Bunny

by Mona Awad

  I smile. “Ava,” I say. “Oh, Ava. Thank god you’re here.”

  “Who’s Ava?”

  The figure dissolves before my eyes, morphing into a grown woman with cat ears on her head. My soul screams and goes howling out of the room. My heart slides down to the floor and weeps. But I stay right here, in her bed, her small, cool hand stroking my face.

  “I’m Kira,” she keeps saying, because I keep shaking my head, no, no. She isn’t Kira. That’s not her name. It’s something else. What is it again?

  “Kira.”

  Tears are falling down my cheeks, they must be, because my face is wet. Last night is replaying itself in small bits like the arty video collages Fosco sometimes projects onto the black walls of the Cave, sequenced to be generative, to inspire us toward some great creative epiphany. The hissing, spitting head of Rob Valencia, my seventeen-year-old love. The blood splatter on the walls. Someone’s blotched white glove. A boy’s mouth full of orchid. The pink, veiny mouth of that flower, pursed like it’s ready for a kiss. I’m watching it all from a cottony cloud. I whimper.

  “Shhh,” she says. She hands me a giant glass patterned with smiling watermelons and two pills the color of Easter eggs. “Take these, Bunny,” she says.

  I look down at the pills she’s cupping in her small palm. They look like Tic Tacs.

  “What are they?”

  “They’ll help. Trust us.”

  I take them. Wash them down with whatever sugary liquid is in the smiling watermelon glass. Lemonade, I realize. Pink lemonade. She watches me drink it down.

  “You okay, Bunny?” she says in a voice that isn’t at all little girlish, but deep. Like a normal young woman. A normal, anxious-looking woman who’s looking at me like I’m about to spontaneously combust.

  “Yes.” I’m in my forest of pines. I’m in my perfect hijacked bed with my golden locks all around me. I look out the window again at the golden green leaves.

  “Rob Valencia,” I tell the leaves. “His head exploded.”

  When I say this, I realize how funny it is. A high, shrieking laugh comes out of me. It won’t stop.

  She smacks me, hard. Just like that, I’m silenced. Then she strokes my cheek softly. “That’s what you think you saw, okay?”

  Saw. I think of the silver, toothy blade that cuts things. Trees. Women. Cartoon animals. Skull hail. Brain rain. A severed, still-smoking ear.

  “Saw,” I say. “I saw. I saw, I saw, I saw, I saw, I—”

  She smacks me again, harder this time.

  “Things aren’t always what they seem, are they?” I look at her cat ears. Her golden, pleading eyes. The smiling watermelons in my fist wink at me. The toothy blade of saw dissolves into silvery, light-kissed waters. I float on their buoyant waves.

  “Bunny,” she says, “I think you should have lunch with us today. After Workshop. Are you free?”

  I try to think of something I have to do. Something I could say that wouldn’t be a lie. Some essential person I have to see. But I can’t find her in my brain now. Every shape in there is dark, indiscernible. Like someone turned out the light. All I see are the bright leaves before me. “Yes, I’m free.”

  “We’re going to be late for class,” she says, getting up. “You can take SafeRide with me.”

  “SafeRide,” I repeat. The university’s car service for when we don’t feel safe walking home from campus. I look out at the sunny day. “But it’s daytime.”

  She shrugs. “Better safe than sorry.”

  I think of Rob Valencia’s head. The blood on the wall. I scream but all that comes out of me is a soft sigh.

  “You have to get ready now. I laid out a dress for you because the one you were wearing is . . . anyway, there’s that one,” she gestures toward a blue bit of floof draped over her chair.

  I look at the dress. It’s got kittens licking ice cream cones all over it. The kittens are wearing slightly askew crowns.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “I left you some coffee too. Oh and you should probably put these on,” she says, picking up a pair of sunglasses with heart-shaped frames from her dresser and tossing them onto the bed. “Those pills will make you sensitive to light.”

  She walks out of the room, leaves me clutching the smiling watermelon glass, the heart-shaped lenses in my lap. A stuffed frog prince on her nightstand gazes at me with something like happy horror. Samantha, oh, Samantha, whatever will you do?

