Also by Mona Awad
13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
First published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Mona Awad, 2019
The moral right of Mona Awad to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781788545426
ISBN (XTPB): 9781788545433
ISBN (E): 9781788545457
Cover photography © shuttersock
Author photograph: © Brigitte Lacombe
Head of Zeus Ltd
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For Jess
Welcome Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Two
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part Three
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Acknowledgments
About the author
An Invitation from the Publisher
We call them Bunnies because that is what they call each other. Seriously. Bunny.
Example:
Hi, Bunny!
Hi, Bunny!
What did you do last night, Bunny?
I hung out with you, Bunny. Remember, Bunny?
That’s right, Bunny, you hung out with me and it was the best time I ever had.
Bunny, I love you.
I love you, Bunny.
And then they hug each other so hard I think their chests are going to implode. I would even secretly hope for it from where I sat, stood, leaned, in the opposite corner of the lecture hall, department lounge, auditorium, bearing witness to four grown women—my academic peers—cooingly strangle each other hello. Or good-bye. Or just because you’re so amazing, Bunny. How fiercely they gripped each other’s pink-and-white bodies, forming a hot little circle of such rib-crushing love and understanding it took my breath away. And then the nuzzling of ski-jump noses, peach fuzzy cheeks. Temples pressed against temples in a way that made me think of the labial rubbing of the bonobo or the telepathy of beautiful, murderous children in horror films. All eight of their eyes shut tight as if this collective asphyxiation were a kind of religious bliss. All four of their glossy mouths making squealing sounds of monstrous love that hurt my face.
I love you, Bunny.
I quietly prayed for the hug implosion all year last year. That their ardent squeezing might cause the flesh to ooze from the sleeves, neckholes, and A-line hems of their cupcake dresses like so much inane frosting. That they would get tangled in each other’s Game of Thrones hair, choked by the ornate braids they were forever braiding into each other’s heart-shaped little heads. That they would choke on each other’s blandly grassy perfume.
Never happened. Not once.
They always came apart from these embraces intact and unwounded despite the ill will that poured forth from my staring eyes like so much comic-book-villain venom. Smiling at one another. Swinging clasped hands. Skins aglow with affection and belonging as though they’d just been hydrated by the purest of mountain streams.
Bunny, I love you.
Completely immune to the disdain of their fellow graduate student. Me. Samantha Heather Mackey. Who is not a Bunny. Who will never be a Bunny.
I pour myself and Ava more free champagne in the far corner of the tented green, where I lean against a white Doric pillar bedecked with billowing tulle. September. Warren University. The Narrative Arts department’s annual welcome back Demitasse, because this school is too Ivy and New England to call a party a party. Behold the tiger-lily-heavy centerpieces. Behold the Christmas-lit white gauze floating everywhere like so many ghosts. Behold the pewter trays of salmon pinwheels, duck-liver crostini topped with little sugared orchids. Behold the white people in black discussing grants they earned to translate poets no one reads from the French. Behold the lavish tent under which the overeducated mingle, well versed in every art but the one of conversation. Smilingly oblivious to the fact that they are in the mouth of hell. Or as Ava and I call it, the Lair of Cthulhu. Cthulhu is a giant squid monster invented by a horror writer who went insane and died here. And you know what, it makes sense. Because you can feel it when you’re walking down the streets beyond the Warren Bubble that this town is a wrong town. Something not quite right about the houses, the trees, the light. Bring this up and most people just look at you. But not Ava. Ava says, My god, yes. The town, the houses, the trees, the light—it’s all fucked.
I stand here, I sway here, full of tepid sparkling and animal livers and whatever hard alcohol Ava keeps pouring from her Drink Me flask into my plastic cup. “What’s in this again?” I ask.
“Just drink it,” she says.
I observe from behind borrowed sunglasses as the women whom I must call my colleagues reunite after a summer spent apart in various trying locales such as remote tropical islands, the south of France, the Hamptons. I watch their fervent little bodies lunge for each other in something like rapture. Nails the color of natural poisons digging into each other’s forearms with the force of what I keep telling myself is feigned, surely feigned, affection. Shiny lips parting to call each other by their communal pet name.
“Jesus, are they for real?” Ava whispers in my ear now. She has never seen them up close. Didn’t believe me when I first told her about them last year. Said, There is no way grown women act like that. You’re making this up, Smackie. Over the summer, I started to think I had too. It is a relief in some ways to see them now, if only to confirm I am not insane.
“Yes,” I say. “Too real.”
I watch her survey them through her fishnet veil, her David Bowie eyes filled with horror and boredom, her mouth an unimpressed red line.
“Can we go now?”
“I can’t leave yet,” I say, my eyes still on them. They’ve pulled apart from one another at last, their twee dresses not even rumpled. Their shiny heads of hair not even disturbed. Their skins glowing with health insurance as they all crouch down in unison to collectively coo at a professor’s ever jumping shih tzu.
“Why?”
“I told you, I have to make an appearance.”
