by Mona Awad
Then, just like that, he drops it. Reaches out and ruffles my hair like I’m a dog.
“I should be off, my love,” he says, turning to Ava.
My love? My love?
I’m high on love, Samantha, he said that night, on the bus.
I look down at the imprint of Ava’s lips he’s left on the back of my hand. And then I see the way he’s staring at her. The way I once stared at light dancing through the leaves of a tree. I was lying beneath it, the leafy shadows shivering over me, all that golden-green light over me. He looks at her like this while she, seemingly oblivious, casually suggests he come home—home!—early tonight so we can all hang out. Maybe have drinks?
“Wouldn’t miss it,” he says. He’ll even bring dinner.
“Already dead this time, please,” Ava says.
He grins, promises. But his eyes and his mouth curve say oh who knows what I am capable of? I watch them exchange secret smiles, enjoying what must be a private joke. Just between them.
And then he kisses her again. So deeply and for so long, I feel like a sun rises and sets and rises again as I sit there slumped against the back of the couch like my legs don’t work, watching them. When they part at last, there’s no lipstick left on her lips, her mouth surrounded by a pale pink ring. The same ring that’s around his mouth when he turns to me and says, “See you around, Samantha.”
He goes out the door, leaving behind him the smell of forests, and underneath that, a vital animal scent that reminds me. As if I could forget.
I pull out my phone, which has been buzzing all this time. Four missed calls. Four texts. Each of them just one word, one all-too-familiar word, long. Followed by a question mark/exclamation, a tulip and a ghost, a pointed period, nothing at all.
And then one more now:
Bunny where are you?
31.
Rabbit cooked four different ways, his specialty. He hopes we enjoy it.
“Enjoy it?” Ava interrupts. “It’s a fucking mouth opera.”
“Mouth opera,” he repeats. “I like that.”
By candlelight, I watch him rip the bunny flesh and bone with his human hands as though he bears no connection at all to that animal. Did the Darlings eat bunnies? I never saw them eat anything but Pixy Stix. I watch him tear at the bunny meat with his straight, white teeth. Wash it all down with the dark red wine he brought home, which I’m sure he must have stolen. All the while staring at Ava. She is cherry blossoms falling. She is serious moonlight. She is shivering green leaves.
Meanwhile, his animal shadow climbs and climbs the walls. Horned and furred and fanged. Do bunnies have horned shadows? Not any that I’ve seen. How can Ava not see it? But she doesn’t. At all. She looks at him from across the table, chin on her lacy palm, cigarette turning to ash between her fingers, like he’s Jacques Brel or maybe even Lux Interior, about to sing her a song about Amsterdam or getting fucked up. Believes him when he tells her that he too wishes to blow up Warren. He too has a soft spot for The Cramps, Scott Walker, sixties French pop, the scores of Mancini. Oh, and he just loves to dance. Tango especially.
Responsibility is what I feel. Ethical-moral obligations. Because you simply can’t sit back and allow your best friend to date an animal-man of your own creation and say nothing. You can’t. And say nothing? That would be just wrong. On so many levels. I have to say something. I have to say—
“More wine, Samantha?”
“Yes, please.”
He’s trying to get me drunk, that’s obvious. I watch him pour and pour and pour. Smile at me. So mannered. So cavalier. Maybe he isn’t mine. That’s still a possibility? Because bunnies do not eat other bunnies. Bunnies do not ever drink wine. Bunnies do not have eyes like smoke and wolfish faces full of knives. He must not be mine. But that gleam in his eye says otherwise, that faint smirk too. He knows and I know and that’s why every time I look at him I have to look away. Looking at him is like looking into a black mirror, is like being inside my own dreammare.
Dinner with him and Ava is in fact like an extended déjà vu. I know exactly when he’s going to lean forward in his chair and look at her with an intensity that makes me flush. Or when he’s going to lean back, nod, and then agree with whatever she just said. When he’s going to say Yes, Exactly, Me too, Oh, I feel the same way.
My phone buzzes in my lap, as it has all day. Why, after weeks of silence? What could they possibly want?