  * * *

  —

  In the SafeRide van, I sit beside Kira while she chats with the lady driver, Elaine. Elaine says she’s glad we girls called, with this recent violence, we need to be careful, and Kira is saying, “We will, I know, SO awful.” And then she changes the subject to the weather. “Such a lovely day for October, isn’t it?” Like no one at all exploded. Like there isn’t blood and skull splatter on her living room walls.

  And the weirdest thing is there isn’t. When I walked into her living room just now, everything was shining and regular. No evidence of Rob Valencia’s demise, no These Dreams detritus. Just her books neatly lining the shelves, her walls full of prints of bored nymphs gazing into glass waters out of which mermen are emerging. All surfaces gleaming, the hardwood floors pristine. And Kira at the front door in her red bell coat tapping her Mary Janed foot, waiting for me. Let’s get a move on, Bunny.

  I tug at Kira’s coat now and she turns to me. “What?”

  “I haven’t done the reading,” I tell her. “For class.” My voice sounds eerily alien to me, like it belongs to this other woman who’s strapped in a van beside a homicidal lunatic. I want to tell this woman to run away. Unlock the van and run. But she is calm. She stays in her seat. She looks out the window with her hands in her lap like a couple of dead fish. Palm trees sway in her voice when she speaks. “I haven’t done the reading,” I hear her repeat.

  “Bunny, who ever does the reading? Seriously. Hang on, Caroline’s having a dress crisis.”

  I look at her texting away. Wearing one of her darkly adorable dresses. Pentacle glinting around her neck. She’s clutching her notebook and the bullshit book Fosco assigned.

  “You did the reading,” I say.

  She shrugs. “Only because I was bored one night,” she says. I can picture her in her living room in a flouncy forest-colored dress patterned with sly-eyed foxes. Doing the reading while putting out the fires of Caroline’s constant texts. Always, always doing the reading. The truth is, if you go to Warren, no matter what is going on in your personal life—hair trouble, existential malaise, ax murder—you do the reading.

  “What’s it about?” I ask her, pointing at the book.

  “Hard to say. It doesn’t really have a narrative spine, you know?”

  “She’ll call on me, though. She always calls on me,” I whisper.

  “Who?”

  “Fosco.”

  She looks confused.

  “Ursula.”

  “You mean KareKare?” she says. Her tiger eyes light up.

  “Oh my god, I LOVE KareKare SO much I want her to have all my babies. Probably they would be mermaids. Look, if she calls on you, we’ll back you up, Bunny,” she says, patting my folded together hands. “Just chill, k?”

  “K.”

  I look out the window. I see green leaves, I see boy blood, green leaves, boy blood. Ava. I see Ava. Standing by the road under a tree, watching this van go by. “Ava! Stop the car,” I shout, but it comes out a whisper. Kira and the driver don’t even hear me. I check my phone to see if she texted.

  She hasn’t texted. I send her a single question mark like an SOS.

  * * *

  —

  In the Cave, they’re super kind to me. They all sit around me so close, so close. Not on the other side of the square, but in the chairs immediately next to me. They call me Bunny. I’ve forgotten all their names, but t
hey help me remember. The edible-looking girl with the golden bob is Caroline. The blunt, veiny, pretty one who looks like another century is Victoria. And then the one who is their queen, who resembles evil Icelandic royalty but who is gazing at me so very kindly today, is Eleanor. That’s right, Eleanor, she says, taking my hand and squeezing it like I’m recovering from a near-death experience.

  They say terribly kind things about my story, another bottom-drawer one I wrote a while ago, then polished up in a panic. Numbered the pages and even stapled them together, it seems. They are now all looking thoughtfully at these pages, making small murmurs of appreciation.

  “This is great, Samantha.”

  “Wow, just wow.”

  “Frankly, I’m blown away.”

  “So.”

  “I mean. What a fascinating commentary on the social politics of . . .” I hear music that drowns out their voices. A strange swell of dreamy, Henry Mancini violins like I’m in an old movie.

