The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

  What it most reminded me of, in a way, was the haughtiness and control of a drag queen. I pictured RuPaul saying, “Sashay away.” What was important to the judge was that the defendant maintain the decorum of the courtroom. That he control himself. Control was the matrix, was the soil, in which any kind of justice or rationality could grow, and if you did not carefully and rigorously maintain the atmosphere of control, then you would have no hope of clarity in anything. Or these were the thoughts that bubbled in my adolescent brain.

  And then it was Bunny’s turn. She and Swan pushed to the front of the room. Ray and I sat with the empty chair between us, the air still warm from Bunny’s body. All I could see was her broad back as she stood before the judge. Swan had told her not to sit.

  “I understand an agreement has been reached between the DA’s office and the defendant,” the judge said.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Swanson said, and there was a murmured “Yes, Your Honor” from the prosecutor’s side as well.

  The judge looked at Bunny with a strange glint in his eye, as though she interested him. “Do you understand that by entering into this plea you are giving up your right to defend yourself with your own testimony?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Bunny said, her voice loud and ringing as a bell.

  “Is this what you want to do?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Do you further understand that by entering into this plea, you are giving up your Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights, your right to refuse to testify against yourself, and your right to a speedy trial. By entering into this plea you are giving up very important, substantial, constitutional rights. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” she said, and again her voice was a bell. I realized the entire court was hushed. They were all interested in this girl, in this girl murderer with the pink sweater and the crystal voice.

  “Are you entering into this plea freely, voluntarily, and understandingly?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. And I felt I could not breathe. What if she copped to the murder charge? Ray’s voice was ringing in my memory. Do you think the DA would make the arson go away? And I worried we were making an incredible mistake. I wished this was like a wedding and the judge would ask if anyone had any objections, but it was not and he would not. It was too late for that kind of thinking.

  “On the afternoon of October twenty-eighth, did you involve yourself in an altercation at North Shore High School wherein you attacked another student, Ann Marie Robertson, causing her to sustain injuries that ultimately led to her death on December tenth?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “To the charge of involuntary manslaughter, how do you plead?”

  “No contest, Your Honor,” she said.

  The judge looked at her for a moment more, then rolled on. “I find waivers knowingly intelligently made. I sentence her to three years state prison. Bailiff, please remand the defendant.”

  And then the bailiff handcuffed her and led her out a door on the side of the courtroom. There was a window into the hallway the door led to, so I could see them even after the door had shut on her. Her hands were cuffed in front of her and the bailiff was steering her down a hallway, and he seemed to be talking to her, and she seemed to be nodding, and then she was gone.

  * * *

  —

  It took me about three days to understand that Bunny was gone, and when understanding finally overtook me, it was like breaching the surface of the water after a near drowning, desperately gulping for air. What was I doing in Ray Lampert’s house? What was I going to do next? I began, haltingly, to claw myself toward a life.

  I walked to Rite Aid, huddled into my sweatshirt, and every house I passed seemed ominous to me, as though there were people inside watching me. When I stepped inside the Rite Aid, I felt like I was home. Terrence let me into his little office, which had a one-way mirror so he could spy on the cashiers. It was all so straightforwardly Orwellian that it seemed a little sweet, from an older, more authoritarian time.

  “Oh my god, oh kid,” he said when he saw me. “How you doing? How’s all your—guts?” He motioned around his own midsection.

  “Well, a lot better. I mean, physically. I just—I’m so embarrassed, but I need help.”

  “Tell me.”

  The problem with telling him was that my eyes involuntarily produced tears, even though I was not sad about these things exactly. I explained that Jason had been one of the boys who beat me up, but that I hadn’t wanted to tell anyone, and I hadn’t told Aunt Deedee. I don’t know why, but when I was talking to Terrence, it was easy to say it was Jason and to be sure. Everything was really very simple, there inside the Rite Aid manager’s office. Maybe because I knew he would believe me. My questions and explanations came in little thorny bursts that were extremely physically painful in a way that bewildered me, but with each piece I got out, I felt lighter and calmer.

  He immediately agreed to my request to come and live with his family. He immediately agreed to transfer me to another Rite Aid somewhere outside the orbit of North Shore. He hugged me so tightly my nose was smashed into his shirt and I smelled the sweet powdery perfume of some brand of laundry detergent I had never smelled before.

  “You are such a good kid,” Terrence said with a ferocity I had never heard in his voice except when talking about football. “Goddamnit, you’re a good kid.”

  “Thank you, Terrence,” I said. I felt like I was floating, like my body was weightless, the way it was in Bunny’s pool. I wasn’t sure if my legs would function well enough to carry me back to Ray’s house to pack my things, but they did.