Ava looks at me, slipping drunkenly down the pillar. I have said hello to no one. Not the poets who are their own fresh, grunty hell. Not the new incoming fiction writers who are laughing awkwardly by the shrimp tower. Not even Benjamin, the friendly administrator to whom I usually cling at these sorts of functions, helping him dollop quivering offal onto dried bits of toast. Not my Workshop leader from last spring, Fosco, or any other member of the esteemed faculty. And how was your summer, Sarah? And how’s the thesis coming, Sasha? Asked with polite indifference. Getting my name wrong always. Whatever response I offer—an earnest confession of my own imminent failure, a bald-faced lie that sets my face aflame—will elicit the same knowing nod, the same world-weary smile, a delivery of platitudes about the Process being elusive, the Work being a difficult mistress. Trust, Sasha. Patience, Sarah. Sometimes you have to walk away, Serena. Sometimes, Stephanie, you have to seize the bull by the horns. This will be followed by the recounting of a similar creative crisis/breakthrough they experienced while on a now-defunct residency in remote Greece, Brittany, Estonia. During which I will nod and dig my fingernails into my upper-arm flesh.
And obviously I haven’t talked to the Lion. Even though he’s here, of course. Somewhere. I saw him earlier out of the corner of my eye, more maned and tattooed than ever, pouring himself a glass of red wine at the open bar. Though he didn’t look up, I felt him see me. And then I felt him see me see him see me and keep pouring. I haven’t seen him since then so much as sensed him in my nape hair. When we first arrived, Ava felt he must be nearby because look, the sky just darkened out of nowhere.
This evening, all I have done in terms of socializing is half smile at the one the Bunnies call Psycho Jonah, my social equivalent among the poets, who is standing alone by the punch, smiling beatifically in his own antidepressant-fueled fever dream.
Ava sighs and lights a cigarette with one of the many tea lights that dot our table. She looks back at the Bunnies, who are now stroking each other’s arms with their small, small hands. “I miss you, Bunny,” they say to each other in their fake little girl voices, even though they are standing right fucking next to each other, and I can taste the hate in their hearts like iron on my tongue.
“I miss you, Bunny. This summer was so hard without you. I barely wrote a word, I was so, so sad. Let’s never ever part again, please?”
Ava laughs out loud at this. Actually laughs. Throws her feathery head back. Doesn’t bother to cover her mouth with her gloved hand. It’s a delicious, raucous sound. Ringing in the air like the evening’s missing music.
“Shhhhh,” I hiss at her. But it’s already done.
The laughter causes the one I call the Duchess to turn her head of long, silver faery-witch locks in our direction. She looks at us. First at Ava. Then at me. Then at Ava again. She is surprised, perhaps, to see that for once I’m not alone, that I have a friend. Ava meets her look with wide-open eyes the way I do in my dream stares. Ava’s gaze is formidable and European. She continues to smoke and sip my champagne without breaking eye contact. She once told me about a staring contest she had with a gypsy she met on a metro in Paris. The woman was staring at her, so Ava stared back—the two of them aiming their gazes at each other like guns—all the way across the City of Lights. Just looking at each other from opposite shores of the rattling train. Eventually Ava took off her earrings, still not taking her eyes off the woman. Why? Because her assumption at that point, of course, was that the two of them would fight to the death. But when the train pulled into the last stop on the line, the woman just stood to exit, and when she did so, she even held back the sliding doors politely, so Ava could go first.
What’s the lesson here, Smackie?
Don’t jump to conclusions?
Never lower your gaze first.
The Duchess, in turning toward us, causes a ripple effect of turning among the other Bunnies. First Cupcake looks over. Then Creepy Doll with her tiger eyes. Then Vignette with her lovely Victorian skull face, her stoner mouth wide open. They each look at Ava, then at me, in turn, scanning down from our heads to our feet, their eyes taking us in like little mouths sipping strange drinks. As they do, their noses twitch, their eight eyes do not blink, but stare and stare. Then they look back at the Duchess and lean in to each other, their lip-glossed mouths forming whispery words.
Ava squeezes my arm, hard.
The Duchess turns and arches an eyebrow at us. She raises a hand up. Is there an invisible gun in it? No. It’s an empty, open hand. With which she then waves. At me. With something like a smile on her face. Hi, her mouth says.
My hand shoots up of its own accord before I can even stop myself. I’m waving and waving and waving. Hi, I’m saying with my mouth, even though no sound comes out.
Then the rest of the Bunnies hold up a hand and wave too.
We’re all waving at one another from across the great shores of the tented green.
Except Ava. She continues to smoke and stare at them like they’re a four-headed beast. When at last I lower my hand, I turn to her. She’s looking at me like I’m something worse than a stranger.
The next day, I find the invitation in my school mailbox, expertly folded into a white origami swan. One of them must have slipped it in between the experimental poetry journals and the postcard-size ads for faculty readings, a Romanian documentary, and a one-woman play about the town being The Body and The Body being the town. I came here early, in the off-hours, to see if my monthly stipend check had arrived. No check. I tip the rest of my mail into the recycling bin, then stare at the swan, upon which one of them has drawn a rudimentary face with magenta ink. Two bleeding dots for eyes—one on either side of its very sharp beak, which, with the help of some dimples and inky lipstick—appear to be smiling at me. On one of its wings, the words Open Me ☺
Samantha Heather Mackey,
YOU are cordially invited to . . .
