by Mona Awad
“I don’t know, I think it really might be too much.”
“Now remind me what is it you’re working on?” As if she had ever remembered it enough to forget.
“This long poem about Alaska. I thought it was going be two pages but it’s like ninety pages so far. I just keep writing it so I guess that’s good but it’s also a bit scary because I can’t stop.”
“Well, when inspiration strikes. When the muses are speaking.”
“Maybe but I literally can’t stop. It might go on forever. I’m actually sort of freaked out.”
“So wonderful. Samantha, how did you feel about Workshop this semester?”
“Workshop?”
I have a vision of a Top Gun–era Tom Cruise with a harelip. His beautiful head exploding. The hail of bone, the shower of blood, the terrible brain rain from which I no longer bothered to take cover thanks to the magic Tic Tacs. And then his lovely eyeball landing in my kitten lap, blue-green as my dream of the sea, winking at me like a hard-won cat’s-eye. Afterward, to stop me from screaming, because there was no amount of Tic Tacs that could stop me from screaming, Cupcake showed me her walk-in closet. Look, Bunny. All her bell-skirted dresses arranged in a neat little line like fascists, organized by color to create a rainbow.
“Great,” I say. “Amazingly well. I’m really happy here.”
But Amazingly well is not enough, I can tell. She wants what Ava and I call Trauma Porn. Give me something, you whore. Don’t make me regret that I pity-invited you at the grocery store.
She raises her eyebrows. “Really?”
“Oh, yes.” What would we do, Fosco, without your feigned interest in our horror stories? Your attempt to unleash them from us through prompts involving tarot cards, hand puppets, and bits of soapstone?
“Well, that’s quite a relief to hear, Samantha, I must say. I know you were having some . . . difficulty with the women in your department.” She’s referring to last winter, when I sat in her office full of wind chimes, requesting, no begging, to be excused from Workshop for the semester. I told her I’d do double the work, I’d do triple the work, I’d—
May I ask why, Samantha?
I told her I worked better independently. I also had a really strong sense of my project at the moment. Workshop would only confuse me. Lead me astray. All manner of lies, which, to her credit, she didn’t buy for a second.
Samantha, she sighed, Workshop is an integral part of the Process. Workshop never “confuses” us, rather it opens us up, helps us grow, leads us in new and difficult and exciting directions. My Workshop in particular, I think you’ll find. Have you ever considered that perhaps your project would benefit from being led astray? Productive disorientation?
She smiled at me, her office caftan shimmering. Her ego was bound up in all this, I saw. I’d have to take another tactic.
It’s not Workshop itself so much as my cohort.
You mean the other girls?
Yes. And then I felt like I was four. A ridiculous, pouting child tattling to the teacher.
I mean, they’re perfectly nice and smart and I love their work, I lied. They’re just a bit of a . . . a clique. And that’s fine. Totally fine. It’s just I’m not really part of it. And I’m the only other person in the class. So. It makes things . . . weird.
I see.
She said she would see what she could do. But in the end, “after careful consideration” she made me return to Workshop. Gave a speech in the next class about how her practice as a teacher, as a writer, was inclusive; she liked to think she brought people together. And she eyed me the whole time as if to say, See? See how I’m laying the groundwork?
And the Bunnies looked from her to me and I swore they knew. And I wanted to die. And I stared at her hands folded over her thirty-year-old handwritten lecture notes, the capelet on her shoulders, the dry ice that in my mind is always smoking around her self-satisfied person. And so the name Fosco was born.
But now, of course, this is my thesis semester. No more Workshop. I can just lie and say everything is fine.
“Oh, that’s all been straightened out. We’re all one big happy family now.” I smile. “In fact, I’ve actually been experimenting with different mediums of expression lately.”
Ah, her face says. “Well. Warren is the place for that sort of experimentation. That deep, personal work.”
Over her shoulder, a tall, broad-shouldered boy in a catering uniform appears to pour her more wine. He looks at me with his Barbie blue eyes, smiles with his warped lips.
