by Rufi Thorpe
“But that’s not what happened,” Bunny said.
“It’s not about what happened,” Swanson said, waving his glass of scotch around. “There was no video footage. We have nothing but your word, a dead girl, and a bunch of eyewitness accounts that vary wildly.”
“They vary?” I asked. This was the first I had heard of this. Bunny crossed her arms over her chest, pushed air through her nose.
“They vary substantially,” Swanson said, turning to me, warmed by a new audience. “We have some people claiming the punching went on and on, Bunny was like a wild dog, no one could get her off the girl. We have some people claiming it happened in a flash, was like a scuffle, they became aware of it and it was over before they could look. No one agrees how many punches, no one agrees who started it, everyone agrees Ann Marie was running her mouth about that gay kid.”
“He’s the gay kid,” Ray said, gesturing at me.
“Oh, sorry,” Swanson said. “But you know what I mean.”
“Do you think it would make any difference that I was later attacked?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Swanson said.
“Well, the girl who Bunny hit, her boyfriend and his friends jumped me. I was in the hospital for a little over a week.”
“No, no,” Swanson said, “I think that might look bad, make Bunny look even more guilty. Everyone is going to forgive the grieving boyfriend for getting wild after his girlfriend kicks the bucket, I mean, come on. You got any food around here, Ray?”
I felt like I’d been hit in the head, dizzy and blind. Everyone is going to forgive the grieving boyfriend for getting wild after his girlfriend kicks the bucket.
It was like getting my heart broken, somehow. That what happened to me could be framed that way, casually, to my face, in a house with Oriental carpets and marble.
* * *
—
Later, in her room, Bunny and I did face masks.
“It feels like fire ants are crawling all over my skin,” I said.
“It feels like my skin is literally burning completely off.”
“Oh, I love it,” I said.
“The pain is how you know it’s working.”
We were quiet. Skin care was a bond between us because both of us longed to be beautiful, even as we feared we were not and could never be, even as we were suspicious of the urge to be beautiful in the first place. What was that power? You were supposed not to want it, not to crave it, not to pursue it. Beauty was just supposed to land on you like a butterfly, showing the world that you were special, worthy of love, attended by magical birds who folded your laundry. But here we were, trying to burn our skin off for that.
I could tell she was upset. How could she not be? The possibility of a trial, homicide charges. “Why…” I began, not certain what I was going to ask until I said it, “do you think that Ann Marie’s boyfriend jumped me? I always assumed it was because I was gay, but maybe it was because I was your friend, and it was more because of Ann Marie.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe because he was afraid of being seen as beating up a girl? So he couldn’t beat me up directly?”
“Or he was afraid you’d overpower him.”
“Or it was Jason who made it all happen and it was because you’re gay.”
“Or it’s all of those things.”
“Do you ever get freaked out because you do things without planning them?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said.
“I mean, like, sometimes I’ll reach to get an apple off the counter, and then I’ll get freaked out because I didn’t plan to reach out and grab the apple. I just did it. And maybe as I’m doing it, I have a thought like, mmm, apple. But I didn’t plan it. And yet other stuff we do plan and then do on purpose, but it’s like a small, small percentage. At least for me. And I get freaked out about that, and I get afraid that basically I’m sleeping even while I’m awake.”
“I know exactly what you are talking about,” I said. “And I feel exactly the same way.”
And then we washed our faces and went to bed.
* * *
—
I texted Anthony: So did you really break up with me at the hospital while I was totally out of it?
He didn’t text me back for three days.
Then he texted: No, I don’t remember breaking up with you per se, but I feel very guilty because I do think we should stop seeing each other.
I didn’t write back. I didn’t want to seem weak by showing him my anger or my hurt. Yet I mentally composed texts that I refused to send every hour of every day. I just feel ashamed, I imagined writing. Why? Don’t feel ashamed, he would say. For having such a coward and Cyprian man, such a stretched-out, gaping old asshole, as my first love. My rage was incoherent. I didn’t even know what I wanted from him exactly. Probably for him to be someone else, and for me to be someone else, and for the situation to be an entirely different situation than it was. Probably something along those lines.
Meanwhile, I was afraid to leave the house. I didn’t want to run into Jason or Aunt Deedee. Tyler and his friends had not been arrested or charged as far as I knew. I had gotten an unclear phone call from Principal Cardenas telling me to take as long as I needed before coming back to school, with no mention of any formal procedure for resuming my attendance, but I knew I was never going back. It wasn’t exactly that I was afraid they would jump me a second time. In a rational sense, I didn’t expect we would be playing Tom and Jerry, banging each other with hammers all over the town or something. But I did feel like if I caught sight of one of their faces without being braced for it, that I might lose my voice and never be able to speak again. Or perhaps go blind, or turn into a pillar of salt. If I saw them, even for an instant, I would lose the coherency of self, such as I still possessed it.