SMUT SALON
When: The Blue Hour ☺
Where: You know where ☺
Bring: Yourself, please ☺
I stare at the loopy, shimmering font, the little hearts one of them (had to be Cupcake, or possibly Creepy Doll?) has drawn around my name. I feel myself start to sweat though it’s freezing in this hallway. Mistake. Has to be. No way in hell they would ever invite me to Smut Salon. That was their own private Bunny thing, like Touching Tuesdays or binge-watching The Bachelorette or making little woodland creatures out of marzipan. Something they’d talk about in low voices all last year, while we were waiting for Workshop to begin.
Smut Salon last night was SO crazy oh my god.
I drank WAY too much last night at Smut Salon.
I was thinking that for next Smut Salon we should . . .
And then they’d cup each other’s ears and whisper the rest.
I scan the invitation again. Impossible that it’s for me. But it has my name on it and everything. Samantha Heather Mackey flanked by bloated hearts. At the sight of my name rendered in those loops, I feel a weird and shameful swelling in my heart. I recall them waving last night. First the Duchess, then the other Bunnies. How I waved and waved back so adamantly.
It’ll be just us five again in Workshop this semester. Which starts tomorrow. I’d been dreading it all summer. Just me and them in a room with no visible escape routes for two hours and twenty minutes. Every week for thirteen weeks. I imagined it would be much like last year. Me on one side of the table and them on the other, sitting in a huglike huddle, becoming one body with four heads the more I narrowed my eyes. The Duchess reading aloud from a diamond-etched pane of glass while the Bunnies closed their eyes as if hearing an actual aria. Holding hands while they praised each other’s stories. Can I have five thousand more pages of this, please? Can I just say I loved living in your lines and that’s where I want to live now forever? Petting each other absently while they discussed the weekly reading. Suddenly erupting with laughter at an inside joke, a laughter in which I never participated because I was never in on the joke, which they never explained because they were too busy laughing. Sorry, Samantha, they might say between gasps, you weren’t there. No, I might agree, I wasn’t. It could go on for several minutes, this laughter. They would shake with it, grow teary-eyed, grip each other’s wrists and shoulders in the throes of it while I sat on the other side of the table, watching them or a nothing space between their heads. Meanwhile, Fosco observed us all, saying nothing. I started coming to class later and later. And by the end, I didn’t come at all. Where’s Samantha? I imagined Fosco asking. We have no idea. Shrugs of their sweatered shoulders. Helpless smiles.
But maybe they’re actually trying to include me this year? Maybe this invitation is a gesture of kindness? Or it might be a joke. Of course it’s a joke. I picture a pair of small-fingered hands folding the swan at a grand oak desk that looks out onto a view of canopied trees. A balmy grin biting on itself with small white teeth.
“Bitches,” I say very quietly in the hall.
“Hey, Sam.”
I jump. Jonah. Standing beside me, leafing through his mailbox, smiling his Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind smile.
“Jonah, you scared me.”
“Sorry, Sam.” He really looks sorry. “Hey, who were you talking to just now?”
“No one. Just me. I talk to myself sometimes.”
“Me too.” He grins. “All the time.” Soup-bowl haircut. An unzipped parka that he never takes off. Underneath he’s wearing a T-shirt featuring a kitten playing keyboards in outer space. Jonah’s a recovering addict who is so saturated with meds that he speaks as though his voice is tunneling through sludge. He’s the best poet in the Program by far. Also the friendliest, the most generous with cigarettes. I don’t quite know why he’s so reviled by his fellow poets—apart from a couple of mixed-genre classes, poets and fiction writers tend to be siloed from one another both academically and socially. But I’ve seen Jonah trailing behind his cohort on the street, sitting in the far corner of class in Workshop, smilingly staring into space while they eviscerate him with their feedback. I know what this feels like, of course. The difference is, Jonah doesn’t seem to care. He appears to be more or less content to remain adrift and immune in his poetry cloud.
“What are you up to, Sam?”
“Oh, just looking for my stipend check.”
“Oh, hey, me too.” He looks ecstatic. “I need it so much. I bought all these books and records and then I pretty much had to live on pasta for the rest of the month. Do you ever do that?”
“Yeah.” I don’t do that. I can’t afford to. I stiffen a little.
“Hey, do you think you’ll go to this?” He holds up the play postcard.
“No,” I snap. Then I feel bad. I add, “I sort of hate plays, Jonah.”
“Oh. Me too, mostly. Hey, I saw you at the party last night. I had an extra smoke waiting for you in the alley but you never showed.”
“Yeah. I left early.”
“Oh.” He nods in a dreamy, knowing way. I’ve basically gotten to know Jonah over shared cigarettes in the alleys, corners, and back porches of the various department parties and functions I’m trying to dodge. I’ll be sneaking out the door, desperate to escape, and I’ll find him out there in the dark cold, shivering and smoking by the dumpster. Hey, Samantha. That’s how I learned that, like me, he’s the only one in his cohort who didn’t come from a renowned undergraduate program. That he too applied to what we are continually told is one of the most exclusive, selective, hard-to-get-into MFA programs in the country on a lark, thinking No Way in Hell.
Isn’t it a trip to be here? he said to me on the back porch at one of the first parties.
Yeah, I slurred, my eyes on the Bunnies, already in the midst of one of their communal, eyes-shut-tight, boa-constricting embraces, even though they’d only just met.