“Is something wrong, Samantha?” Her concerned expression. His leering one beside her. Hello. I know you. You made me, remember?
“Yes.”
“Yes? What’s wrong?”
They don’t remember, girl, Caroline said when we spotted one behind the counter of the Snuggery. They don’t. Seriously. They’re really infantile in some ways. Relax. Have another mini muffin.
“Samantha?”
The bunny boy is still staring at me. Sometimes they find their way back, Creepy Doll told me once. A lot of them end up getting jobs, believe it or not. Under the table, obvi. Violent? Sometimes they get violent, I guess. I don’t know. Whatevs, girl. Should we go to Trader Joe’s and get more cookie butter? I need it, like, for my soul.
“Fine. I’m fine,” I say, looking into my wineglass.
“Well,” Fosco says. “I’m glad you’re finally taking advantage of this place to broaden your horizons, your creative wingspan, so to speak.”
She holds out her glass and he pours, wearing white gloves that I know conceal flawed hands. Was I there when we conjured him? Hard to tell. Despite all the Bunnies’ nuanced conjuring talk, the boys all look more or less the same. But this one’s looking at me like he knows me. Tell me everything, Samantha.
“I’m definitely broadening it.”
“Wonderful. You know, Samantha, yours is the first all-female cohort we’ve ever had at Warren. You could say you young women are all pioneers of sorts.”
Behind her the bunny boy blinks at me. Samantha, I will hunt for you.
“Such nice young women too. We get spoiled here at Warren, really. We get the cream of the crop.”
“The cream,” I agree. “Absolutely.”
“I always say your cohort is your life-support system while you’re here.”
“I say that too.”
“You need them as much as you need your solitude. Perhaps even more than your solitude. Too much solitude, Samantha, can just lead to the worst kind of paranoia and navel-gazing.”
“Exactly.”
“Learning from each other, growing with each other, on the other hand.”
I think of us sitting in Creepy Doll’s bloody attic, and I picture us learning and growing with each other and I start laughing. Laughing and laughing and laughing. Jonah laughs with me even though he has no idea what I’m laughing at. The bunny boy laughs too.
Fosco looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.
I’m sorry, I say, but I can’t stop, the laughter keeps coming. It’s irrepressible. It’s the same laughter I heard from Ava at the Demitasse when she first saw the Bunnies, threw her head back and just laughed and laughed. And I couldn’t believe that she couldn’t stop.
“What’s so funny? Did I miss something?”
But I can’t even answer her for the laughter bubbling out of my own throat. Laughter is a rabbit hole and I’m falling, falling like Alice. There is no way up or out. The only way is down, down, down. The only way is to keep falling. Succumb. I shake with it. Ava’s laughter. Suddenly I miss her so much I want to cry. Tears, real tears, stream out of my eyes.
“Samantha?” Jonah says, reaching out and touching my arm. We’re alone in the living room. I can hear Fosco and Silky speaking hushed words to one another in the kitchen.
“I have some drugs if you wa
nt them,” Jonah says to me. “Not crack or anything. Pills. Just legal stuff. They’ll still make you feel better probably. Relaxed.” He hands me a small, cloudy plastic bag of variously colored pills. They look like the shiny backs of poisonous bugs.
He’s still cupping a holiday napkin with shrimp tails on it. His hair has been combed to look what he imagines to be festive or presentable or both.
“Jonah, I’m so sorry.”
“For what? It’s nice to hang out with you again.” He smiles.
Under the parka, I see, he’s wearing a button-down shirt and a tie featuring a graphic of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Jonah’s formal outfit, which he’s worn to every school event.
“I should go.”
“I can drive you.”
“No, you should probably stay here. It’s bad enough that I’m leaving early. I don’t want to draw you away too.”
“Okay. Hey, did you ever find that book?”
“What book?”
“That one you were looking for the other day, remember?”
