The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

  “Oh,” I said. It seemed wrong that I could be in a hospital for a crime there wasn’t enough evidence for, as though I were Schrödinger’s cat. I might be, but possibly was not, the victim of assault. Maybe four guys had gotten together and beaten the piss out of me, or maybe they hadn’t? Hell, who could say in this wacky world! It didn’t matter that I was bruised, peeing blood, that it hurt like fuck to laugh or sneeze because my ribs were broken. Just moments ago, when I had thought the choice was mine, I had wanted to make sure those boys would not be brought up on charges, but now that I knew I was powerless, I was furious that they might not be, and anxious about what it might mean in terms of my medical expenses.

  “A social worker should be stopping by today or tomorrow to see you,” Detective Carmine said. I was released the next day, and Bunny drove me to her house in her red Jeep Cherokee, and I dimly saw through the darkened glass Jason watching from our kitchen as she led me, limping, up the path into her mansion.

  Bunny devoted herself to taking care of me in a way I might not have expected. The next morning, she showed up in my room. They had installed me in the Madame Butterfly Suicide Sex Suite, a place teeming with memories of Anthony, so that any surface my mind attempted to land on became a knife that cut me. She was carrying a tray: peanut butter toast, a bruised banana, and a shot glass holding a bug-eaten rose from their front yard. I had been worried after the way I drunkenly insulted Ray that I would not be allowed to stay with them, but Bunny had told me he was extremely sorry and embarrassed about it, and indeed Ray himself had made a speech to that effect immediately upon my entering their home, and at the end had even gotten down on one knee and grasped my hands. “I am determined,” he said, “to become a better man.” I looked at him, understanding that he was already very drunk. The bruising on his cheeks was gone now, I had been in the hospital for so long, but there was a hot pink seam at his hairline that I couldn’t stop looking at. Really, all things considered, he did look much better, and it was amazing how completely the bags under his eyes were gone. He looked ten years younger. With his eyes open, you could no longer see where the stitches had been because they were right in the fold, but every time he blinked, you could see the hot red line where they were still healing. I did not believe he would become a better man, but I was very grateful he was letting me stay in his house. When I thought of the things I had said to him, especially about Allison, I felt like a dog that had pooped indoors.

  “Oh my god,” I said, gesturing at the tray. “You’re so Judy!”

  “Well, you deserve it. I’m not going into work today,” Bunny told me as I ate my peanut butter toast. She had thrown herself across the foot of the bed, having settled me with my tray, and was now examining her toes.

  “I know I’m not allowed to mourn,” Bunny said. “But I—”

  “For Ann Marie?”

  “Yeah. I just, you know, and I never, I just can’t—” Her words were like a car that wouldn’t start, an engine that refused to turn over into a full sentence.

  “I know,” I said. “Bunny, I know.” What had happened was so big, and we were so used to considering our lives as trivial. We almost didn’t know how to approach it. The largeness of what had happened, of what we had done.

  “It was an accident,” Bunny said, her chin crumpling. “I never meant. I never, ever, ever meant to—”

  “Of course you didn’t,” I said. “I know that.”

  “I loved her. I mean, I hated her, but I also loved her.”

  Those two girls growing up in that red sandbox. Those two ponytailed heads turning at the sound of the ice-cream truck. Ann Marie’s round ugly-cute face in goggles as they stared at each other underwater. They had braided each other’s hair. They had slept in the same sleeping bag. Ann Marie had known Allison, could remember meals Allison used to cook. She knew how their living room used to look before Ray redid it.

  “And then sometimes,” Bunny said, “sometimes I’m just mad at her. Please don’t ever tell anyone this because it’s so bad that I even think these things, but like, of course Ann Marie would find the ultimate way to ruin my life with her crazy-fragile brain tissue. Like, how dare you die and pin all of this on me, and I even picture her, like, laughing in heaven or whatever. She was always so on about heaven. Who was getting in and who wasn’t. Who God loved and who he didn’t. And then I thought I saw her. At the Rite Aid.”

  “What?”

  “I just fully hallucinated that this other girl was her! She was in the skin-care aisle, and I was so convinced it was Ann Marie that I was, like, creepily walking up behind her, about to tap her on the shoulder. And I just thought, oh thank god, it’s all been a big mistake.” She stared at me. “Am I going insane? How could I think that? How could my mind—and I just keep remembering stuff. Stuff we did as kids. Like we loved the game Concentrate. Do you remember that game?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It was a really weird game, I don’t even know how we learned it, but it was like a rhyming game? Where you were supposed to be hypnotizing the person and kind of simulating these experiences for them? You would hammer on their back with your fists and say, ‘Concentrate, Concentrate, People are dying, Babies are crying, Concentrate.’ ”

  “I have never heard of this game in my life.”

  “I swear, it’s a thing,” Bunny said. “Lots of girls played it. Anyway, you pretended to crack an egg on the person’s head, and then you would pretend to stab them in the back and push them off a building, and they were supposed to imagine themselves dying and tell you what color they saw.”

  “This is insane.”

  “I know. Little girls are insane.”

  We sat there and Bunny didn’t say more.

