Bunny

by Mona Awad

  From upstairs, I hear more screams.

  “Don’t you guys hear that?”

  They look at one another. Genuine confusion troubles their brows. “Hear?”

  “That screaming?!”

  “Your beauty is like screaming, Samantha,” says Beowulf, touching my face. He strokes it with his gloved hand, like my skin is the most delicate pet.

  The lights go off. Then on. A rustling. A thud. Then silence. The sound of heeled footsteps clambering down the stairs. Beowulf’s hand drops and Blake crushes his sippy cup in his fist.

  They emerge from the side door and swarm into the living room like a plague of hair and pastel taffeta. “Hey, girl,” they say. They look vaguely disheveled. Creepy Doll’s cat ears are askew on her head and she’s clutching Cupcake’s arm like she’s lost in the woods except this isn’t the woods it’s her own living room. Cupcake’s glove has a little dark blotch on it. Her skin has a pink glow, as though she’s just been masturbating.

  “Where were you guys?”

  Vignette grabs a handful of chips, shoves them into her mouth, and crunches. Stares at me with her lovely, fuck-you eyes. “Surprise,” she says.

  “We can’t tell you,” Cupcake explains like she’s her translator.

  “I thought I heard screams.”

  “That was me,” Creepy Doll says. “Sometimes I scream.” I watch her sloppily pour more punch into my glass, then into hers. “It’s sort of a disorder.”

  They look restless. Excited. I notice they’re all staring at the front door.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “Nothing, nothing,” this from Cupcake, who’s white-knuckling her own corsaged wrist, her eyes on the front door.

  A knock, knock at the door.

  They look at each other. At last the Duchess says, “You should get that, Samantha. I believe you have a guest.” She looks at me like I’m a sick kid and she’s a nurse about to give me the biggest lollipop I’ve ever seen.

  “Here,” she says. “I’ll come with you.”

  She stands up, holds out her hand to me, and smiles. It’s the nicest she’s ever looked at me. For a minute she reminds me of Ava.

  I take her hand, which feels like a cool, thin skipping stone, and we walk to the door.

  “Open it,” she says, gesturing toward the door as though it’s a present.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Just answer the door, Samantha. Trust us this time, okay?” Her face says it’s about time you trusted us. Her face says that has been the problem thus far. Me. My lack of trust.

  I open the door.

  “Samantha Heather Mackey,” he says.

  My heart explodes. I’d scream but I’ve lost my voice. Run but my legs are all swimmy. He’s the same. Sort of balding. Small eyes, which I described in the last diary I ever owned that had a lock as smoky. Tall and broad in his dark blue suit. Is it the same suit he was wearing that night? The night I didn’t even stay for four songs? Watched him dance with Alyssa Fisher while I ate a hard roll two tables away with Alice. The last man whose name I’d write in a notebook. Again and again and again with loopy hope.

  “Rob Valencia.”

  “Samantha Heather Mackey,” he says again. “Hello.”

  “Oh my god. What are you doing here?”

  He looks at the Duchess.

  “We called him,” she says, looking at him and nodding. “We hope you’re not mad, Samantha. We called him and when he found out you were going to be here, he came right over. Didn’t you?”

  Rob’s nodding now too. He takes my hand in his and I notice he’s also wearing black leather gloves.

  “I came right over, Samantha,” he says, squeezing my hand.

  Rob Valencia is squeezing my hand. This is on a giant marquee in my mind. Flashing and flashing and flashing.

  “I can’t believe you’re here.”

  “Believe it, Samantha,” the Duchess says.

  “What are you doing here?” I hear myself say again.

  Rob Valencia looks at the Duchess again.

  “You’re in town on business, aren’t you?” the Duchess says.

  “I’m in town on business,” Rob says. “I’m a businessman now, Samantha. I travel and I’m very successful.”

  “Serendipitous,” the Duchess sighs, looking at me. “Isn’t it?”

  Rob nods.

  “I’ll leave you two alone,” the Duchess whispers, patting us both on the back, patting my shoulder a little. Then she walks away.

  Rob Valencia is still squeezing my hand in the doorway. “Samantha, I would like to come in,” he says. “Will you let me in, Samantha?

