Bunny Read online

  “Hot,” Vignette says.

  I tell them how we got to die together over and over. How every Monday and Wednesday afternoon for three months during rehearsal and then for the five nights of our performance and once for a final matinee, I died with Rob Valencia. How we would hold hands and shake and tremble and fall together to the stage in a heap. How we’d lie there while everyone pretended to scream and accuse each other of our murders. How we’d lie there until the stage got swallowed in darkness and then, only then, would we get up. How I hated it when we had to get up.

  “Of course you did,” they all murmur. Except the Duchess. She says nothing. Just sips her drink and stares straight ahead.

  I tell them how erotic it was to be lying next to him on stage and to feel him trying to be so absolutely still and failing, his chest rising and falling beside me, his panting breath on my face, his roasted goat and incense smell filling my lungs. Sometimes we’d fall to the floor in a tangle and our bodies would touch. Sometimes we’d fall a few feet apart from each other and he would be close but so far away. Both were erotic in different ways.

  “It was like fucking,” I say, taking a sip of my drink. “But way more intense, you know? Cosmic.”

  Cupcake and Creepy Doll are nodding. Yes. Of course. Cosmic. So very.

  “So you never actually fucked him?” Vignette says.

  I look at the Duchess, who just stares at me, blinking. Her lovely dark blue eyes seeing the truth, which is not so interesting, so dark, so gritty, after all, is it, Samantha? Which is sad and sort of humdrum pathetic, huh? An unfortunately shaped virgin’s paperback fantasy, a tenuous castle made of air.

  I never fucked Rob. He wasn’t in lust, let alone love, with me, even though height-wise we were perfect for one another. Even though I knew he saw through my ravaged skin and lank hair into my very soul. Even though we loved similar music, similar books—he too had read Dante’s Inferno by candlelight, I was certain. Even though I knew he knew there were worlds in me. One time, he pity-danced with me to “Slave to Love” at the cast party. But that was it. He was in love with Alyssa Fisher, who played Véronique, his French mistress. He took her to prom. Waved at me from the dance floor. Hey, Samantha.

  But who wants to hear that story?

  I look at these women now, their skins glowing a little in the dark, gazing at me with such dreamy expectation, and even—is it admiration? All but the Duchess. For a brief moment, I think she can see me moping on the outskirts of the dance floor in my regrettable Goodwill dress with the fire-breathing dragon on it, watching Rob and Alyssa slow dance to some song I told myself I hated anyway, wishing for a Carrie-like catastrophe to mitigate my broken heart, my teenage scorn.

  So instead I tell them how, on the last night that we died together, just after the curtain came down but before the lights went up, he held out his hand in the darkness and led me to the woodlot behind the school. There, among the bare-branched quivering aspens, Rob Valencia ravaged me like a wolf. I describe the crunching of the many-colored leaves beneath us. How I stared up at the gray sky while he performed miracles with his mouth. How I sank my hands into the muddy earth as I orgasmed. How it was so intense, the mind-body-spirit connection we experienced in that woodlot as a result of dying together all those months, that, well, we never spoke to each other again. When we were dying it was like we were fucking. But when we fucked it was like we were dying. For real. And after that . . .

  “After that, what?” Cupcake prompts, breathless.

  “After that, we were simply past language,” I say.

  Silence.

  “Hot,” Vignette says at last, raising a glass.

  “So hot,” Cupcake says.

  “So,” Creepy Doll adds.

  I smile. Yes. It was hot, wasn’t it? I feel a small surge of shameful pride. They liked my story. I like that they liked my story. I blush and take another sip of Me, which is not bitter at all anymore. It’s perfect.

  “But also quite . . . sad, Samantha,” the Duchess says, looking at me with her cocked head, her probing Zen face, a sudden warmth and concern spreading over her features like a rash. “He broke your heart, didn’t he?”

  I nod. My lip quivers. Begins to twitch violently again.

  They’re looking at me with such kindness. “It’s okay, Samantha.”