Bunny haven’t seen you around campus lately! Come out for cocktails, please
Bunny oh no r u still sick? Can I bring you soup? Juice? Text anytime!
bunny where are u?
?
“What’s that noise, is that your phone, Samantha?”
“No.”
I know exactly how long he’s going to laugh at the joke she just told—hahaha she is so funny—before he makes one of his own. A dumb one. I’m embarrassed by it, though probably it’s one I would tell. She’ll never laugh. You lose, I think.
But Ava does laugh. Hahaha. You think you’re funny. Doesn’t he, Samantha?
“Yeah.”
I know exactly when his ax tattoo is going to catch the candlelight and shimmer blackly at me from across the table. Reminding me he might be dangerous. Reminding me I must be vigilant. Reminding me—
“Samantha, you haven’t touched your rabbit,” he says.
“Haven’t I?” I stare down at my plate. He’s given me the head of the one he roasted whole. A gift from the chef. I stare deep into its unseeing eye. Samantha, you have to tell her.
“Ground control to Samantha,” Ava says. “Everything okay?”
“What? Fine, yes.”
“Just in your own world again?”
I smile. Yes. That’s all it is.
“Samantha’s a writer,” she says to Max, who looks at me over the hunk of thigh he’s just ripped from the animal’s side. As if he didn’t already know.
“Is she? How about that. So what do you write, Samantha?”
The thing about him that frightens me the most is his features don’t stay fixed, they shift. Sometimes he is the street busker I watched eat fire in Edinburgh. Sometimes the silver-shirted dark wave boy with the white spikes and the clove-smoky kiss.
“Smackie?”
The lone wolf I would visit at the zoo as a teenager with Alice. I’d stare at his lean body sitting still beneath a wind-warped tree and think if he went free what would happen? Everything, Alice would say, exhilarated.
“Smackie.”
The Czech cab driver who I thought was going to pull over and kill me. I was so convinced of my imminent death at his hands I prayed all the way home. My childhood best friend Brian of the wheat-colored hair and the gentle voice and the quiet intelligence my mother proclaimed positively freaky for a five-year-old. He promised me he would marry me when we grew up. We even had a pretend wedding before he moved away. I wore a white sundress, threw a bouquet of twigs and dandelions over my shoulder. Whatever happened to Brian? He exists in my memory as sunlight on a white-blond cowlick.
“Samantha!”
“Sorry, what?”
“Max asked you a question,” Ava says.
I look at Max, who is holding his wineglass by its stem, his features having shifted again, how does she not notice? He is now the picture of smiling, gentlemanly patience, the perfect boyfriend who is interested, genuinely interested in the lives of his girlfriend’s friends.
“I just asked what do you write? Ghost stories?” he offers. “Dark romance?” Wry grin.
I tell him it’s hard to explain.
He nods. Sure it is. It must be very hard to explain.
Well, he’s so sorry we haven’t met sooner, he says. But he’s been busy, Samantha, terribly busy. Literally he’s had to be in four different places at once.
“Max is a performance artist,” Ava sa
ys. “He’s been working on this huge project all winter. At your school actually.”
“My school?”
She misinterprets my look of horror. “I know. Blegh. But apparently it’s highly subversive. A real fuck you to the institution, which you know I’m all for. I told him, just watch you don’t get your soul stolen by the bonobos.”
“Bunnies,” I automatically correct, then instantly regret it, because he looks up. At me. His smile a question that already knows the answer.
“Bunnies?” he repeats. And I’m reminded of when he said it that first night. The word in his mouth. Needing salt, but good. Definitely. He holds up the hunk of red-wine-soused rabbit flesh skewered on his fork. Waves it around.
Ava laughs. Such a card, he is. “I wish. Just these cultish girls Samantha was involved with for a while. They tried to eat her soul like a placenta.”
“I don’t know that I would—” I start to say, blushing.
“Like a fucking placenta,” she repeats, not looking at me. He looks from me to Ava and whistles. “Wow,” he says. Slips the forkful of bunny meat into his mouth. Chews thoughtfully. Shakes his head. “They sound jusht awful.”