  * * *

  —

  I am sitting with Rob Valencia in Creepy Doll’s living room. A mirror off to one side which I consult from time to time confirms this. That Rob Valencia is not a mirage. He is actually here. Sitting beside me on the loveseat. A thing of flesh in a suit. Looking vaguely like Zeus. I have consumed more punch. I have forgotten that I am a twenty-five-year-old woman. The heart Rob Valencia holds in his hand is a seventeen-year-old heart, warped and badly drawn with purple ink. It is Samantha Heather Mackey’s seventeen-year-old idea of her heart. And it has Rob Valencia’s name drawn inside in jagged, bleedy letters.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” I hear myself say in a voice that does not sound like my voice. It is a voice filled with twinkly stars, with overly lashed cartoon eyes.

  He smiles at me. The eye crinkle that made me rabid with lust as a teenager. I never cared that Rob Valencia was balding at sixteen and I’ll tell you why. Rob Valencia had charisma. And at six foot four he is the only man in the universe who ever made me feel short.

  “It surprises you,” he says, grinning.

  “Yes,” I say, swaying a little from the Bunny punch. “Very much. I can’t believe it.”

  “Believe, Samantha,” he says. “Please. It makes sex faster.”

  Sex faster? “I—”

  He puts his leather finger to my lips. “Shhh,” he says. “Shhh, shhh. Samantha, I must say something. There is something missing from my life that has been missing since that night seven years ago when I went to the dance with that slut whose name I do not even remember because she is that inconsequential to me.”

  “Alyssa Fisher,” I offer.

  “Alyssa Whatever,” Rob says. He sighs and clutches my hand tighter. “Do you know, Samantha, I do not even masturbate to the memory of fucking her in the mermaid limo?”

  I shake my head.

  “It’s truth,” he says.

  He pours us some punch, which I drink down in two seconds. “Do you know what I do masturbate to, Samantha?

  I shake my head, my body a swell of pinprickly lights. Because it cannot be. Because surely it isn’t—

  “Dying with you, Samantha. Three months of rehearsal. Five nights of performance and one matinee. It remains the most erotic time of my life.”

  Rob Valencia looks at me with eyes I don’t remember being so smoky. Electricity courses through me. Down my arms and legs. Butterflies hatch in my gut and go flying out, flapping their wings furiously in my chest. My intricately noosed hair is going to burst into flames.

  “Really?” I whisper.

  “Yes, Samantha. In fact the whole time I was dancing in Alyssa Whatever’s unmagical arms, the whole time I was fucking other women in various venues, but mostly my car, I was still thinking this is not at all erotic at all. And how much infinitely better, how much infinitely hotter it would be to die by electrocution with Samantha Heather Mackey. Because we died like we were fucking, didn’t we, Samantha?”

  I nod yes. Oh, yes.

  He takes my hands again and I shiver.

  “Samantha, I found your treelike height erotic and I enjoyed your bleak dress sense more than I can say. All day,
I wanted to tongue the little skull pin you wore on your boob. Yet I did not. You intimidated me because you were so . . .”

  “What?” I whisper.

  “Formidable. Angry. Scary-angry. You refused to turn that frown upside down. You scared us all year, Samantha Heather Mackey. But we knew the truth too.”

  “We? What do you—”

  “That you were just a lonely girl. That you were a sad girl.”

  He reaches up and holds my face lightly, tenderly, between his gloved hands. Gazes at me so tenderly with his eyes of smoke. Rob Valencia’s eyes of smoke.

  “Weren’t you, Samantha?”

  I cry a little. Probably it’s just the punch. I cry into Rob Valencia’s boulderlike shoulder, which smells just like it did seven years ago when he was lying there beside me on the sawdusty stage. His smell of seventeen-year-old-boy sweat, roasted animal, church incense. And something else now too, like some sort of muffin mix.

  “Samantha,” he says, “there is no need at all for eye water.”

  “What?”

  “Ultimately we find you vulnerable and desperate but compellingly so.”