  * * *

  —

  “What’s going on with Eric?” I asked, later when we were out by the pool. I had taken a shower in her dad’s ultra-luxury steam shower, and we had made cinnamon rolls from the can, and I was feeling woozy but good from the sugar.

  “Well, we’re definitely having sex.”

  “Shut the front door!” I said. I had not been prepared for this. I had stupidly been in the hospital and out of touch, unable to protect her or at least try to sway her from driving just straight into the rocks.

  “Well?” I said. “How is it?”

  “I mean, good?”

  “How did it happen? You have to give me the entire scene. Go.”

  “Well. One day, I guess like ten days ago, after our practice, he asked what I was doing, and I said, avoiding going home for as long as possible, and he asked if I wanted to come see his new apartment, because he just moved to Hermosa Beach. So I was like, sure. So he drove us there, and he asked a bunch of questions about my dad, and was he super strict, and I was like, no, he doesn’t know half of what I do, I don’t even have a curfew, I’ve stayed out all night before and he’s never even noticed. And he’s like, cool, cool. So then we go to his apartment.”

  “What was his apartment like?”

  “Oh, it was like boy stuff, like bro-y, he had a cheap leather couch from IKEA, but then no rug or coffee table or other stuff to make it look less sad. He did have a cat, though, which somehow made me feel safe. It’s an orange tabby named Mayonnaise.”

  “That’s cute,” I said. I was already feeling yucky about this story and she hadn’t even gotten to the juicy parts, but I was trying to be supportive and nonjudgmental. Stay focused on the cat.

  “So he made us drinks, Cactus Coolers and tequila, which is yummy, turns out. And we were just being silly. I don’t know, I remember laughing a lot, but I guess I got pretty hammered, which is kind of embarrassing, and then I don’t have any memories at all.”

  “Wait—what?”

  “But in a way, I’m kind of glad because I got it over with and I didn’t have to be all awkward.”

  “So wait, you had sex?”


  “I guess so, I woke up in the morning totally naked with him on top of me, like inside me, and I leapt out of bed and I was scrambling around, out of my mind, like crying and screaming and trying to hide in the bathroom.” She was laughing as she told me this, making fun of herself. “Because I had no idea what was going on. But then he explained it to me, how I was the one who kissed him, how I gave him this whole speech about how I wanted him to be the one to take my virginity and then I burped in his face, which is embarrassing, but I was also like, that sounds about right.”

  “So were you upset?” I began rubbing at my knees where the sunscreen was refusing to soak in.

  “I mean, no. I mean, like, yes, obviously, because also I was hungover so I felt like I was dying and I spent the rest of the day throwing up and then that was the day you got attacked, and it honestly felt like the world was ending. But we’ve done it since then. So, like, I have memories. That was important to me. Because I feel like it’s not really your virginity if you can’t remember it.”

  “Right,” I said. In a way, I wasn’t sure how to proceed, but honesty seemed like a good base layer. “So that was date rape.”

  “But does it really count as date rape if I wanted it to happen?”

  “Admitted gray area,” I said. “But it sounds like in the morning you did not want to have sex, and, like, he was having sex with your sleeping, passed-out body, which is gross and wrong.”

  “Please don’t ruin this for me,” she said.

  “I’m not trying to ruin it! If you’re into it, then I’m fully supportive, I just want to advocate for your boundaries.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Noted.”

  “Well, do you enjoy it? I mean, is the sex good?”

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  “Do you cum?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said.

  “If you’re not sure, then you’re not cumming.”

  “It’s just so much going on, I mean, I certainly feel a building to something and then a kind of frenzy?”

  “But is it like when you masturbate? Are you like, nrrrr?” I rolled my eyes up in my head and faked a small seizure.

  “No. Definitely not. But it’s still pretty painful so I’m not sure if that maybe has something to do with it.”

  One of the simplicities of being male was always definitely knowing whether or not I had orgasmed, so I found her answers maddening. I had chosen much more bizarre and, on paper, bad sexual partners, but I had always had my own erection as a kind of guide, a Virgil, if you will, to lead me through the inferno. And I had been occasionally freaked out by where it led me, but there was no faking it.

  Women, however, had drunk so very deeply of the cultural Kool-Aid that they couldn’t even figure out if they were cumming. Were they moaning right? Did their tits look good? How were they supposed to let go, get carried away? They were in deepest drag and they didn’t even seem to know it. I felt bad for Bunny but also ill-suited to help, and a little bit grossed out. It just seemed unnatural to me. Not a man and a woman having sex, although that wasn’t my favorite thing to picture, but someone not understanding or being able to detect their own sexual pleasure. It was like someone confessing they liked eating soap and dirt, that they couldn’t tell what was food and what was not food.

  “But isn’t the pain,” I said, trying to figure it out, “like, at first it hurts, and then it gets hot and it stops hurting?”

  “No,” she said, “definitely not, it hurts the whole way through.”

  “Like, pardon me if this is too intimate, but are you really dry or something?”

  “I have nothing to compare it to,” she said.

  “Has he said anything?”

  “He said I’m really tight, which is a compliment, right?”

  “Yeah, but if it’s causing you active pain, then not so much.”