  Tears fill my eyes. Real ones.

  The Duchess puts her hand on mine and squeezes. “Let’s get you another drink.”

  6.

  I wake up with my face mashed into my sagging mattress, still in my clothes from the night before. There’s a red cloak on my shoulders, a smell of cinnamon, baked lemony sugar, all the twee things of this world rising from my own flesh, hovering in the stale air around me.

  How I got back here I do not remember. I recall headlights. A twitching pink nose. Long gray-brown ears. The black gleaming bead of an animal eye. A sky-colored cocktail the size of my head being refilled and refilled by a girl with a rabbit face. A cocktail just for you, Samantha, said the rabbit girl, pouring. Thank you, I said. Thank you all. And I drank and drank of the cup. And I told them—what did I tell them? All I remember is them nodding. Smiling. Yes. Tell us, Samantha.

  How much did I invent in the end? Probably a lot.

  Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things? my mother always asked me.

  I don’t know, I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.

  I stare up at my cracked ceiling. The water stains that look like jaw-baring beasts seem to have spread since the last time I was here. The yellow light fixture has filled with more moth carcasses, so now there is more moth than light. The towers of books stacked against the walls are all in various stages of collapse, and the walls themselves, thin and piss colored, which are all that separate me from a perverted giant on one side and a sallow-faced girl on the other, appear to have crept even closer together. The black vinyl curtains, which came with the apartment and which a previous tenant seems to have stabbed multiple times, are open, revealing a view of chipped brick.

  I haven’t been back home since I met Ava. Don’t live here, she said, standing in my single room which she was much too tall for, which she made seem impossibly sad and small with her height. I don’t want to think of you living here.

  It’s not so bad, I told her. Far better than my first apartment in town, a tiny blue room in the cat-piss-infused basement of a sadly unhinged Dutchman who claimed to teach at Warren, but who I quickly found out was just a self-appointed, slightly horny philosopher in desperate search of a pliant pupil. Better too than my car, where I was forced to live briefly when the Dutchman wouldn’t give my deposit back after I proved to be so “unteachable,” and our stipends didn’t kick in until October. Or the undergraduate dorm I squatted in for a short time after a faculty member caught me sleeping in my car. When I locked eyes with him through my bug-streaked windshield, I cursed myself for parking on such a leafy, luxurious street, where even the dogs in the yards glowed with money. It only took a few weeks of living among the truly, absurdly rich in their incongruous prison dorms for me to decide to sell my car, and that’s when I found this place. A single room on the west side, which I really thought was just fine even though it didn’t quite pass my suicide visualization test. Could I picture shooting myself here? Definitely I could. Hanging myself? Sure. Some nights, I could even see the noose swinging from the light fixture on the ceiling. But I figured with a few well-placed posters, I might mute the sound of my own future death cry that would sometimes flood my ears upon entering this single room with galley kitchen. Perhaps even write my masterpiece. Or at the very least, Think Great Thoughts, Dream Big Dreams like full worlds you could wander. I did none of these things here. What I did here was seethe about petty things. Count the moth deaths. Think of money.

  It’s really not so bad, I told Ava. Anyway, this is the only place
I can afford to live in without roommates. I can’t get work done with roommates, I told you.

  But she was already packing my things. You’re coming home with me.

  Now the place is pretty much empty, apart from some books and a pine desk I found on the street, which I never worked at anyway. And the mattress, of course, upon which I now lie, the weight of the red cloak heavy on my shoulders. There’s a spiky flower in my fist. Here, I remember the Duchess saying as she pulled it from her silver hair. For you, Samantha. Their coos of sympathy are still in my ears. Their finger pads still wiping tears from my cheeks. Because I did cry. Why did I cry again? What did I tell them? Their little hands patting my knees, shoulders, hands. Tell us another story, Samantha. Another. How erotic. How gritty. How brilliant.