  The Duchess, who suddenly appears in the periphery, slides a clear box toward him on the table. There’s a flower inside. A corsage. It looks like an orchid. White and shimmery and with a little purple mouth full of pale pink veins.

  He opens it and holds the flower in his palm like a baby bird. He looks down at it hungrily. For a second, I think he’s going to eat it.

  Then the Duchess comes by and pats him on his massive shoulder, and he takes my hand and fastens the flower onto my wrist. The music changes to a song I know so well, though I’ve forgotten the name.

  “Samantha,” he says standing, “will you dance with us?”

  * * *

  —

  Dancing with Rob is not at all like dancing with Diego. His football-player chest. His broad shoulders. His large, sure hands going up and down my back like I’m not six feet tall at all but a mere wisp of a thing. Everything about him feels solid as bricks or stale bread. So different from Ava. Her hands of mesh. Her airy frame. Her feathery white-blond hair grazing my shoulder. Her smell of fallen leaf and firewood not at all like the smoky synthetic sugar, the burnt animal scent emanating from the flesh of Rob Valencia.

  Over his shoulder I observe the other Bunnies dancing with their dates. Their eyes are closed—except for the Duchess, who’s looking right at me. When we lock eyes, she winks. I smile at her. The beautiful room is spinning. The open windows are letting in a gentle fall breeze, making the silky curtains swell.

  I close my eyes and hear a voice in my ear, like a cupped whisper, female, velvety, that says, Float, float, isn’t this nice?

  “Isn’t this nice, Samantha?” he says.

  So nice. Except the burning sugar smell is getting stronger. I look up at Rob. No. He’s Rob Valencia. I’m dancing with Rob Valencia. In the flesh.

  I think of Ava out there in the dark, smoking on her roof, or maybe reading in her red velvet chair, but the thought seems very far away. She’s in silhouette. I can’t see her face.

  That’s when I hear the chewing sound. Like excited teething punctuated by little grunts.

  I open my eyes. I see Cupcake and her TV boy, dancing. Her head against his shoulder, her eyes closed, her lips parted and blissful. He’s chewing on her peach spaghetti strap. His eyes are open but vacant. When he sees me watching, the strap drops from his mouth. Then he picks it back up again and starts chewing. His eyes have a glazed, contented look to them.

  I look away, toward Creepy Doll. I see her date is doing the same thing. Except it’s a fallen rope of her hair he’s chewing.

  When I turn to look at the Duchess, her head resting against Beowulf’s shoulder, I see Beowulf is gnawing on her pearls. The Duchess appears oblivious.

  And Vignette. Vignette is sitting in the window seat in the corner like a drunk music-box ballerina, drinking a beer, while her boy lies in her lap, chewing on her crinoline.

  Then I feel it. The mouth at my wrist. Rob Valencia is hunched over my hand, his teeth full of orchid. For a moment, he just looks at me like a dog caught eating a shoe.

  Then he starts up again.

  I try to pull away, but he grabs hard at my wrist and starts munching on the corsage with a vengeance.

  “Jesus, stop it! What are you doing?!”

  But he keeps chewing, harder and harder. His eyes narrow into dark little slits.

  “I said STOP.” I slap him on the cheek. Harder than I wanted to. The sound is louder than I expected, a sharp crack.

  The music stops. Everyone stops dancing and looks at me. Rob stares at me, shocked. He touches his cheek with his gloved hand. His eyes cloud. His nose starts to twitch. His mouth full of chewed-up bits of flowers opens to say—

  “Look, I’m sorry,” I cut in. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Abrasive,” he says, stroking his cheek. “Angry. Invested in her own outsiderness. Gritty, oh so gritty.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  Then his eyes suddenly fill with hate.

  “You think you’re better than us, Samantha. Well, you’re fucking not.”

  “What?”

  He takes my face between his hands and hisses, spitting flowers and foam from his mouth.

  “We tried to braid your hair, you didn’t let us braid it. We invited you to things, you wouldn’t come. We asked you to come out for bento boxes and you said, No, no, I’m too busy and important and better than you are for bento boxes. But you don’t remember. All you remember is Samantha Heather Mackey is the victim. Samantha Heather Mackey is in pain. Samantha Heather Mackey’s heart is on fire with all the feelings she thinks only she can feel.”