Ava’s face through the diner glass. I’m leaving.
“I really should go.”
“Leaving already, Samantha?” Fosco coming in from the kitchen.
They all insist that I stay. At least for dinner. It’s Christmas, after all.
“No, I should head home.” Her eyes say, Oh Samantha. What could that possibly, possibly mean?
26.
Outside, the sun is weak and high in the sky. Snow gently falling. I see The Duchess’s house not too far off. A fantasy of breaking in consumes me briefly. I could set fire to all the diamond proems. Dishevel her artfully arranged stacks of Latin American novels. Lick all the probiotics and kombucha in her fridge. I think of my apartment, back in the opposite direction. Cold. Fridge empty. I polished off the last of my New England needle wine before I left. Across the street, I see the bus stop where I watched him disappear into the bus that disappeared into the dark.
A bus approaches as if on cue.
* * *
—
“Excuse me, where does this bus go?”
The driver just looks down at me with his one eye.
“All over. Where are you headed?”
“Um. I forget the name of the street,” I lie. “I’ll know it when I see it, though.”
He looks at me, unphased. Your funeral, lady.
I use change, not my Warren card. I’m not going to give him the satisfaction. And I don’t want to stand out, make myself a target. What do you mean, target? Ava asked me once. And I explained: They think we all have money and probably I’d have no time to explain that I’m not like other Warren students.
Her face said that’s exactly what makes you like other Warren students.
I look around now at the Ava-less bus, sparsely populated with the deeply dismal. They sit on the duct-taped seats with legs splayed, heads turned toward the grime-covered windows, grim faces looking dazed and subdued by the blue bus light and the dark outside. I walk down the aisle, keeping my head down. Sit across from a very old woman in a windbreaker who at first looks to me a little like my dead grandmother, at least in the face. I’m comforted. There is my grandmother sort of. Wearing the clothes of a slightly insane person. Tattoo on her throat of a spider in a web. Reading a ripped-up medical poster about schizophrenia aloud.
SCHIZOPHRENIA: Do You Have the Symptoms??
She reads each symptom on the list, going, “Oh I have that, oh I have that.” Making sounds of delighted surprise. Like it’s a recipe she’s reading and she’s tickled to discover that—
“—she already has all the ingredients in her fridge. No need to go shopping.”
Whispered into the nape of my neck, blowing softly into the small hairs there, taking the words right out of—not my mouth, but my mind. I turn. He’s in the ripped-up seat behind me. Headphones around his neck blaring “Your Silent Face.” Black trench-coated frame slouched coolly. His chaotic hair falling into his eyes, each its own cloud of glittering gray smoke. Smiling at me like we’re friends.
“So. Did you ever find your bunny, Samantha?”
* * *
—
In the blue light of the bus, I stare at his gaunt, wolfish face. His eyes are fixed on me, waiting.
“You said it died,” I say in a small voice.
“Did I?” He shrugs. Turns to the window, even though there is nothing to see but grime. I notice a tattoo of a black ax on his neck. Pinpricks all down the back of my neck like little stabbing stars. He looks back at me. Eyes that are profoundly every color and no color at all.
“So where are your friends?”
“Friends?”
When he looks at me, I feel my rib cage open like a pair of French doors. Everything that keeps me alive suddenly bared and there for the taking.
“They’re not my friends. I hate them.” The words leave my mouth in twisted smoke.
He smiles. Light on green leaves. Me looking up at the fast-moving clouds, the damp grass on my back. The smell of wet budding flowers all around me. I’m fifteen.
“So where are those girls who aren’t your friends, Samantha?”
A club in my old town. My back against chipped bricks. A stranger’s white spikes in my fist. Frankenstein forehead but a red pillow of a mouth. He was wearing a silver shirt that gleamed in the dark of the bar like an aquarium fish. The bass of a New Wave song pounding in my heart. His mouth a clove-smoky tunnel into which I was falling and falling.
“It’s Christmas break. They went home for the holidays.”
