by Mona Awad
“Book?” And then I remember Ava. Out there. Right now in the snow.
“I can’t. I have to go. I should probably head out now, actually.”
“Okay. Well, I hope you find your book, Samantha. Maybe it will find you. Sometimes, you know, that happens.”
My phone buzzes in my lap.
Coming over tonight, Bunny?
And then: We think we should have a talk.
A talk. Inside me, something curls and uncurls its fists.
“Actually, Jonah, would you mind driving me somewhere else?”
19.
By the time I arrive at Eleanor’s, the snow is falling in slow, fat flakes. Fairy-tale flakes. Movie flakes. Perfect flakes falling on her perfect house, its towers, actual towers, shining white and pointy as teeth under a perfect moon. An inch of it on the ground, making her perfect lawn white and shimmery.
“Sweet place,” Jonah said when we pulled up. Now, I watch him fishtail down the road and disappear. They aren’t nice actually, I told Jonah. The knowledge courses through me and makes me braver. Words that came from my own lips. When I walk up to the door, I hold them close. Beyond the door I imagine, no, I know, they are whispering about me. That Eleanor has told them things. I don’t know what things, but I imagine her leaning forward from her thronelike armchair, them huddled all around. Ready to swallow whatever vile lie or half-truth she feeds them about me like so much cheap candy. Practically panting with the desire to regurgitate little nuggets that validate her claims.
The other day, she didn’t seem that into her cupcake. I bet she doesn’t even like them.
I think she eats Pinkberry just to please us and it’s like, don’t do it just to please us, you know?
I’m pretty sure she blew You-Know-Who. That’s why he was so into her work last fall.
Guys, you should see her apartment. She lives in a cell. Seriously. Like a cell. It’s so dismal. It’s so sad. Do we want sadness around us? We’re suns, do we want clouds?
I ring the doorbell. I’m here to ask her something, that’s all. What did you say to Ava?
Remember they hate you. Remember you hate them. I repeat these two things to myself, over and over, like a mantra.
It’s then that I hear a faint sound behind me like a branch snapping. I turn, expecting to see a rabbit or a squirrel make a mad dash into the trees. What I see instead makes the hairs stand up on my skin.
A stag. Standing just a few feet away from me in her snowy front yard. Staring right at me, through me, with eyes like liquid smoke.
I stare at his large body gleaming under the moon, his horned shadow darkening the snow-covered lawn, his white-tipped antlers that could pierce me into oblivion. He’s beautiful. So beautiful that for a second I forget who or where or why I am. I’m aware of nothing but the racing of my heart.
Probably he just wandered out of the woods behind her house. But his presence, so large and living and wild, turns her blandly picturesque yard, the absurdity of me standing in it, the Bunnies waiting inside, everything, into a dream.
He’s looking at me. Really looking at me now.
“Hello, Samantha. Tell me everything,” comes a voice from behind me.
Her front door has opened. Standing in it is Orphic French Welder Who Plays Guitar, one of their failed collage experiments from way before my time. He looks, as always, severely depressed. Probably because, like many of their creations, he doesn’t know what he is. He is a product of their combined whims. Nothing more. His dark blue suit does not conceal how severely misshapen his body is. His black gloves conceal what look like small paws.
I’m surprised he isn’t dead or locked in the basement or out in a field somewhere turning circles, which is often their fate. But sometimes they’ll keep the docile, handsome ones and turn them into servants for a while until they tire of them. This one looks a little like a malformed Montgomery Clift.
“Samantha,” he says now. “You know I will hunt for you, daughter of Woolf.”
“Yes. I know.”
Remember, remember the two things.
“Come in, Samantha. Come in.”
When I turn back to look for the stag, he’s gone.
* * *
—
I follow Orphic French Welder into the living room, where they’re all seated in a little circle, flanked by her golden retrievers. They have been talking about me, that’s obvious. Their cheeks are plump and pink and shining like they’ve been eating too much sugar, but actually it’s Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus. The room smells of their grassy perfumes and their many organic conditioners. Little flutes before each of them full to the brim with something violet and fizzy. At the bottom of each glass, what looks like an eyeball floats. A lychee.
My heart starts pounding. Two things. Remember the two things.
“Samantha, we’re so glad you came.”
“Samantha, we’ve been talking.” They side-eye each other.
“And we have something we want to tell you.”
Suddenly all my resolve leaves me. I have something too! I have something. Don’t I?
“What?”
They side-eye each other again.
They’re going to tell me I have to go. They’re going to expel me from the group. Call their Darlings out of the basement and the locked places and order them to escort me to the oak front door. They’ll look at me with their vapid, glittery eyes and with their botched mouths they’ll say, Go. The dumber ones will just point at the door. And I’ll have no choice but to go back out into the Ava-less cold. Face my thin-walled room, sandwiched between the perverted giant and the sallow-faced girl. The desk I’ve been avoiding.
“What did you want to talk about?” I ask.
“Take a seat.”
“Just because you’re so tall,” Creepy Doll says. “It’ll make it less weird if you sit down.”
They gesture toward a vacant pouf, extremely low to the ground.