  The burnt sugary smell is overwhelming now. I think of a squid releasing ink. I try to release myself from his grip. That’s when he starts screaming. He just opens his mouth and screams and screams, looking right at me like I’m the most horrifying thing he’s ever seen.

  Then all the men start screaming. Just stand there shrieking at the ceiling. The noise is deafening. I cover my ears with my hands. Watch as the Bunnies attempt to shhh them to no end.

  They pull Rob away and try to lead him to a door, not the front door, but the door that leads to the attic. But he’s too worked up to go. Shaking his head. Screaming his head off. Even though my ears are covered, I can hear every word.

  “Samantha Heather Mackey thinks her stories are so fucking great! Samantha Heather Mackey doesn’t say it but she thinks she’s too good for the whole fucking world! Samantha Heather Mackey acts poor but why then does she behave like a princess? Samantha Heather Mackey slept with her professor! Sucked him off! For preferential treatment! There is no way in hell that Samantha Heather Mackey can be that tall, she wears stilts! Samantha Heather Mackey wears stilts so she can look down on us! Oh, ho, ho, ho she loves every fucking second of that!! Samantha Heather Mackey thinks we have everything under the sun, that we sleep on a bed of gold, and meanwhile she sleeps on a bed of dirt. That she has nothing, nothing, and she thinks this makes her deep. It doesn’t make you deep, Samantha Heather Mackey, it just makes you rumpled and it makes you smell of old potatoes. Samantha Heather Mackey thinks she understands everything, but she fails to understand the depths of the human heart. She fails to understand the depths of our heart. Our heart our heart our heart! We’ve read Jane Eyre too, you cunt, and we’ve read The Waves, and when we read it, you know, we wept for minutes.”

  Then he starts weeping.

  I think Go now. Go fucking now, but in the spinning, swaying room, I find I can’t move, I’m transfixed by Rob Valencia’s rage. His hissing, spitting rage. His tears. By the sight of the Bunnies gently shushing him. The terrible suffocating smell of muffins on fire. It all feels like a terrible play. Maybe it will end with Rob Valencia and me twitching on t
he floor. I almost want to laugh. A hysterical laugh comes out of me like a cough.

  That’s when Rob Valencia’s head explodes. Literally explodes. Blood and brains all over me, the walls. Blood all over the Bunnies and their whimpering boys. Bits of skull falling on the hardwood floor like hail. His headless, suited body remains standing before me. Then it collapses to the floor.

  I hear my own scream stretching my face.

  Something drops at my feet. An ear. Rob Valencia’s ear.

  I fall to the earth. I fall and fall and fall. It’s a long way down to the blood- and skull-splattered floor. And in the background, the song that was so familiar is still playing, the song my seventeen-year-old heart knows so well yet the name escaped me, becomes one I finally recognize as “Slave to Love.”

  12.

  I wake in a bed that isn’t my own. Open my eyes to a poster of a woman, a famous English actress, hugging a man dressed like a pirate in a whirlpool of smoke. She is clinging to him for dear life, her head thrown back in ecstasy. Beside the poster is a corkboard full of photos of a smiling, redheaded girl with her family, her friends. She is posing on a stone beach, she’s in the midst of a fecund vineyard, she is standing atop a mountain, in every photo the same happy, sane expression. She looks familiar, very familiar, and yet I cannot put the face to a name.

  I turn toward a window that looks out onto leaves that are gold and green. I am filled with an inexplicable peace. I observe the events of the night before from a great, cloudlike height. I observe too that the bed is neither too hard nor too soft. It’s a perfect bed. Just right. Goldilocks could set up shop here forever. Masturbate. I picture Goldilocks brazenly masturbating in this bed while the Three Bears watch. She is daring them with her slitty eyes to tell her to stop. The Bears are too polite to say anything. I laugh at what a picture that makes. Ha. Hahaha. The comforter smells of a luxury detergent, like real fucking pines. I could be in a forest. My bed is a bed of moss.

  “Bunny?” I turn and see a woman sitting on the edge of the bed.