“All on the same plane? The same burning plane that is spiraling out of the sky as we speak?”
When he smiles this time, I see the drummer of a black metal band who once rattled my soul’s spine.
“Different planes. Different places,” I say.
“What a shame,” he says.
He pulls a silver flask from his coat pocket and drinks, then offers it to me. Shakes it at me when I hesitate. I take it from him and drink. Green fire hatches in my gut. I try to hand it back to him, but he stops me.
“You keep that. You look like you need it.”
“But what about you?”
“I’m high on love, Samantha.”
Cherry blossoms falling. Rob Valencia convulsing on the stage floor. A fishmonger I once had sex with whose eyes said I know the insides of everything.
He leans forward now, so close I can feel his cold breath on my face. Forests. Freshly killed things. The smell of wet white sage. He reaches a hand out toward my face. He might try to kill me. That’s fine. But he just grazes my cheek gently. When I open my eyes, he’s showing me his palm, dusted with gold glitter from when the Bunnies painted my face like a faery princess. It’s been on my skin for god knows how long.
He smears the glitter across his own cheek and smiles at me. Even with glitter on his face, he remains all of the not-cute things of this world in one man. And then it hits me. I feel it like a sudden singing in my skin, a blaze in my blood, an opening up of my heart itself. Are you my—
“Home,” he says. And just then, the bus stops. He gets up. Slips his headphones back on and walks down the aisle toward the door, whistling.
27.
I follow him in the dark. Him moving ahead with a wolfish prowl, me several steps behind. I think he’s going to turn around and say, what the fuck do you think you’re doing? But he’s letting me follow him, it seems. Turning around slightly every now and then to see if I’m still behind him. Maybe smiling to himself a little. I can’t tell.
He walks farther and farther ahead but never so far that I lose him entirely. Because there are so few streetlights in this town, sometimes he dissolves into the dark for a while and I get scared that I’ve lost him forever. But then there’s a circle of light again and I see his distant shape up ahead. Taller than a
redwood. Dark hair turning white with snow.
We turn this way and that, this way and that. Through a woodlot, a parking lot. Through alternately nice and shit parts of town I’ve never seen. Cutting through people’s gardens where I watch him break off a branch of holly here, a branch of pine there. I pace outside a greenhouse while I watch him clip the delicate snow-white flowers that grow inside. He gathers it all into a spiky bouquet, then moves on, walking more quickly now. Down between the line of houses and into a never-ending alley where for sure I think I lose him because the world goes black, black, black, but at last I see the alley open to a street up ahead, his silhouette turning onto . . .
. . . a row of abandoned-looking houses. Junk-filled front yards. A black cat sitting primly on the steps of a shuttered store.
Jesus where the hell are we? But I’ve been here before. Haven’t I been here before?
He slows his pace at last, swinging his bouquet, running his palm over the snowy spokes of all the fences we pass. Stop doing that! my mother would scream whenever she caught me. You’ll get a disease for god’s sake. Do you know how filthy? But I could never resist.
I’m about to reach out my hand to do the same when I see he’s stopped suddenly up ahead.
He’s standing on the snowy front lawn of a small, two-story brick house.
Why are we stopping here? What are we doing?
I look at the house. My chest tightens. Red front door. Flowers still dead in their pots. The whole foundation leaning a little to the left—just like being in Amsterdam, she used to say. If you close your eyes you can even hear the bicycle bells, the live sex shows. The roof where we danced now covered in snow.
I didn’t recognize the route, a different one than Ava used to take.
“What are we doing here?” I ask, turning back to him. He’s vanished. Just vacant snowy street as far as I can see. Just me standing here alone in front of her brick house.
I run up to the red door. Try the ice-cold knob, locked. Knock, no answer. I pound on the door until my fists burn. Try the knob again, which instantly comes off in my hand. “Ava, Ava, Ava,” I shout until I’m hoarse. I want to call his name too, but I realize now I don’t know it.