It’s sort of like a dream, Jonah continued. I keep thinking when will I wake up, you know? Like maybe I should ask someone to punch me.
You mean pinch you?
A pinch wouldn’t wake me up from this. And if it did, I’d be back in Fairbanks, living in my dad’s basement. Where would you be if I punched you, Samantha?
Staring at the brick wall of my life from behind a cash register in the intermountain West, I thought. Writing myself elsewhere in the evenings.
Mordor, I told Jonah.
We better not punch each other then, I guess, he said, grinning at me.
“So how’s your writing going, Sam? Did you take advantage of the summer?” He smiles. He’s making fun of our Mixed-Genre Workshop leader last spring, Halstrom, who kept telling us we must not let the summer pass us by. Because this year, the final year, in which we’re all expected to produce a complete manuscript by April, would go by oh so quickly, we wouldn’t believe it. Literally in the blink of an eye, all of this—he gestured with his manicured hand to the stale classroom air around us, the fake pillars, the unlit fireplace, the cavelike walls—would be gone. I watched the Bunnies shiver and give each other a group hug with only their eyes. The poets brace themselves for imminent, overeducated poverty.
“I pretty much wasted it,” Jonah says. “I mean, I wrote like two volumes of poems but they’re terrible so I’m back to square one. I’ll bet you wrote like crazy this summer, though.”
I think of the summer, my days spent gazing at dust motes from behind the Warren music library information kiosk, my nights on Ava’s roof, drinking and tangoing ourselves into oblivion. Sometimes I’d stare at a blank page, a pencil held limply in my hand. Sometimes I’d draw eyes on the page. Scribble the words what am I doing here? what am I doing here? over and over. Mostly I just stared at the wall. The page and the wall were one and the same to me all summer.
“I don’t know about like crazy. . . .”
“I still remember that piece you brought into Workshop last year. You know, the one everybody hated?”
“Yeah, Jonah, I remember.” The horrified faces. Heads slightly bowed.
“I still think about it. I mean, it was pretty hard to forget. It was so . . .”
“Mean?” I offer. “Willfully twisted? Aggressively dark? I know, I think that was pretty much the consensus.”
“No! I mean yes, it was mean and twisted and dark and it actually scared the living shit out of me for weeks. But I loved all that. I love how mean and twisted and dark it is.” He beams at me. “Who ever thought going to an aquarium could be so treacherous and horrifying, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“But if you really think about it, it kind of is.”
“Thanks, Jonah. I liked your piece that everyone hated too.”
“Really? I was going to scrap it but—”
“Don’t do that, that’s what they want.” I say this more intensely, more bitterly than I intend.
Jonah looks confused. “What?”
“Nothing. I should probably go. Late for class.” I’m not late for class. There is no class now. But I imagine Ava waiting for me outside by the bench, giving undergraduates her death stare. Hurry the fuck up, Smackie.
“Oh, okay. Hey, Sam, can I read more of your stuff sometime? I kind of dig it. I mean, I really dig it. I was actually kind of jonesing for it after I read it, you know?”
“Um—I guess so. Sure.”
“Cool. Maybe we could hang out sometime and . . .”
Down the corridor, behind Jonah, I hear the elevator ding and my stomach flips. Because I know before the doors even open who it will be. I know even before I see his tall, sleek frame exit the doors, whistling. Mane a carefully cultivated chaos. Arms inked with watchful crows. The Lion. Approaching us. Wearing his usual obscure noise band T-shirt. One of the bands we used to talk about back when we used to talk. He carries with him the scent of the green tea he used to brew for us in his office, which he would ceremoniously stir, then pour into mud-colored, handleless cups. How’s the writing, Samantha? he might ask in his deep Scottish lilt.
Now I see his leonine face fall slightly at the sight of students with whom he must fraternize. Ask about their summers. Their writing. Did they get their stipend checks okay? And then there’s the fact that I’m one of the students. Makes it much more difficult. But he smiles. Of course he does. It’s his job.
“Hello, Jonah. Samantha.” Definite voice drop when he said my name, though he tries to make it sound cool, even-keeled. Small, subtle nod of his maned head.
I watch him busy himself at his own cubby, which is full to exploding with letters and books. Humming a little. Taking his time.
“Samantha, are you okay?” Jonah says.
I should just walk over there like I’ve imagined doing how many times, tap him on the shoulder and say, Look, can we just talk? He’ll look surprised, perhaps. Caught off guard. Talk? he’ll say, his gaze sliding from side to side, assessing routes of escape. As if it’s a highly suspicious activity I’m proposing. Illicit. I’m afraid I can’t talk now, Samantha. But perhaps you could come by during my office hours?
Or perhaps he’ll play dumb. Look at me with a chillingly neutral expression, revealing nothing. Sure, Samantha. What’s up? Meeting my eyes like go ahead, absolutely, please, talk.
“Samantha?”
And then what? And then I could just cut to the chase and say, I don’t understand what happened between us exactly, but can it just not be weird anymore? But my fear is that he’ll look at me like I’m insane. Weird? Happened? Between us? Samantha, I’m sorry but I really have no idea what you’re talking about, I’m afraid. And he won’t look afraid at all.
But now when I see him standing there, humming, checking his own mail slowly, smiling to himself, my body goes rigid with—I really don’t know what, but I have to go.