  “So true.”

  They liken me to Woolf, to Borges, their praise as lavish as their handbags. Gone are the inanities I have witnessed among them outside this room. The hair braiding. The organ-crushing hugs. I almost feel as if I dreamed their cooing, their Bunnyness.

  Now it is the girl with the golden bob’s turn to be Workshopped. Caroline. I find myself saying very kind things about her story about a girl who is having a vague love affair with a mist that only she can see. “This is wonderful, Caroline,” I say. And her name feels strange in my mouth, but lovely too, like a new kind of candy. Caroline, how original. What insight, Caroline. Caroline, what poetic phrasing.

  “And what did you think of the reading, Samantha?” Fosco asks me when we—very suddenly it seems to me—switch to discussing the reading.

  I look down at the book cover, which features an art-house photo of a girl who looks pleased that her hair is on fire. I flip through and find nothing but blocks of text, unpunctuated. I look back up at Fosco, who is looking at me with the certain knowledge that I did not do the reading. Briefly, I picture her head exploding.

  “Fosco,” I say softly. “I actually haven’t—”

  “You were telling me earlier that you thought this book gestured toward a complex paradigm of female desires,” the girl named Eleanor interjects, not looking at me. “That it languages the circumnavigation of the hermeneutical circle. And I think Samantha’s piece is clearly talking to that piece. You must have taken inspiration from it. . . .”

  Fosco nods. “Eleanor, that’s very true. Samantha,” she says, turning her grand head toward me. “I’m very impressed by your piece this week. You’ve been doing a lot of emotional growth, lately, that’s clear.”

  They all nod at me and smile.

  I stare at Fosco through my heart-shaped frames. Because of the tint of the shades, she appears to be dark pink. They all do.

  “Clear.” I nod. “I’m so glad.” I bite into the mini cupcake Caroline offered me at the start of class. For the hangover, she said, shyly offering up the ornate confection in the cupped bowl of her small, pink hands.

  13.

  We’re at the café they love where you can get everything in miniature. Mini sodas. Mini burgers. Mini poutines. Mini cupcakes. How often have I pictured them eating here together? Clinking mini cocktails. Talking about me, maybe. Who fucking cares if they are? Ava would say. Seriously.

  They’re not looking at their cupcake-shaped menus, which I know they know by heart. Instead they’re looking at me. Four pairs of eyes watching me as I scan the menu. Every item on it is a dark pink headless body to my eyes, but the haze of drugs is clearing, is beginning to clear, is clearing imminently. And I have questions. I want answers. I open my mouth to ask—

  “Samantha,” Caroline says, “we want to talk to you about last night.”

  She’s wearing a dress patterned with little Bunsen burners, her Christopher Robin cardigan, her hair in a French twist. I touch my own head, find the elaborate knots she tied still there. How strange that I don’t even feel them anymore.

  “I don’t feel them anymore,” I say softly, clutching my cupcake menu close.

  “Feel what?” Victoria asks.

  “My hairs,” I whisper.

  They look at each other.

  “Samantha, we want to talk to you about what happened last night.”

  “What happened,” I repeat.

  “About what you saw.”

  Saw. I recall once more the wobbly blade with the winking teeth.

  “About what you think you saw,” Caroline says. “Samantha,” she starts again, “last night didn’t exactly go the way we hoped.”

  “I hope you know that, Bunny,” Kira says.

  I look down at the menu. Mini churros. Mini chicken and waffles. Mini sweet-potato fries with mini aioli. “Rob Valencia exploded,” I hear myself say as though I am commenting on the weather. Going to rain later. Ho hum.

  Caroline sighs and blows her shiny blond bangs out of her eyes.

  “He didn’t explode.”

  “Well, he sort of did,” Kira says. “And he didn’t. I don’t know what I’m saying. Never mind.”

  “He did NOT explode,” Caroline says.

  “He totally didn’t, Bunny.”

  “That’s just what you think you saw,” Victoria says.