  That’s when I see it perched on the outside sill of my window. Looking in, looking right at me, or so it seems. Twitching its nose. Slitty eyes black and shiny and peering right at me through the smudged glass. Floppy ears hanging on either side of its face like little-girl braids.

  I scream until the sallow girl next door thumps the wall with her fist.

  Everything from the night before comes back to me. How I told them about Rob Valencia. How we drank some more. At which point the room began to sway like it was dancing, the pastel furniture began to change shape. Their shadows on the wall seemed to stretch. Their hair grew shinier and longer, their eyes red, and I did not know which small hand belonged to which pink-and-white body, which coo came from which glossy mouth, which fingers were getting tangled in my hair. And then a voice like warm fur, her balmy lips very close to my ear.

  Go outside and bring us a bunny, Samantha.

  I remember looking at them all, sitting equidistant from me, mouths closed like purse clasps.

  What?

  You heard us, the Duchess said.

  It’s actually really easy, Samantha.

  Super easy.

  There are like a ton of them on campus, haven’t you noticed?

  Why? I asked.

  It’s a dare, Vignette said.

  How we round off every Smut Salon, Cupcake added.

  I couldn’t tell if they were joking. Were they joking?

  We never joke about bunnies, Bunny.

  Bunny, did they just call me Bunny?

  Yes, Bunny.

  I dimly recall protesting a little about the darkness, about the lateness of the hour, about the danger of going out at this time of night in the streets. I slurringly cited the recent, horrific news—the girl getting raped on her way back to the dorm, the boy who got clubbed on his way home from the lab just the other night. And then those rumors of actual decapitation, had they heard those rumors?

  We’re not asking you to go to the lab, Samantha. Just right outside.

  Never mind, Samantha, the Duchess cut in. It’s fine. It is getting late. You’re right, you should probably be getting home.

  No, wait, I said.

  Me in Creepy Doll’s red-riding-hood cloak, drunkenly circling the damp front lawn outside while they watched from an upstairs window for I don’t know how long.

  I still don’t remember how I got home. Did I walk? Take the bus? Flashes come back to me. Waiting for the bus on her fancy street, staring at the glittering sidewalks. Thinking every sound was a machete-wielding maniac. Readying myself to tell him, I am not rich. I am not one of Them. Do not judge a woman by her red cloak soft as tiger pelt. There is nothing in these pockets but lint.

  That’s when I heard the rustle. The sound of definitely disturbed leaves. Crunched on. A shadow getting longer. Two shadows. Three. Four. Seven. Emerging from the bushes.

  I closed my eyes. Waited for the inevitable to fall upon me. Waited for the blade to strike my neck. Please be quick. I said hi to my mother in heaven, who I’d be joining soon. She shook her head at me: You’re an idiot for going out after dark to hang out with these cunts. You deserve your fate, she said. But yes, see you soon. It’s nice here. There are all manner of purple flowers, there is the shade of great weeping trees, there are golden-green leaves rustling in the breeze and a late August light falls over everything. Not in her voice, but Ava’s. Then it was Ava’s face I saw. Then nothing. No club to my skull. No blade at my throat. On my neck nothing but a fall breeze, very much of this world. And then into my lap, something leapt. Small. Heavy. Soft. I looked down to find it gazing up at me with its shiny black eyes.

  See? hissed a voice from an upstairs window.

  I lifted my gaze just in time to see a light go on then off. When I looked back down, my lap was empty.

  Is that what happened? Is that what I saw? There is simply no way that is what happened. There is simply no way that is what I saw or heard. No, I tell the bunny now sitting on my sill. There is no way.

  Now, I watch it leap off, leaving my barred window empty, the view of a brick wall and New England sky in all the bleakness of midmorning. The mist in my brain clears. Ava. I check my phone to see if she texted.