“Samantha, wait—” Jonah says.
“I’m really late for class now.”
The Lion looks up from his mail. He probably knows that I am not late for anything. That there is no class right now. That I’m running from him like a scared little bitch. What’s the prey of a lion again?
“Oh, okay. Have a good class, Samantha.” And then Jonah waves and waves and waves at me and I’m reminded of myself, last night, waving, my hand high over my head.
Before I leave to meet Ava, I shove the invitation in my pocket. She said she would wait for me outside the Center for Narrative Arts, sending check vibes. Because I’m not going in there, Smackie. Sorry. You know why. I nodded solemnly. Yes. Even though the truth is I don’t really know why, apart from the fact that she’s militantly anti-Warren and feels it’s full of entitled pricks. Also that it’s killing my soul/creativity. She knows firsthand because she went to the art school right next door which is almost as famous and elite as Warren, and it nearly killed hers. But she didn’t let it. She dropped out before they killed her soul. Fuck that. Fuck them. Now she works in the basement of the nature lab down the hill, shelving dead bugs. Every single dead bug gets its own tiny glass drawer. It’s kind of nice. And infinitely better for her spiritual and creative well-being than hanging around the fake poor and fashionably deranged, aka the art school student body.
The only thing Ava enjoys about Warren is raiding the dumpsters behind the undergraduate dorms and fucking with student campus tours. From time to time we’ll even get drunk on a bench by the infamous flying-hare statue and wait for a drove of would-be students and their parents to pass by. The mothers always look around the campus like extremely interested buyers, their jeweled hands rubbing the backs of their fawnlike spawn as if to say: This could be yours, this could be yours. The future students gaze hungrily or with proprietary ease at a campus green that shimmers like their own skin, perhaps imagining their lavishly appointed dorms or the school orgies they’ve heard about, which Ava says are only attended by the very lame and unexcitingly naked. Not imagining, I’m sure, the very real possibility of being beheaded on their way home one night from a student bar. Or else beaten with crowbars by the roving gangs that stalk the campus and its surrounding area. Because the violence of this place, existing as it does in the fragile heart of seething poverty, doesn’t exactly feature in the script of the Warren campus tour, which is always led by some undergraduate tool in designer sportswear who is quite expert at shouting cozy factoids about statue erection and chandeliers while walking backward. Hence Ava’s pointed disruption.
Warren was founded in 1775 and over here—
Blah, blah, BLAH, finishes Ava on the bench beside me. What he’s not telling you is that there are people right here on campus who will chop your head off, she shouts to the mothers, who look at her, appalled. That’s right. With an ax! Like this. And then she’ll stand up and take a step toward them with an invisible ax over her shoulder and one or some or all of them will scream.
Though I’m horrified, I laugh until I cry every time.
Now that bench has actually become our unofficial meeting place. It’s where she should be sitting at this moment, glaring at the passing students, drawing what she calls the monstrous truth in her sketchbook, as is her wont.
At the sight of the empty bench, I panic. All my lonely days last year swell up in my heart and my vision goes swimmy. Then I feel my right arm being grabbed and I am blindsided by a waft of familiar scent. Two hands swathed in fishnet mesh cover my eyes.
“Boo!” she whispers into my ear.
Though I know who it is, I act surprised. Gasp.
Raucous laughter. She claps her hands. “Jesus Christ, you’re easy,” she says.
“I know. Where did you go?” I ask.
“Two idiots were having a discussion about Virginia Woolf with such orchestrated earnestness, I had to move. What the hell took you so long, anyway? You were gone for like five years.”
I remember the invitation in my pocket, the swan beak poking my stomach flesh as we speak. “I talked to Jonah for a bit.”
“The dreamy poet boy who wants to fuck you?”
“He does not.”
“It’s ridiculous how much he does.”
“He called me dark, twisted, and mean.”
“How sweet. He’s in love.”
“Can we not talk about this?”
She looks at me. “Something else happened. Tell me.”
“Nothing. Just. I had a run-in. Near run-in. With . . . you know.”
Ava nods. She knows, of course. “Did you talk?”
“I couldn’t. You know. Face him. After, you know, everything . . .” I trail off because she’s staring at me intently. I can’t tell if she’s disappointed in me or angry at him.
“You should really consider setting his office on fire,” she says at last, and smiles. “For a second I thought you got kidnapped by those bonobos.”
“Bunnies,” I say, feeling myself flush. Recalling those smiley faces on the invitation. All those hand-drawn hearts.
“Whatever. I was worried.”
She shivers at the view of the grand trees, as if they’re not trees at all but something truly vile, like all the rosy-blond light that seems to forever bathe the campus is about to punch her in the face like a terrible fist of rich. She looks at it all with disgust—the tall old buildings, the ornately spiked gates, the endless stretch of carefully manicured perfumed green teeming with bright-eyed squirrels and rabbits, the students walking here and there, discussing Derrida and their nose jobs, their hair kissed by a September light so golden and perfect it’s as though they’d paid the sun to beam down on them in just that way. I am not immune to the beauty. All year last year I took lots of pictures of campus—click, click, click with my cracked, ancient phone during every season, at different times of the day, in all kinds of light—that I don’t look at anymore and which I sent to no one. A placarded bench between two weeping trees. A two-hundred-year-old bell tower. A fireplace you could stand up in like the one in Citizen Kane. There’s a selfie of me I took in that fireplace. There’s one Ava and I took by the fireplace together, temple to temple, not smiling, as is our way. Her arm is around me, swathed in holey lace. There’s one of just Ava. Because of the way she’s standing before the flames, she looks like a witch being burned at the stake.