  * * *

  —

  And so I moved in with Terrence’s family, engulfed by his many noisy children who were charmed by the irregularity of my sudden appearance. “I think we are in a pretend world and someone is playing with us,” his three-year-old said to me, her face inches from my own close to dawn in the gray-blue light of their living room. Breakfast time in that house was like Abbott and Costello on bennies but with a lot of farting, and by the time everyone left for school or preschool or kindergarten or wherever, I was usually slightly smeared with peanut butter from cuddles I would never have dared ask for. I loved it at Terrence’s house. I cannot even begin to describe how safe I felt there. His wife bought me socks because she noticed I did not own any. I had never bothered to spend money on socks when I could just not wear them, but I found that I adored the soft black cotton socks she bought. They made my feet feel so chaste and clean. I tried to express my gratitude by doing laundry, vacuuming when the dog hair buildup became uncomfortable (they had an aged pug named Grinch), playing with the kids, and helping with their homework, and Terrence’s wife, Olivia, was gobsmacked by this, as though no one had ever in the history of the world helped her, and so I became a most besotted suck-up, and she my sappy liege.

  In February I turned eighteen, and my mother invited me to their new house, or new to me—they had been living there for over a year. She gave me a flask as a present, engraved with my name. “Did you think I was turning twenty-one?” I asked. “What? No!” she said, laughing and hurt. “Why would—I just—nobody waits to be twenty-one to drink.”

  “True,” I said.

  “Now you can seem like the cool guy at parties,” she said. I don’t know who she thought I possibly was. “Speaking of cool guys, I wanted to inform you: Surprise! There’s a new member of your family!”

  My smile was frozen. Was she saying she was pregnant?

  “Me and James got married!” She squealed.

  “Wow, when?” I asked.

  “We went to Vegas just before you went into the hospital,” my mother said. I always noticed how no one ever said “when you were attacked” or “when you were beaten.” They always phrased it as my “going into the hospital,” like it was a line of work, or like I was a n
un entering a convent. Obviously, I had not been invited to their wedding.

  “Gabby was my maid of honor,” my mom said, smiling shyly. I knew that on some level my mother was embarrassed. As though she had no right to get married again, to wear a white dress and feel loved and important, no right to be happy. She held out her ring for me to admire, but then took it back too quickly. “It’s not real,” she said.

  “Well, that’s great,” I said, but it was the most I could say and she could tell.

  I was alienated by their house. I’d never been here before, the new house. I’d been plenty of times to the old apartment, and of course we often met at the beloved Denny’s on Hawthorne Boulevard. Their house was so clean, much cleaner than our house had ever been in my memory. There were candles burning, even though it was still light out, which was very my mother, but the furniture was all new looking and matching and everything was gray and teal. The walls were a muted gray, the couch was gray, the rug was a lighter gray, then teal accent colors: couch cushions, coffee table items, candles, wall art, all teal. It was like the house had been decorated by a T.J.Maxx HomeGoods specialist. I had remembered my mother’s taste as so much more bohemian, but then I wondered if perhaps our furniture had been mismatched and bizarre because we couldn’t afford furniture that coordinated. I realized, too, that I was sitting in a house, albeit a small one in a not very nice part of Culver City, but it was a house, and I understood now what that meant. I didn’t know if they owned, but even if they were renting, the feeling was different. I had been so overwhelmed by her new boyfriend’s similarities to our father that I had failed to notice this key difference: He had money. Not a lot, but enough. And maybe that would change the way the story unfolded.

  As we talked and ate (my mother had baked several different Trader Joe’s appetizers, little spinach-and-feta cups, tiny pigs in a blanket, it was all very fancy), I kept finding myself evaluating the cost of the items in their home. I noticed Gabby was wearing socks that looked new, an unblemished snowy white with electric-orange toe caps. Her jeans seemed fashionable, with little rips in the knees. Her hair was cut in subtle waves that framed her face. There was a cookie jar in the shape of a French Bulldog in the kitchen. They had a spinning spice rack. While I had been living elsewhere, they had been buying things, acquiring things. Strolling through the aisles of Target or Marshalls and finding something they liked. I do not know why the idea of this made me so achingly jealous, but it did.

  Now that my mother’s boyfriend was my stepfather, I figured it was time to try to learn more about him. I knew that his name was James and that he worked in a garage as a mechanic, but I knew very little else. I guessed that they were still drinking because of the beers and box of wine I saw in the fridge, as well as a faux-rustic sign hung in the kitchen: DON’T TALK TO ME UNTIL I’VE HAD MY WINE. Maybe that was okay. Maybe I was wrong about everything. Maybe it was okay to just cast off one of your children, focus on the one you liked more, drink until you felt happy, and buy stuff. Hyena pups kill off their brothers and sisters until only one from the litter remains. The females even have pseudo penises with which to show dominance and rape each other.

  But James was watching Ancient Aliens in the living room, and he did not feel any social need to engage with us. He had shaken my hand very warmly when I first arrived, and now he was a kind golem steadily absorbing the trickle of false information. I let my mother and sister take me outside to show me their yard.

  “Show him the fairy garden,” Gabby was saying.