Aunt Deedee, in particular, was extremely miffed at me for moving out. I could not explain myself. I could not tell her that it was Jason, because I did not know for sure that it had been Jason. What if I were wrong? Or worse, what if I told her and she didn’t believe me? I could not afford these realities. And so I told her that Ray Lampert had insisted, that they had a spare bedroom with an actual closet, that it “just made sense.” And she let it happen because it made her life easier too, but she was still insulted. There she had gone, treating me like her own child, taking care of me like one of her own, and what did I do? Move in with a friend who had a pool, like I wasn’t part of her family at all, like she wasn’t the closest thing I had ever had to a mother. She had actually said that part. “I’ve been like a mother to you, Michael, and I suppose I would have expected a little bit of gratitude.”
Did she think I had forgotten my own mother? My real mother? And even if she had been trying to be a mother to me, shouldn’t she have done a better job? Was teaching me how to apply eyeliner and telling me “no boys” really enough? I had paid for my own food and clothing since I was old enough to get a job. I was living in, literally, a closet. But I said, “I don’t mean to express a lack of gratitude. I am very grateful, Aunt Deedee, I really am. You know I love you.”
“I love you too,” she had gasped, and hugged me so tightly that I finally caught it, what was going on for her, what was at stake. She was upset because she knew she had failed me, and she could not, could not look at it. And I didn’t want to make her look at it either. She really had done her best. She really was trying very hard. It was not fun to be Aunt Deedee. In fact, it was terrible and bleak to be Aunt Deedee.
For whatever reason, in these bizarre, timeless weeks, Bunny decided she needed to teach me to drive. We were always together. She had stopped working for her father out of moral disgust more latently, and need to “take care of me” more patently, and there were only so many shows to binge-watch and only so many blueberry muffin mixes to bake (she loved blueberry muffin mix, she loved to eat the batte
r raw; I had to positively claw the bowl away from her to make sure any of them got baked). And so we went to the DMV and I got my permit, and then she would take me out driving. We drove only in parking lots, especially at first because her Jeep was a stick shift, and I was a slow learner. I would scream every time I stalled the car. This made Bunny laugh hysterically each time we lurched, and I would say, “Shut up, shut up, I can’t concentrate with you laughing like that!” and she would say, “How can you be so bad at something? I’ve never seen you be this bad at anything!”
The thing is, I was falling in love with Bunny again. She was so clumsy with artifice that she had no choice but to be absolutely and authentically herself, which gave me permission to be the same. And that had been part of it all along. That we were our truest selves when we were together.
That Christmas was a weirdly happy one. We didn’t get a tree or do any of that, but we did order in Chinese and have a movie marathon. I hadn’t gotten presents for Ray or Bunny, and I didn’t think there would be any gift exchange, but then on Christmas Eve, Ray suddenly pulled two wrapped boxes out of the closet.
“Wut,” Bunny said.
“You didn’t tell me we were doing presents!” I said.
“We’re not,” Ray said. “Weirdest thing. Found these up on the roof. Wrapped up just like this. I think they’re from Santa. He must have dropped them off early.”
He set a box in front of each of us, and we tore into the paper like little kids. I couldn’t imagine what was in a box this size, and then when I saw the packaging, that white packaging, I almost started crying. I was like one of those audience members sobbing after Oprah gave them a car.
MacBook Airs for both of us, silver and sleek and so expensive I didn’t want to touch it and get finger grease on it.
“To take to college,” Ray said proudly.
I had never known that a material possession could make me so happy, but my giddiness lasted through New Year’s.
Of course, I could not help but think about, almost constantly, what Bunny had done to Ann Marie, and how it was different or the same as what those boys had done to me. I found myself observing her hands, thinking about the heaviness of her bones, the densely packed muscles in her back, in her buttocks, in her thighs. “Like celery…just crunching,” Naomi had said. A mosaic of bone. Pulp. I could vaguely remember someone saying that in the deeper dream chambers of my hospital memories. His spleen is pretty pulpy.
But the difference was, at least to me, that Bunny had seen red. She had left herself, lost herself, in a kind of divine madness, almost like Heracles, who was driven mad by jealous Hera and tricked into killing his own wife and children. Madness personified gets onstage and brags: “Nor shall the ocean with its moaning waves, nor the earthquake, nor the thunderbolt with blast of agony be half so furious as the headlong rush I will make into the breast of Heracles.”
In such a model, madness and violence both are seen as a loss of control, and the essence of good behavior is defined as a maintenance of control. There are a thousand versions of the same philosophy, from studies showing hypotrophy of the frontal cortex in murderers to treatment protocols for domestic abuse that advise against the consumption of alcohol, lest the batterer “lose control.” (I wish I could have told them, drunk as my father was, he always seemed to know to hit my mother or the kids and never accidentally hit a cop.)
In some ways it made Bunny’s violence more terrifying, more otherworldly. I remembered Naomi, how stricken she seemed afterward: “That was some of the craziest shit I’ve ever seen.”
But the boys who had beaten me, pulped my spleen, cracked my ribs, had been laughing. They had been chewing gum. They were not in an ecstatic frenzy. They did not “know not what they did.” They were talking to each other like they always did. I remember one of them made fun of another one for being out of breath from kicking me. They were perfectly in control.