Now, she puts a hand on my cheek, gives me a small smile. “Can we get the hell out of here, please? You know I only come here for you.”
*
I don’t say anything to Ava about the Bunny invitation all day. Instead, we celebrate what she continually called my final day of freedom by going to the monster diner where she draws and I write. Supposedly. I just sat there with my notebook open, watching her draw. Then the zoo to say hello to the Moon Bear in his pit. Then out for Vietnamese iced coffees at the sketchy place we like downtown, where I almost got shot.
“You did not almost get shot, Smackie. Jesus Christ. That was a car backing up or something,” she said when I brought it up.
“Yes, I did.”
“You need to get out more.”
“I get out. I’m out with you, aren’t I?”
Now we’re back at her place drinking the sangria she made that’s so strong I’m pretty sure it’s poison. It’s that time of evening she calls the hour between the dog and the wolf. A time that actually makes this sorry swath of New England beautiful, the sky ablaze with a sunset the color of flamingos. We’re on her sagging roof, listening to Argentine tango music to drown out the roaring Mexican music next door. We’re practicing tango, like we did all summer, taking turns being Diego for each other. Diego is an imaginary panther-footed man we dream will one day come into our lives and whisk us off our very large feet. He has the smoldery, dangerously mesmeric looks of Rudolph Valentino but with the trustworthy eye crinkle of Paul Newman, the smiling insanity and very long torso of Lux Interior of The Cramps, but with the swoon-inducing earnestness of Jacques Brel. Diego wears white suits or black Cuban shirts patterned with orange flames. He bakes bread for us in the morning. He cuts fresh flowers and leaves them in jars all over our apartment. He does not write poetry, but he reads it for fun. He has a pied-à-terre in Paris, a mansion in Buenos Aires. Most importantly, he tangos like a dream. I’m Diego right now for Ava, which means I’m leading and she can close her eyes.
The Bunny invitation is still ticking in my pocket like a little bomb.
R u coming tonite? ☺ one of them texted earlier this afternoon.
“I can’t dream that you’re Diego if you keep dancing like an engineering nerd, Smackie. Panther-footed grace, remember?”
“Sorry.”
“What’s with you tonight?”
“Nothing.”
“You seem distracted.”
I should just text Sorry, sick ☹ and be done with it. Because I shouldn’t go. Because even being in their vicinity, hearing their childish voices from the other side of the room, hurts my teeth. And yet the sun has set. And I have yet to say no. Probably they don’t want me to come anyway. Probably they did it just to be nice. Nice? No. Not nice, exactly. So they can say, Well at least we tried. She’s the one who didn’t show.
See, Bunny? I told you she wouldn’t come. This is how she wants it. She wants it like this.
Why, though? Creepy Doll will ask. She’ll be wearing the cat ears they stuck on her head last Halloween that she has yet to take off.
I told you, Cupcake will say, petting her. She’s a freak.
Oh, you’re so funny, Bunny. I love you.
I love you, Bunny.
“Okay,” Ava says, “let’s stop.”
“Why?”
“You’re obviously not into this tonight.”
“No, no, I am,” I lie. “I am.”
“What’s going on with you?”
It’s now 6:30. I have to decide. I shouldn’t go. I just won’t go.
“I might have to go out tonight,” I say.
She raises an eyebrow. Understandably. In all the days that have passed since we first met last spring, I’ve never had other plans.
“This thing at school,” I say.
“Didn’t we just go to one the other day?”
“This is another one.”
She looks at me. “You’re not sick of me, are you?”
“No. Never.” I say it fervently because it’s true.
“You can tell me, you know. I’m not going to cry or anything.”
I pull the invitation out of my pocket and hand it to her.
She doesn’t touch it, just looks at it.
“It’s probably from Caroline,” I say. “Cupcake?” I clarify, realizing I’ve never shared their actual names with her.
She blinks at me, expressionless.
“The blond one with the perfectly undertucked bob and the pearls and the blue orchid corsage on her wrist? You said she looked like a Twinkie. Or a child of the corn going to prom?”
“They all look like Twinkies to me, Smackie: fake-sweet, squidgy, unsurprising packaging. I’ll bet the ink on this thing is scratch-and-sniff,” she says, snatching the invitation from me, scratching at the cordially, and holding it up to her nose. “When did you get this thing anyway?”
“It was in my school mailbox this morning.”
“So that’s why you’ve been weird all day.”
“I just don’t know how to respond. I feel like if I don’t . . .”
“Here,” she says, and pulls out her Zippo and holds it at the corner of the shimmery invite.
“Wait,” I say. “What are you doing?”
“You’re not actually thinking of going to this party for dorks, are you?”
“No.”
“So,” she holds the lighter up to the invitation again, this time even closer, and looks at me. It starts to crackle.
“Wait, wait, wait.”
“What?”