  I stare at Victoria’s pretty skull face, the skin shimmery like white orchids. Her fuck-you eyes bored but also amused. Oh, Bunny. She’s holding a flute full of fizzy pink water upon which I am now drifting, thrashing a little to keep afloat. Inside, a spiked red thing bobs, bleeding red into the pink waters. My heart or the heart of Rob Valencia? I recall the blood splatter on the walls. How at the sight of Rob’s head blowing up, Victoria’s face remained composed, more annoyed than shocked. She might have even rolled her eyes.

  “What did I see?”

  They look at the silver-haired one who is named Eleanor, who is sitting with her bonelike hands braided over a mini basket of mini breadsticks she is not touching.

  “Samantha,” she says dreamily, “may I just say that I’ve always loved your work?”

  “You do?”

  She keeps her dreamy cobalt gaze on me.

  “So much. I’m a real fan.”

  “Really?”

  “Are you kidding? Your . . . grittiness. Your salt of the earthiness. All that brooding, dark-night-of-the-soul melodrama. Just wonderful. I mean . . . jarring at times, don’t get me wrong. Over the top. Willfully provocative. But the talent is undeniable. And your voice adds so much to the collective.”

  “A stiffness, so to speak,” Victoria adds.

  I look at them all nodding at me—their hair bright as the sunny sky right before me.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Which is why I was so saddened to hear that you’re having some difficulty writing lately. That you’re . . . blocked.”

  Now they look away. Avoid my gaze. The sunny sky vanishes and I’m alone in the rain, in the shadows. I imagine the Lion telling them, whispering it to them. See him stirring his tea, saying not unkindly, There’s no shame in it. It happens to the best of us.

  “What? Who told you?”

  “Samantha,” Eleanor says, shaking her head, patting my hand, “we could sense it. It’s so obvious.”

  I shake and shake my head. “I’m not. I wasn’t. I’m writing all the time.” But my tears that fall and fall betray me.

  Kira hands me a handkerchief patterned with rainbows. They wait while I blow.

  “Samantha,” Eleanor continues, “there’s no shame in it. You’re an artist. We all are. Our desires, our needs, what makes us thrive and flourish as artists—”

  “As women.”

  “Exactly. Is a complex and delicate thing, isn’t it? Nuanced and immense.”

  I nod.

  “Here is yo
ur desire,” Eleanor says. She looks at Caroline, who pulls a pink plastic pony from her purse and places it on the raised cupcake stand in the middle of the table.

  I gaze up at its long, pink plastic body in the center of the stand. Emblazoned with hearts. Frozen in midprance. Its large, ever-smiling eyes full of sparkles.

  “Pinkie Pie,” I whisper.

  “And here is the world,” Eleanor says, looking at Kira, who pulls what looks like a small plastic square of latticework from her purse.

  A fence. A toy fence.

  She places the tiny fence in front of Pinkie Pie.

  “You see how the situation is dire?”

  “Dismal is the word we use.”

  “Stifling.”

  We gaze at Pinkie Pie. Fenced in and alone on her elevated perch, empty of all but crumb dust. The table so far below.

  “It’s no wonder you’re blocked, Bunny.”

  “Samantha, we’re undertaking a project that addresses this issue.”

  “A sort of . . . collaboration.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Like a novel? Or a short story?”

  They smile. Oh, Samantha. So behind the times. Sitting alone in the dark at her prehistoric desk. Clutching her little blunt pencil oh so tightly!

  “No, no, no. Not a novel, Bunny.”

  “Which is no longer novel, you know.”

  “Such a tired form.”

  “Flaccid. Limp.”

  “What we’re doing is far more . . .”

  “Innovative.”

  “Experimental.”

  “Performance based.”

  “Intertextual.”

  “So intertextual.”

  “Basically: a hybrid.”

  A hybrid. That most obscure of academic beasts. What you call something when you just don’t know what you’re doing anymore. “A hybrid. So, combining genres?”

  They smile that tsk-tsk smile again. Shake their heads.

  “Samantha, we’re at Warren. The most experimental, groundbreaking writing school in the country. This goes way beyond genre. It subverts the whole concept of genre.”