I sit down. I face them. It feels like that first night, ages ago, when they asked me to get a bunny. Ultimatum, I think. They’re going to give me an ultimatum. You can’t. You—
The Duchess smiles at me. “Who wants to tell her?”
“You tell her, Bunny.”
“You tell her.”
“Should we all tell her?” She makes it sound like a treat.
“We should all tell her.”
“Let’s count it off, though?”
“Okay! One . . . two . . . three.”
What comes out are shouted, indiscernible words, and then a wild eruption of laughter.
“You guys . . . let’s try one more time, okay?”
“Okay!”
“One, two, three.”
It happens again. They laugh and they laugh and they laugh and I sit on my pouf watching them. Fucking leave. Just leave. Why can’t you? says a woman’s voice in my ear. Slightly bullying. Losing patience. Slipping away. Ava’s voice. My voice. The hate is bubbling up in my soul and yet I am pinned there by the terrible fear that they will cast me out for good.
The Duchess lays a quieting hand on Cupcake’s knee, which creates a domino effect of hush upon them.
“Samantha,” the Duchess says after a long pause, “we’d like you to lead Workshop tonight.”
“We feel you’re ready, Bunny.”
“In fact, we can’t wait to see what you’re capable of.”
“All that raw energy at work. That imagination.” Small, shy smiles all around. Followed by blinky, twinkly-eyed concern at my face, which is doing something, it must be, that I’m not in control of.
“Bunny, what’s wrong?”
“Bunny, are you crying?”
“Bunny, don’t cry.”
“I’m sorry, I just, I thought you were going to say something e
lse, that’s all.”
“What did you expect us to say?”
“I don’t know, I just—” The tears make them go all swimmy and watery. They become one blob of peach-colored flesh wearing a pastel rainbow dress. Her golden dogs stretch into gleaming pillars at their sides.
“Did you expect us to say we were going to throw you out? That we didn’t want to be your friend anymore?” asks the blob in a concerned voice.
I look up at the blob. It laughs softly with all its mouths.
“Bunny, this isn’t high school.”
“This isn’t even undergrad, Bunny.”
“Or an eighties movie.”
“Or even a nineties movie.”
“We’re all educated adults here.”
Behind the blob, I notice another Darling lurking in the corner. He has a wooden spoon in one hand and a hammer in the other. Chefarpenter, because they couldn’t decide if he should be a chef or a carpenter. I watch him begin to mix and hammer the air confusedly. He looks at me with his pained, voidlike eyes.
“Here, Bunny,” the blob says. It hands me Pinkie Pie, the one they used as a stand-in for their desire—complex and nuanced—that first day at Mini.
I look into its absurdly huge plastic eyes, much too big for its horse face.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“That’s the beauty of being friends with us, Bunny.”
“There don’t have to be words sometimes.”
“You could text us a whale tomorrow afternoon and we’d be like, We know. We’d know exactly what it is you were feeling.”
The blob nods its four heads vigorously. Then it rises from its many thrones. It comes toward me awkwardly, almost shyly. It hesitates for a moment. Then it lunges forward and puts all its arms around me. It mashes its many-boobed body into my face so I can’t breathe anything but grass and cupcake perfume. Until I am drowning. Suffocated. Full of hate. A desperate desire to escape this saccharine embrace coursing through me. I tell myself I have to fight this—remember you hate them, remember they hate you—but all at once I fail. I succumb. I allow the sick need that no degree of revulsion can kill to be picked up out of the cold, wet dark and petted. I melt into it, their hug, allowing, nay, willing myself to be crushed. I become one with the blob. Or as close to one as I can become.
“Bunny,” one of the mouths says, “get the bunny.”
* * *
—
They caught it for me earlier that day, they said. When they remove the red cloth from the cage, I gasp.
“What do you think? Isn’t it perfect?”
“We saw it and we were like oh my god, this is so Samantha’s bunny.”
“So cute, but also kind of scary?”
I gaze at the shaggy monstrosity before me. White as snow. Ears and muzzle black. A little black blotch over one red eye like it’s wearing an eye patch.
I can’t decide if it’s beautiful or hideous or just fucking creepy. But they caught it for me. As I stare into its spotted face, I can’t help but be touched.
“It’s perfect,” I repeat. “Thank you.”
“We thought you’d think so.”
They’ve lit the scented candles. An incense that seems muskier, spicier, more putrid than the vanilla sticks they usually burn.
“We asked Fern at the magic store what’s a good incense to burn if you’re more of a bitch.”
“Like if you’re a bitch in the best way imaginable?”
“Or if you’re just a bitch.”
“And he didn’t even have to think about it, he was like, Oh, here.”
No audiovisuals tonight, they tell me, because surely you don’t need those, Samantha. We’d hate to color what you bring to this on your own. We’d hate to get in your creative way.
* * *
—
I don’t know how long we’ve been sitting here, staring at this creature who has curled himself into a tight, unyielding little ball. His red eyes mock me. His stare mocks me. Explode. Fucking explode, you little shit. Caroline yawns discreetly. Victoria yawns openly. Kira looks at her watch and then at each of them and then back at her watch. Eleanor’s just watching me.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur. “I’ve never done this before.”