“It’s just. Well, Workshop starts tomorrow.”
“So?”
“So it’s just going to be me and them again in class this semester. Just us five.”
“And?”
“I’m just thinking of how not to be rude. When I say no. I mean, I’m going to say no, obviously. It’s just . . . you know, these are the women in my department, my . . . you know . . . peers.”
“Whom you call Cuntscapades.”
“I just have to figure out the right wording. So they don’t think I hate them.”
She stares at me. “But Smackie, you do hate them.”
I look at her through my bangs, which she has encouraged me to grow over my eyes. Makes you look punk, she says. I look at her different-colored eyes, her bleached and feathery hair that is the antithesis of Bunny hair, cut asymmetrically and shaved in places, her fishnet veil that she wears like a threshold to be crossed only if you dare. And here’s what I realize: she would never wear mittens shaped like kittens or a dress with a Peter Pan collar. She would never say, Love your dress, if she fucking hated your dress. She would never say, How are you? if she didn’t care how you were. She would never eat a lavender cupcake that tasted like perfume or wear a perfume that made her smell like a cupcake. She would never wear lip balm for cosmetic purposes. She would never wear it unless her lips were seriously, seriously cracked. And even if they were, she’d still put Lady Danger on them, which is the name of her lipstick, this bright blue-red that looks surreally beautiful on her but when I tried it on once made me look insane. Her perfume smells like rain and smoke and her eye makeup scares small children and she wears pumps even though she’s at least two inches taller than I am and I’m a freak. Why? Because life is shorter than we are, she says, so why beat around the bush?
“I do hate them,” I say quietly. “So I should just say no. I mean . . . what do you think I should do?”
A faint smell of garbage rises up with the heat of the end of the day. I stare at her for a while, but her face is absolutely deadpan. She lights a cigarette. I gaze down at my legs in their bland, black jeans.
After what feels like an unbearably long time, in which a wind swooshes through her sycamore, a gusty wind that takes my breath away briefly, that reminds me that we’re near the ocean even though I’ve never seen it—but the Bunnies have, of course, because one of them has a Mercedes SUV and they drive there on the weekends and take pictures of themselves in Esther Williams–style swimsuits, laughingly wading together into the white crashing waves with arms linked—Ava says, “You should go if you want to go.”
“What? I don’t want to go.”
“But you also don’t want to be rude, right? These are the women in your department.”
She stares at me until I lower my eyes.
“Look, you don’t know what it’s like to be in class with them. To be in Workshop with them. Maybe they’re trying to make an effort this year. You know, to be nice or something.”
She snorts.
“I’m serious. And if I snub them, they’ll . . .”
“What? Tell me what they can possibly do.”
I think about last year. How they would look down at each story I submitted like it was a baby that just gave them the finger, and then side-eye each other for a long time.
It’s very . . . angry, they’d say at last.
Yes. Abrasive. For my taste?
Exactly. Sort of in love with its own outsiderness? Its own narrative of grittiness? Of course, that could just be me. (Small smile of deference.) Still. I do wish it would open itself up a bit more.
“Look, I’ll go for like an hour,” I say. “Tops. Just to make an appearance.”
“Whatever.”
“I’ll text you pictures of their apartment so you can see how hideously twee it is.”
She nods. “Sure.”
“You could come along if you want,” I offer lamely.
“Don’t sweat it, Smackie. You couldn’t pay me all the money in the world to attend that little soiree. Speaking of which, you oughtn’t dally. Better hop along.”
“I’ll be back soon. Like later tonight even. Anyway, I’ll text you.”
She says nothing, just frowns into the book she’s cracked open, like the book made a face at her, stuck out its tongue.
“Hey,” I think I hear her say as I’m starting to climb down the ladder from her roof, but when I look up, she isn’t looking at me. She’s still staring at her book. The wind picks up again, stirring the pages, turning them this way and that, but she keeps reading like she hasn’t lost her place at all.
How long have I been standing here, outside her front door, staring at the tuliplike flower she drew next to the brass bell and the loopy letters that comprise her real name? Long enough for the sky to grow darker. The street to smell sweeter. The shadows to get thin and grow teeth. I can hear well-schooled female laughter drifting from an upstairs window. I shift my weight from right to left. Turn back. Not too late to turn back and watch the family of raccoons make their way down Ava’s drainpipe, as they do each evening. Cheer on the little one who is always afraid to go down. Come on, little one, Ava and I always say, raising our drinks to him. Be brave. Be bold.
Her neighborhood is obscenely beautiful. I cannot help but observe this as I stand on her marbled steps, flanked by stone griffins, beaks open in midscreech. A line of stately houses, a canopy of grandly bowing trees. Just a block from campus, off a poshly quaint street lined with bistros that offer champagne by the glass, cafés that make the cortadas with the ornate foam art that all the faculty drink, shops selling cold-pressed juice and organic dog treats. Unlike my street, which smells of sad man piss, hers smells of autumn leaves.