And for me, that made their behavior much worse somehow, though I was hard-pressed to articulate exactly how.
At root, I seemed to be upset about the existence of physical power at all. That violence is nothing but another kind of touching.
I was also confounded by the existence of Ray Lampert as a ready moral corollary. He, an overtly bad man, a man who cheated his neighbors, who committed frauds both large and small, who abused his wife, who was venal and petty and drunk, was universally revered, a valued member of the community, a city council member. And Bunny, by virtue of her actions on a single afternoon, but who was otherwise honest, kind, generous, and hardworking, had been cast out of our community, stigmatized, and mythologized as a specific kind of female evil. She was Lizzy Borden, she was Medea, she was some sort of Kali with the cunt of a cow. Was it any wonder I wanted to excuse her? To explain away what she had done?
But no matter how hard I tried, or how I contorted my mental world, I could not make what Bunny had done right. No one could argue it was right to do that to Ann Marie. Yet I could not stop loving Bunny. I could not stop being on her side. I would continue to love her, even as she horrified me. I would continue to love her because she was mine.
* * *
—
One night in mid-January, when I was fully asleep, Bunny came into my room.
“Sorry,” she said when she saw she had woken me. She already had my window halfway open. The window in the guest bedroom led out to a portion of angled roof, whereas her window opened onto empty air. “Go back to sleep.”
“Where are you going? To see Eric?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Sorry.”
I went back to sleep. But she was not gone for very long. It was only an hour or two later when I heard the window grating open again.
“You smell like fucking gas,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Why do you smell like that?”
“I splashed gas on my shoe when I was gassing up the Jeep,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”
And I did.
* * *
—
The cops came while we were eating breakfast. Cheap bagels, the kind that are too sweet and never toast correctly, slathered in cream cheese. There was a knock on the door, and when I answered they swarmed inside, sliding past me and filling the space, at least six or seven police officers and a gaggle of crime scene techs.
“We have a search warrant and a warrant for your arrest,” one of the officers told Bunny. “You’re charged with the second degree murder of Ann Marie Robertson. You’re also wanted for questioning regarding an act of arson at the construction project on 605 Grand Street. Please stand up and put your hands behind your back.”
“I’ll call your dad,” I said. “I’ll call Swanson.”
Bunny nodded. But she didn’t look scared. She looked somehow enlivened, bold, the way she did when she was on the volleyball court, about to slam a ball out of the sky on her new legs. As though she were proud of herself for the first time in a long time.
Bunny was taken away in a cop car, the house was searched, I gave a statement, and then I just sort of sat on the sofa. The statement had been remarkably easy to give. The detective, a different one from the detectives I had talked to in the hospital, was named Kirby, and she was the most tired-looking person I had ever seen. She questioned me like she had already reviewed the entire history of the earth and there was no longer one single thing that could surprise her. For every hyper-specific question about what we did the night before, what we ate, what we watched, when we went to bed, I told the truth. And then I simply omitted Bunny waking me up by coming through my room. It was some of the easiest lying I had ever done really. I don’t know. I’d been lying to people about what I did and where I was going for so long, and maybe I should have been anguished, but I was calm.
The background questions were more difficult to field and so I opted for total ignorance. What did I know about
those apartment buildings under construction? I said I thought they were going to be pretty when they were done. Did I know Bunny Lampert owned them? I said I had no idea and I asked how an eighteen-year-old could even get a mortgage. Maybe that was a mistake, but honestly I didn’t care what happened to Ray. I hoped they found out that he routinely cheated his friends and neighbors, that he’d convinced the city council to change building codes not because it was better for the town but because it would be more attractive to the developers he had lined up. I hoped they found out he’d opened a credit card under his baby girl’s name when she was only four. I hope they found out he’d destroyed her credit and she’d never get college loans now. I hope they found out every single dirty rotten thing that man had ever done.
No, she had never mentioned them to me. No, to my knowledge she had had no input on the construction process. Did I know what Bunny wanted to be when she grew up?
“Well, a volleyball player,” I said.
The woman stared at me, then wrote this down.
I don’t know, it seemed crazy to me, this woman was a North Shore police officer and Ray Lampert was one of the most visible citizens and his daughter one of the most prominent athletes, how could she not know?
“Has she ever talked about going into business with her dad?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think it would really suit her.”
“How so?”
I didn’t feel she was trying to suss out some hidden truth from me so much as she was appalled by anyone not wanting to become a real estate agent when their daddy had it all teed up for them. “Well, I don’t know. Bunny is not very good at being slick is all. She’s a very genuine person, she’s not a sales kind of person.”
Just then there was a lot of shouting and then laughter, backslapping. They had found her clothes soaked in gasoline.
Mainly I was worried about Bunny. What was happening to her now? Were they taking her mug shot? Were they taking her fingerprints? Were they being mean to her? On the worst possible day of your life, which is the day you are arrested, you would think people could be a little softer with you, but they aren’t. It’s like you’re not human at all anymore. You got yourself into this and now it’s just fucking funny or it’s just fucking life.