“They are,” Ava and I say quietly.
“Like they should be destroyed slowly.”
“They should,” I whisper before I can even think.
Ava looks at us both, appalled. “Destroyed? Why even bother? Fuck them.”
“Exactly,” he and I say at the same time. “Fuck them.”
I watch him lick his knife with his very long tongue. I feel a lick of fear up the inside of my thigh. Both thighs. “What are you doing at my school?”
He looks at me, feigning surprise, genuinely amused by my question, as though I’ve aimed a toy gun at him from across the table.
“Oh, I don’t like to talk about my work, Samantha. Ruins the thrill of the reveal. Surely you understand.”
“Samantha’s the same way about her writing,” Ava says, patting my arm.
He stops sawing at what looks like an ear stump and smiles at Ava. “Really?”
“Are you kidding? She’s so secretive about it,” Ava says.
“I am not so secretive,” I mumble.
“You should see her. Scribbling in that notebook. Covering the page with her hand like it’s a test in junior high.” She smiles at me. “It’s kind of sweet.”
Max grins at me from across the table.
“That’s because she’s writing about you,” he says.
I feel my chest catch fire. A redness spreading that I know, even in this dark room, is going to betray me. I can feel Ava looking at me. Samantha, is this true? But I can’t face her.
I keep my gaze fixed on Max, his scary-handsome, yet oh so innocently smiling face. I attempt telepathy. A warning. Traitor. But he’s either oblivious or doesn’t care. Clearly I don’t have the sort of power over him that the Bunnies had over their Hybrids, their Darlings, even their Drafts. Stay! Sit! Fetch me fro-yo! Lie here, beside me, good Darling.
“I’d write about you too,” he continues to Ava. “If I were a writer.”
“Fuck off,” she tells him softly but she looks touched. Really touched.
“I would. You’re the most exciting and wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me.”
The way he says it, so sincere. Like it came from his own brain and not page three of my secret notebook, which is shoved under my bed.
She tells him to shut up, but I know she doesn’t mean it. Her shut up is Continue, please. Much to my horror and fascination, he does.
He leans forward and takes her hand. But for his monstrous shadow on the wall, he is the embodiment of the edgy but romantic soul. Sid Vicious when Nancy was his sun.
“Being with you,” he says to Ava, “is like being in literature. I have no idea where you’ll lead me next. But I’m excited. My life could change. And I’m not alone anymore.”
I die inside when he says this. Recall the words, which I wrote down in another, older notebook. Scrawled it ecstatically on the lonely campus green when I was hungover after one of our first day- and nightlong escapades. After I met her at 11:00 in the morning and she took my hand and didn’t let go until the next sunrise. I might have whispered it to the flying-hare statue, the leaves falling in my never-yet-braided hair. I met a friend. To hear my words from his mouth now. The shame. The melodrama. The lonely, sweaty hopeful need. I ask for the floorboards to open up and swallow me. I look down at them and pray. They’re covered in dust because Ava never dusts and neither do I and apparently neither does he.
What could she possibly say to all that? Shut up? Fuck off? For real this time.
“That’s sweet,” I hear her say. I look at her. She’s gazing down at her plate, empty of everything but a couple of gnawed bones. Ava never eats much, really. She smokes over untouched plates and then leaves them for me to finish later, her ash sprinkled over the top like salt. But her plate’s gleaming now as if she licked it clean. And she’s blushing. All the way down to her neck.
“It’s true,” he responds almost immediately. Exuding intensity like a scent. That foresty smell he brings with him into every room like a wind gust, a shadow. “Isn’t it, Samantha?”
He reaches out and grabs the last crust of bread, which I was tempted by, and chugs the wine from the neck of the bottle. Then he hands it to Ava, who does the same. She hands it to me and I tip it back but there’s only one drop left.
* * *
—
After we’ve finished the last bottle, he revisits the subject of tango, his very favorite dance. Wait, it’s her favorite too? Both of you? Well, fuck. How wild. How crazy. How serendipitous, isn’t it, Samantha?