“Don’t be sorry, girl. It happens. I mean, it’s never happened to me.”
“Or me.”
“Or me. But I’m always paranoid that it’s going to?”
Have fun with it, use your intuition, let your imagination loose, they tell me.
“All that raw, angry energy.”
“All that dark, complex stuff your stories are so full of.”
“She gets the point. I’m borny as fuck over here.”
They smile at me. So kindly. We can’t wait to see, Samantha. We can’t wait to see what you’re capable of. And it’s like someone with a camera is saying, smile, and when they say that, your mouth is suddenly frozen. You find you can’t move your lips.
Time goes by, I don’t know how much. No change. I tell them again I am so sorry. And they smile at me again in the most impenetrable way. Disappointment? Impatience? Pleasure?
“Maybe you’re overthinking it, Samantha.”
“Maybe you need to strip it down.”
“Maybe some audiovisual inspiration after all?”
“Maybe just think of men you’d want to fuck,” Victoria says. “How about that?”
Some singers and actors flash lamely through my head. I try to go deeper. Think of songs that would make me feel, as I lay in my bed listening, that I was ascending from the cheap sheets toward the ceiling. A wet spring night wafting in. Sweet with dripping green. Rob Valencia’s long, lovely shadow passing me in the school hallway, trailing his scent of slaughter and smoke. The Lion stirring his tea. Telling me what, I don’t even remember. Because behind him was a window where I could see a sky so wide and purple-yellow and lovely that he could see anytime. Dancing with Diego who never had a face. The smell of rained-on sage. Tendons flexing in a neck. The chiseled, tattooed arms of a fire-eater I saw once in Edinburgh. The way he looked me in the eye when he tipped the flame into his mouth. A one-eyed wolf I became fixated with for a while at the zoo I used to visit as a teenager. If he escaped everything would go horribly wrong but it would be beautiful too. And then I think of the stag I just saw outside. Its eyes like smoke. Probably long disappeared into the trees.
“Samantha?”
But the bunny just sits there. Confirming my worst fears. That I am not like them after all. That I can’t do this, I could never do this.
“Maybe we should help her,” Caroline offers. But she isn’t looking at me, she’s looking at Eleanor, who shakes her head slowly. Like no, no. This is Samantha’s catastrophe.
It dawns on me that perhaps this isn’t a gesture of kindness and trust at all, it’s a test. Or worse, a way to humiliate me. To show me that they are the ones who have this gift, not me. Not you, Samantha. Sorry. This ability comes with being us. We inherited it, like our summer houses, our grand pianos, our perfect, nuanced taste.
“I don’t think I can,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
I look up at them. Are they happy? Angry? Sorry for me? I can’t tell. Their smiles twitch slightly. Little sighs of frustration escape them.
“You need to have more confidence, Bunny.” I can tell by the way she says it that this is something they’ve discussed in a perfumed huddle. A cloud of bitchy whispers like tainted pixie dust.
Samantha has no confidence, it’s so frustrating.
She doesn’t believe in herself. It’s like shut up.
I just want to shake her in the nicest way.
Or slap her face.
Or punch her, you know? And be like, I love you. You’re amazing.
“You need to focus more.”
“Clear your mi
nd.”
“Think about your desire, Samantha,” the Duchess says suddenly, like she’s cutting to the chase. “Just think about what you want.”
What I want or what you want me to want? It’s not that simple.
“It’s really that simple, Bunny.”
I stare and stare and stare into the red, beady eyes of the bunny. It just sits there, burrowed into itself like a furry little Fuck You.
You have no idea at all, do you? the bunny seems to say to me. Sad. Very sad, Samantha. To be lost like this. Sad, sad, sad that when someone asks you, What do you want? nothing comes to mind but a pair of fists clutching little broken bits.
I look up; they’re all staring at me with their fairy eyes. Fucking with me. They have to be. And yet I feel those eyes all over my soul, plundering whatever pain and want they imagine lives there. That made them keep their distance all year last year. That somehow draws them in now. A pea to put under their twenty mattresses, which they can feel in the night, something from Down There, where they think, where I have somehow given the impression, I live. Let it out, Bunny. Show us. Or make a fool of yourself trying while we watch.
“Go on, Samantha.”
I close my eyes and see Ava, wandering alone in the snow in scuffed heels. Ava and me dancing on her roof. Who were we dancing with really? Nothing. Each other. Air. My lonely nights. And that’s when I realize that whatever pain I have, whatever true want I have that lives under all this greasy, spineless needing to please isn’t something I want to give them.
The bunny looks at me. His ears twitch. Then he unfurls suddenly. He looks right at me. He looks right at me with his red rabbit eyes and runs right out of the circle.
Hops is, I guess, more accurate.
* * *
—
Don’t be sorry, they tell me. We know you are.
“It happens. I mean, it’s never happened before,” Cupcake says, looking at Creepy Doll.
“But it could happen,” Creepy Doll offers. “I mean . . . I guess it could.”