a new job. I would have to start entirely over. It was too much to think about.
And so I scrolled and scrolled through my phone. Ann Marie’s accounts were silent, obviously. She wasn’t well enough to post dramatic ER selfies.
I checked Kelsey’s Snapchat, another girl on the volleyball team, best friends with Ann Marie. There she was, in the hospital waiting room, looking somber in a selfie. She had put crying-face emojis over it and the text running across the bottom in a stripe said: “Praying for my best friend.” Then I checked the Snapchat stories of the rest of the team. Half of them were in that hospital waiting room or had spent some portion of the evening there. Even Naomi was there. She had taken a picture of Ann Marie’s mother, Ms. Harriet, her shoulders hunched, staring off into space, sitting under a TV she wasn’t watching. Her face looked numb and frozen, as though if you pinched her it would feel like chicken breasts that hadn’t thawed all the way. The text Naomi had chosen said: “Psalm 34:19.” I didn’t know the Bible, had never been to church even as a child, and while I knew Naomi went to church every Sunday I had not given this considerable
thought. It was just something she did, the same way she did her homework. In my defense, so many of her opinions were openly blasphemous that a display of sincere religiosity caught me off guard.
I googled the Psalm, and it said: “The righteous person may have many troubles, but the LORD delivers him from them all.”
Was Ann Marie the righteous person? Was that how it seemed to Naomi?
I couldn’t imagine what she meant, although there was something about the word “righteous” that did ring a distant mental bell. Almost as though you didn’t have to seem right, you had to actually be right. Straight and unbent. True. Inside yourself, the circuitry untangled and clear.
I looked at the picture of Ann Marie’s mother and I understood that her baby girl had been attacked, her face mutilated, her brain damaged. And she might die tonight.
For the first time that day, I understood that it was real. That Bunny had done this monstrous thing, and that none of it could ever be undone.
* * *
—
When I woke up in the morning I had a text from Anthony. It said:
Sometimes I am terrified of what we are doing. I read these lines by Jack Gilbert last night and thought of you: A feudal world crushed under / the weight of passion without feeling. / Gianna’s virgin body helplessly in love. / The young man wild with romance and appetite. / Wondering whether he would ruin her by mistake.
I read the poem almost numb, and I could feel one part of my brain go down the familiar track of sympathy and delight, that Anthony felt these big feelings, that Anthony framed his life so metaphysically, and I was interested in this “passion without feeling,” what a phrase. What did that mean: to have passion without feeling? Some kind of numb, ecstatic frenzy! And wasn’t the young virgin to be pitied? And wasn’t the young man wild with romance and appetite to be pitied? And weren’t all these big dramatic feelings to be pitied and explored and charted and indexed and treated with the same reverence an astronomer feels toward the stars?