Ava suggests we roll up the rug. “Oh, come on, Smackie. I’ll even be Diego for you.”
And he says, “Diego? Who’s Diego?”
“Just this clichéd man Smackie and I invented to dance with. I mean, really we were dancing with each all other along. Weren’t we?”
“Yes.”
He smiles. “How sweet. Show me.”
* * *
—
When Ava and I danced together before, where did we look? Did we look at each other? I can’t seem to remember. I only know that now we look a little away from each other. I try to smile into that nothing space, like that is where she is actually standing. Except now there isn’t nothing. There is Max. Leaning against the doorframe in his scary-sexy way, a handsome, evil tree. He is smoking and holding a tumbler full of dark amber whisky. Casting come hither scents, weird shadows. Watching us intently. Not us. Ava. He’s watching Ava.
“I think I’m pretty tired,” I say, breaking away from her. “I better turn in.”
But I don’t turn in. I stay seated, watch them turn and turn and turn before the fire, which never ceases to burn. I bring his still-smoking cigarette to my lips. Drink his whisky, which tastes like an actual bonfire by the North Sea. Watch their souls entangle like squid tentacles. I am horrified. I am mesmerized. I am embarrassed in ways I cannot explain. I am also increasingly drunk and I can’t stop looking. At the way he looks at her. The way she looks at him. I drink the bonfire he pours and pours for me. Ignoring my now endlessly buzzing phone.
Bunny this isn’t funny. You’ve fucking disappeared.
Bunny r u dead?? Did the gross apt where u liv kill u??? If ur not dead, pls text me!
Hey! Where the fuck R U?
S, haven’t seen you around campus of late. I’m concerned. We should reconnect. Soon.
The world is going soft around the edges as I watch him turn and turn Ava. Even when the music stops, they’re still turning. It hits me then, even though I already knew.
They’re fucking. Of course they are.
32.
Of course we are,” she says the next day. “What are you, twelve?”
We’re si
tting on her roof, the sky a gray slate expanse hanging over us. She looks at me, wanting to know, really wanting to know if I’m twelve. Because this is the age of a person who whisper-asks a grown woman the question, “So are you guys, you know . . . ?”
Fucking? she finished.
And the word apparently looked like it hurt my face. Don’t look so fucking horrified, she says. I say I don’t look horrified and she says well, I should see my face. Which she can see thanks to my bonobo hair. My bitch curtain is still not in full swing. So she is free to look into both my eyes. To see how violently my lip is jerking while I try to appear calm, chill, casual. Not at all shocked or pleased or horrified to learn that Max, unlike the dickless bunny boys, is capable of sex. With my best friend.
How was your sleep, Samantha? he asked this morning, not waiting for an answer before he kissed me on the nose and then kissed Ava on the mouth, the neck, the ear, the shoulder, the mouth again, the other ear, the neck again. And then he was gone. Wherever he goes. Where does he go, anyway?
I don’t know. Your school, I guess? To work on his project. He says it’s site specific, whatever that means.
I’m really so anxious for you to see it, Samantha, he whispered to me on his way out the door. Once it’s finished, of course.
But where in my school exactly? I asked Ava.
How should I know? I don’t keep tabs on him. This isn’t a Bonobo House!
I look down at the patches of green poking through the snow on the ground below. The wet, dripping trees full of bright buds. Because apparently, somehow, it is now spring. The air smells sweet, bloomy, like plants having sex. My brain is cottony as Ava tells me all about how they hooked up. Back when she thought I was dead or bonobo feed. And she was a wreck, lonely as hell, but trying to forget me because I was just a ghost of myself anyhow. Then he just showed up, asking about the spare room, even though she didn’t advertise it. Just appeared out of nowhere, really. This anarchist with the best music taste. And such a serious artist too. Not that she knows what he is doing exactly. He’s being very mysterious about it. And serious. Like someone else she knows. Whatever. She’s certain it’s blazing. And he’s an amazing cook, well, I saw that with my own eyes last night, didn’t I?