  Nothing but a troll emoji from Creepy Doll, followed by a tulip and an open-armed ghost. And then, from an unknown number: Did you make it home okay, girl? And then from another unknown number: See you in class tomorrow ☺

  Class. Our first Workshop. I’ll go to the diner on my way there. Where Ava and I always go in the morning. Where she drinks her spiked gunpowder tea and draws the world as a series of zombies. Her sky is full of lightning. Her sun has teeth. She gives all the spoiled Warren girls gills, fangs, wings. She sets the frat boys on fire. While she does this, I stare at New England. Sometimes I write. Sometimes I just stare.

  7.

  It has been so long since I walked to school from my apartment that I’ve forgotten how to get there. I get lost. I don’t see Ava anywhere. The air is alive with crackly fall and the murmurings of mad people. This place is so beautiful you find it hard to believe that it’s overrun with the insane and the desperate and the lonely. That wildly violent assault happens almost daily. Rape, clubbings, stabbings, and shootings as common as finding pink champagne by the glass on bistro menus. That rumors of random decapitations are on the rise. One day, you might see a perfectly respectable-looking man walking down the street across from you in the slanting fall sunlight and you might think I am mistaken about this place. It’s not an insane and violent place after all. It’s not a wrong place. It’s a place where people walk at a leisurely pace in the slanting sunshine. It’s a town named after a godly gesture of gratitude and fate. Then a small wind comes and the man’s coat blows open like the wings of a bat spreading. And when he comes closer you see that he’s talking to himself, this man. Not only talking to himself, no. He’s arguing profusely. His face is red. His features are warped with rage. All the veins in his neck are pulsing and thick and full to bursting with blood. And that’s when you start to notice all the abandoned houses, the spiderwebs of smashed glass in storefronts, the busted windshields, a ripped, empty purse lying on the sidewalk. You see all that and you remember, that’s right, I’m in Sketch City. I’m in the Lair of Cthulhu.

  I walk toward what I think is the school, getting lost again and again until at last the moldering, vacant storefronts switch to juice bars and dog salons and I glimpse the Ivy Bubble. The towers upon which Ava and I have sat like gargoyles. Everyone on the street suddenly goes from looking like an extra in a zombie movie to the star of a French New Wave film.

  * * *

  —

  Workshop is held in what is called the Cave, but is really just a black-box theater in the basement of the Narrative Arts Center. No visible doors, no windows, and of course, no clocks. Only dark, damp walls that evoke the womb. I enter late and apologize under my breath—no sign of Ava at the diner, which was empty but for one red-faced man hunched at the counter, hissing at his plate. The Bunnies, seeing me come in, smile like librarians, then look away. They do not look hung over. At all. They are seated in their usu
al huddle on one side of the hollow square arrangement of tables, leaving the other three sides open to me. My stomach sinks a little to see this. But what did I expect anyway? For them to suddenly embrace me?

  Cold dread in my chest. Fluttery hummingbird heart.

  I look at them—my gaze a question—but they’re blinking thoughtfully through their designer reading eyewear at our teacher, Ursula, whom they have christened KareKare, because she cares so, so much. I call her Fosco, after the villain in the Gothic novel The Woman in White. I don’t know why. I suppose there is just something about her gravitas, her voice like a thick mist, her long, ever gesturing white hands and her saccadic violet eyes that suggests she has distressed maidens in her basement, human livers in her fridge, that she baby talks to pet mice, attends the opera in a box seat, clapping lightly from the shadows. My god, yes, Ava said when she saw her. My god.

  “Samantha,” Fosco calls in her usual booming voice as the heavy double doors clang shut behind me. “So glad you could join us.”

  They all watch me walk toward the stage at the center of the room, where they’re all seated as though they’re in a play. In what Fosco likes to call the “Hermeneutic Circle,” aka a “Safe Space” in which to bravely bare our souls to one another in the form of cryptic word art. Evoke our alchemical experiences and experiments. In which our work will perform the Body and the Body shall perform our work. Whatever that means. Even after a year at Warren, I’m still not totally sure. The school is known for its highly experimental approach to narrative. Hence no windows or clocks in the Cave. Because we cannot, we will not, be slaves to the time-space continuum aka plot. And yet she knows I’m late.