As I stand here, my finger poised over the bell, the laughter morphs into hellion squeals. Four distinct shrieks. I hit the bell, not because I want to but because it’s getting cold out here and this town, even in Cupcake’s neighborhood, is ridiculously dangerous after a certain hour. I don’t need to look up to feel the fact of four heads suddenly appearing in the upstairs window, flanked by billowing white curtains. Four heads full of white, orthodontically enhanced teeth. Hair so shiny it will blind you to look at it directly, like an eclipse. My phone buzzes with a text from an unknown number, the emoticon of a monkey with its hands over its eyes. I think: I should go, I should go, I should go. But I stay right where I am. I wait. I wait so long the sky gets darker still. The sweet smell of the street acquires a tang of rot. Leaves from a nearby luxury tree fall and I count them falling. One. Two. Three.
I am staring into the eyes of the one I call Cupcake. Because she looks like a cupcake. Dresses like a cupcake. Gives off a scent of baked lemony sugar. Pretty in a way that reminds you of frosting flourishes. Not the forest green and electric blue horrors in the supermarket, but the pastel kind that is used at weddings or tasteful Easter gatherings. She looks so much like a cupcake that when I first met her at orientation, I had a very real desire to eat her. Bite deeply into her white shoulder. Dig a fork in her cheek. Tonight, she wears a dress of cerulean blue patterned with sinuous white clouds and one of her many matchy cardigans. Blond hair freshly flat-ironed. Lips shiny but colorless because lipstick is for whores, Bunny, I have heard her say and I really couldn’t tell if she was joking or dead serious. Glinty pearls around her neck that she never takes off. She’ll often gently tug on them in Workshop while reading aloud from her work—the most recent iteration of which was postfeminist dialogues between herself and various kitchen implements.
I think she’s going to greet me like she usually does, like I’m an unfortunate patch of gray sky from which she should soon take cover, or a tall, mildly disease-ridden tree—it is so sad and creepy about my bare and unseemly branches. Normally if she and I catch sight of one another in the halls or around campus, she’ll draw her Christopher Robin cardigan closer, clutch her books tightly to her chest as though, tut, tut! Looks like rain. Oh, hi, Samantha, she’ll say, looking around at anything like it might be a buoy that will save her from the fact of me standing right in front of her. A telephone pole in the distance. A gnat only she can see. Frankly, I don’t know what I did to get on the wrong side of Cupcake. Perhaps she sensed my hunger when we first met and has understandably kept her distance.
But tonight, Cupcake smiles at me. Her pink-and-white face lights up. “Samantha, hi!” As if she’s actually delighted to see me. I’m a jewel-colored cardigan. I’m a first edition of The Bell Jar. I’m a marzipan squirrel. I’m a hairdresser who knows exactly, exactly, how to handle her carefully undertucked bob of golden hair.
“So glad you could make it. Bunnies! Look who’s here! She came!”
*
She takes my hand—actually takes my hand—and leads me into her giant living room, which is what I pictured and not what I pictured. Lots of soft, lush, cushiony fabrics. Ceilings that stretch up and up and up. A white fireplace in which she was has placed a vase full of delicate pink blossoms. They’re all sitting around a candlelit coffee table as though they’ve been kept waiting for a guest. Creepy Doll, aka Kira. Vignette, aka Victoria. And of course, the Duchess, who in another life is merely Eleanor. On my way over, I’d envisioned various nightmare scenarios of what awaited me. I feared they might be naked, reclined on whimsical furniture out of Alice in Wonderland. Or else in pastel lingerie, using Anaïs Nin erotica as fans. Massaging each other to the music of Stereolab. Obscure yet erudite porn projected on some massive screen. Reading sex manifestos from the seventies using pastel dildos as mics. A tiered tray of erotically themed cupcakes, I had no idea. But instead, they’re just sitting in a circle like it’s Workshop, wearing their usual clothes, notebooks clutched in their laps like purses. Normally when I enter Workshop, they give me tightfisted Hi’s, little upward jerks of their lips, making me feel, as I take my seat, like a portentous fog has somehow settled into the room. But this time they’re all looking at me and smiling like I’m the actual sun. Smiling with the whole of their mouths and eyes.
“Samantha!” Creepy Doll gasps. “You’re here. We thought you got lost or something.”
Lost? I look into the amber eyes of the one I call Creepy Doll. Because she reminds me of the creepy dolls I used to want when I was little, with their saucer eyes and their velvet dresses, their Shirley Temple curls of blood-red hair and their Cupid’s-bow lips molded into little pink oh!’s of wonder at the world. Writes fairy tales about girl demons, wolf princes, the cozy phantasmagoria of her native New Hampshire. Collects antique typewriters, each of which she claims has its own unique “ghost energy” that she channels into her stories as she types, head tilted back, eyes closed. She is the literal doll-pet of the other Bunnies. Sits curled in their skirted laps like a cat. Purrs when they pet her, makes hissing sounds when they stop. Her voice is the feathery baby voice of children in horror films. I have heard that same voice go down about five octaves when she thinks she is alone, become deep as a well. Out of all of them, she is the first to usually extend a social hand to me in the form of a random troll emoji, or a last-minute invite to places they already are.
Hi Samantha, We’re having bento boxes. You’re welcome to join ☺
She’s also the only Bunny who attempts to talk to me at social functions. She’ll come up to me and ask me questions like little digging hooks and while I’m answering, she’ll nod and murmur cool while her eyes flit from side to side. Like she is a child who has dared herself to knock on Boo Radley’s door, and now that he’s opened it she isn’t sure what to do, should she run?