  “I will, I will,” my mom said. She led me past some daisy bushes that were frankly thriving and much prettier than daisies had any right to be, and then held back the bladed leaves of a calla lily so that I could see a small clearing between plants. There I saw several tiny houses, their roofs painted to look like mushroom caps. There were tiny lanes paved with pebbles and some miniature white picket fencing. There was a small ladder that led up the trunk of a camellia tree with low branches so that it looked like a fairy had climbed up there to go about their fairy business. A little figurine of a hedgehog was swinging on a tiny rope swing behind one of the toadstool houses.

  “Isn’t it so, so cute?” Gabby was saying.

  “Oh, he doesn’t like it!” my mom cried.

  “No, no, it’s not that,” I said. I didn’t know whether I liked it or not. It struck me as both wonderful and very sad. The child part of me was enchanted, and also deeply jealous, while the adult part of me thought it was stupid and bizarre. The figurines were cheaply made, the colors garish. I didn’t know what to think. “Whose idea was this?”

  “I saw it on Pinterest,” my mother said, “and the very first time I saw it, I just thought: I have to have that.”

  “So interesting,” I said. “It’s very cute.”

  “You think it’s dumb,” my sister said. Her brown eyes were hurt. She looked more like our father, and that had always been the family lore, that I took after our mother and Gabby took after our father, but now, seeing them standing side by side, their arms crossed against the cold, I could see the resemblance almost vibrating between their bodies, the similarity in the way they stood, the way they moved, the dark chocolate color of their hair, though my mother had several strands of silver coming in. I was overwhelmed. I was suddenly extremely upset and worried I would cry, but I had no idea why and it seemed so inappropriate that I was horrified by myself. I couldn’t seem to breathe correctly.

  “Michael, are you okay?” my mother asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “This is just so weird. I haven’t seen you guys in a while, and then the house, and I…”

  “I know,” my mother said.

  “Cause you’re a traitor,” Gabby said. She did a fake little ninja kick at my leg.

  I stuttered, not sure what to say. “I-I’m not a traitor,” I said.

  “Well, you’re the one who didn’t want to live with us,” Gabby said.

  “Oh, Gabby,” my mother said. “We don’t need to talk about that.”

  “You never invited me to live with you,” I said. I thought they meant the house, this house, the current house.

  “Yes, we did,” Gabby said. “Aunt Deedee said you refused. Said you wanted to stay with her.”

  “What? When? When are you talking about?”

  “We don’t need to bring all this up, this is ancient history,” my mother said.

  Was that what they thought? That it had been I who abandoned them? I tried desperately to remember exactly how it had all happened, how it had been decided, but it was so many years ago, and so many of the conversations had been had between my mother and Aunt Deedee that I had no idea what had been said.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said.

  “He’s not even sorry!” Gabby said.

  “What? Sorry for what?”

  “You were my big brother,” she said. “And you just fucking abandoned me.”

  “You are twisting this. Mom didn’t want me.”

  “Who said I didn’t want you?” my mother said, her voice almost hysterical with emotion. “Did Deedee say that?”

  “No!” I said, because I couldn’t remember her actually saying that. “She didn’t say that, it was just implied. Because—well, I mean, because I’m gay.”

  My mother clapped both her hands over her mouth in surprise.

  “Michael!” she gasped. “You are not.”

  “I am,” I said.

  “You are not,” she said again.

  This conversation was getting so bizarre that I looked around at the grass, at the daisies, at the fairy garden, trying to find something to cling to, that was real, that made sense. “I thought you knew,” I said, “when I was in the hospital—you just—I mean, why did you think I was there?”

  “You were beat up!” she said. “Why would that make me think you were gay?”

  “
I was beat up because I’m gay,” I said, though I didn’t know if that was true either.

  “I just want you to know that I accept you,” Gabby said, which was such a one-eighty from her previous anger that I couldn’t take it in as sincere at first.

  “You’re not gay,” my mother said more confidently.

  “I am definitely gay,” I said. “Mom, I’m gay.”

  “I know you think you’re gay,” she said. “But you’re not.”

  “Mom, if he says he’s gay, he’s gay,” Gabby said, and I was grateful that she was my unexpected ally in this situation, but it did nothing to deter my mother.

  “Trust me,” my mother said, “I know you’re not gay.”

  “How do you know I’m not gay?” I asked.

  “Because you would get crushes on little girls!” she said, tugging her hands inside the sleeves of her beige sweater. “When you were little! You always loved the little girls. Listen, Michael, just being more sensitive, having taste, being interested in art, those things don’t make you gay.”

  “I like to suck cock, Mom,” I said. “I like to fuck men in the ass.”

  “Shut your mouth,” my mother said, her fury instant and electric.

  “I’m leaving,” I said. “Thanks for the flask. I’ll use it for all the drinking I don’t do!”

  And I turned and went back into the house. I looked for a second at the cake on the counter. They had gotten the bakery to write Happy Birthday and my name on it. The guilt was so strong it seemed to make my vision wobble, but I went into the living room where James was learning that aliens had visited the Old West and been seen by cowboys. “Bye!” I said, as I put on my sweatshirt.