  She took off her sunglasses and sat up on her lounger then, and she looked more sad than I had ever seen her, even after Ryan Brassard told everyone she had bitten his ear. “But it’s supposed to hurt! That’s like the first thing anyone tells a girl about sex is that it’s gonna hurt and she’s gonna bleed, but no one ever tells you when it will stop being like that. I don’t even care,” she said, “I would keep doing it except—”

  She broke off and there was a wet sound in her voice like tears were coming, but then none came. She put her sunglasses back on and sat perfectly still, like she was killing someone far away with her mind.

  “What is it?”

  “He has a girlfriend,” she said with a tremendous exhale. Sometimes I marveled at the sheer size of her lungs. They must be the size of grocery bags in her chest. “Which I knew! And I thought I didn’t care, but obviously I do.”

  “Well,” I said, searching for a bright side. After all, my boyfriend had a fucking wife.

  “And I told myself I was fine with it, but he teases me about it. He’ll be on the phone with her and start fingering me and keep talking to her, and when I pull away or get mad, he’s like, ‘Don’t get all butt hurt.’ Or he will make fun of me for being jealous. He says I’m irrational, he calls me his irrational little bull.”

  I hesitated, because calling Bunny an irrational little bull was both apt and kind of cute, but these were all still giant red flags, just waving in the lusty breeze. “I don’t like this, Bunny. It’s one thing to have a girlfriend but to call her in front of you and then try to finger you—that’s power-tripping.”

  “I think he thinks he’s just being funny,” she said. “He says if he didn’t know better he’d fall in love with me.”

  “What is that supposed to even mean?”

  “I have no idea,” Bunny said. “But I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be a compliment.”

  “That’s the shadiest compliment I’ve ever heard.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and shrugged. It struck me as perverse, a grown man treating such a majestic creature as Bunny Lampert this way. With her large hands and soft little titties, she was a Wagnerian fantasy of a milkmaid, a baby Valkyrie. Was Eric insane? Did he stomp on flowers and piss on kittens?

  “Fuck that boy,” I said.

  She smiled. “Indeed, I already have.”

  “Walk on him in your heels, grind his face into the mud, honey. That boy is trash.”

  “You are sweet to me,” she said, and picked up my hand, kissed my wrist. “But I don’t think I’m the kind of girl who is going to get Prince Charming.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing,” I said.

  “Well, Michael, I’m a fucking murderer.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said, before I could think about it.

  “But I am,” she said, with such sureness I was terrified.

  * * *

  —

  Because I was living with Ray and Bunny, I had front-row seats for everything that came next. We did not attend Ann Marie’s funeral; Ray thought it would be offensive, and his lawyer advised against it. I was there when his lawyer, a man named Swanson, whose lips were too red and who wore truly unattractive glasses, little beady grandma wire-frame dealies that made him look ten years older than he was, swept into the house at ten o’clock at night, also drunk, demanding that Ray pour him a scotch and then getting angry at the quality of the scotch (“Swanson, I don’t drink scotch! Forgive me, this was a gift from a client, blame him, not me!”), and told us that Ms. Harriet had called the DA and was demanding murder charges.

  “There’s no way,” Ray said. “It’s involuntary manslaughter at the most, which you yourself said was a wobbler. Misdemeanor manslaughter. That’s the most they’ll do.”

  “Ray, I’m telling you that the DA was making noise about going for second degree murder.” I was beg
inning to understand the dynamic between Ray and Swanson. They were like frat boys, even though neither of them had probably ever been in a fraternity. Maybe Swanson had, but there was deep acne scarring on his cheeks and he was a pedant through and through, so I doubted it. The man had no style, no swagger, he’d been pretending to be forty his whole life and now he had finally grown into it. But together they were making up for the youths they’d never had, or something along those lines.

  “How? How would that ever fucking fly?”

  “He’s saying she has a violent past. Some incident where she bit a kid.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Ray turned to us, the silent peanut gallery curled up under a fake-fur throw on the couch. “You never bit anybody, did you?”

  “Uhh…” Bunny said. “Well, it was like—”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Ray said.

  “I’m not a criminal defense attorney,” Swanson said. “Ray! I can’t take this to trial, you know I’m not a trial lawyer. We’ve gotta get you somebody else.”

  “It has to be you,” Ray said. “I want you. You’re the only one I trust.”

  “I know a great guy,” Swanson said, sucking down the rest of his poor-quality scotch. “His name is Remi, and he’s the best, he can sit in, and—”

  “I don’t want Remi, I want fucking Swanson! Because you’re an animal, Swan! You’re a fucking dirty, cheating, little animal and I want you in my court.” The two men embraced. Ray was almost crying. Bunny was frantically chewing her nails.

  “We’ll see what happens,” Swanson said. “Who knows. Some of those witness accounts, I mean, we could go in there and argue mutual combat.”

  “But she didn’t hit me back,” Bunny said. Both men looked annoyed with her for interrupting.

  “I thought you couldn’t remember anything,” Ray said in a singsong parody of her voice.

  “Maybe she did hit you back, you hit her, you didn’t know your own strength, it was a hell of a punch and then she fell just the right way. These things happen. They happen all the time.”