Bunny

by Mona Awad

  “Talk about betrayal.”

  “On both sides.”

  “It’s no wonder your ‘friend’ flew away or died or got killed or whatever. Not that we can pretend to have any idea what you do in your sad little room, Samantha. I mean, our pretending only goes so far.”

  Smiles that see me tangoing on the roof, no longer alone. Falling for what I didn’t know was my own invention. The room dissolves and then comes back into focus and then dissolves again. The soft rug I’m standing on is so thick and plush I can’t feel the floor beneath. You have to keep your eye on the bitch in the purloined dress, you have to—

  “We did want to tell you, girl. About your bird friend or whatever. We almost did a couple of times. But you were just so delusional. We thought maybe if we told you, you would have like a breakdown or pee your pants or something. We didn’t know. I mean, you were just so invested in being too cool for everyone, in not being around us or even the poets or any actual people at all, you know.”

  The ax in my hand is slipping. My gaze is still pointed at her like a gun.

  “You fucking killed her. I know you killed her.”

  The Duchess looks at me like she is so sorry for me, really. Truly. But not really. Not fucking really at all.

  “Honestly, Samantha. Probably you killed her, if anything.”

  “And probably you don’t even remember because you’re just that crazy, you’re just that lost.”

  The darkness of the abandoned attic comes back to me. The red moon shining through the window with the crack in the glass. Me and Max sitting in a pool of blood.

  “Samantha, we’re not going to pretend we know the details of whatever squatter drama you had with your little fake threesome in that abandoned house on the west side. But we can tell you this. Whatever happened in the end? We’re sure it was for the best. You can really, really trust us on that. Maybe it will even . . . I don’t know . . . help you grow.”

  “I mean, you have to kill your Darlings, remember?”

  “I mean, they’re not real, Samantha, remember? Oh wait, that’s right. Samantha forgets.”

  “Conjures little bird friends . . .”

  “Maybe more than friends . . .”

  “Plays with them all by her lonesome and doesn’t even realize. So, so embarrassing for you.”

  “And sad. Super sad. And sort of scary-crazy?”

  “Not that we don’t appreciate that, girl. Certainly, the crazy-scary-sad adds a certain something or other. Like that time in first year—you weren’t there, obviously—when we added that weird exotic spice to a cake by mistake? What was the name of that weird spice? I can’t even remember. And for a minute we were like, oh my god, amazing more please? But then we tried to add more. And we were like, No, definitely not. There’s a reason why this spice is only available in certain ethnic stores. In the end, it turns out you just need like an eighth of a teaspoon of that shit. Every now and then. That’s all.”

  She gives me the full hate bouquet of her smile. Every fuck you flower. She knows full well that I’m gripping an ax in my coat. She’s not stupid, she fucking invented this game, remember? She knows my every murderous thought, rising and falling like white feathers in a wild breeze. But whatevs. She sips her champagne slowly, savoring it under my wavering gun gaze. Because I’ll never actually go through it, will you, Samantha? Killing us? Real people? Wouldn’t that be going just a little too far, even for you?

  “Samantha, we so love how you love to go to that edge.”

  “But it’s one thing to go to the edge. It’s another thing to fall off entirely, isn’t it?”

  “Where not even your ‘friends’ can bring you back?”

  “Or like, real people.”

  “I mean, Samantha, if you can’t tell the difference between reality and illusion, we can’t help you.”

  “We really can’t, girl.”

  “A true artist knows the difference. I remember learning that that’s actually the difference between an actual artist and, like, an insane person, you know? We learned that in high school. At least, we learned it in mine.”

  “Samantha, honestly?” the Duchess continues. “I think if you look deep and hard inside yourself, you’ll finally see. I think you’ll see that this was all for the best in the end.”

  “Totally for the best, girl.”

  “I mean, we were always like ‘you do you,’ but still. This had to end sometime, didn’t it? I mean, you’re about to go into the real world, aren’t you, Samantha? You can’t be having these sorts of . . . attachments.”

  It hits me then. There are no bunny boys languishing in the corners of her living room. The room is pristine, corners empty even of dust. No evidence. No sippy cups on the coffee table or Pixy Stix dust or half-chewed freesia petals on the floor. No whining rising from the basement through the floorboards like heat that at first would give me nightmares, made me want to go down there—No, Bunny, don’t. Leave them there—that eventually I learned not to hear, like white noise. None of it. Just them. And me. In a regular rich-girl living room. Beige as fuck. And all around us the regular dawn beginning to break. Finger by pink finger.

  I can’t kill them.

  I really can’t.

  The Duchess’s smile shifts. Victorious, knowing my thoughts so instantly. No, wait. Not victorious, dreamy. She suddenly looks like she’s gaping at a dream. They all do. A lightness breaks across their half-veiled faces. Like a rainbow just appeared over my shoulder.

  I turn. Max. His silhouette outside the living-room window, lighting a cigarette. His beautiful knifelike face lit up by the flame. And then darkness again. Just the red cherry of his cigarette. Moving away.

  “Tristan!”

  “Byron!”

  “Hud!”

  “Icarus!”

  They rise like a black wave. Rush past me out of the living room like they’re on fire.

  * * *

  —

  I find them all standing on the Duchess’s stone front steps in a ringlike huddle. Standing absolutely still. Holding each other’s hands like friends might, but really just holding each other back. They appear frozen. Transfixed. Their lips parted. Staring down at Max, who’s standing in the misty front yard smoking, still in shadow. He could be looking at all of them, at one of them, at none of them.

  Hard to say.

  Very hard to say in this early misty light.

  All a matter of perspective.

  A collective sigh suddenly leaves their lips like a spring breeze. I watch them gaze down dreamily, hungrily at the man with the cigarette held loose but firm between his fingers. As if he’s holding a bouquet of wildflowers, a razor blade, a blue orchid, a boom box playing your favorite song in the rain.

  For you.

  Just for you.

  He brings the cigarette to his smiling, unripped lips.

  And then they storm him. A mad rush down the stairs across the yard to where he’s standing. Pushing past each other. Pulling each other back by the hair, by the neck. Tripping each other in their black heels. A single squid monster of pink flesh and black silk whose tentacles have turned on each other. Cupcake reaches him first and wraps her arms around his chest and closes her eyes and just starts screaming. Meanwhile Vignette grabs him by the leg and Creepy Doll by the opposite arm. No, you don’t, bitch, they growl in perfect synchronicity. Then a rabbity grunt bursts forth from the Duchess as she jumps up and grabs him by the neck like she’s going to rip his head off.

  For a second, I’m frozen. Frozen as they were just a moment ago. Transfixed, watching them. Pulling at his body, making shrieking noises of want that are terrible to hear. He’s mine, no he’s mine, no he’s fucking mine, you cunt, let go, we talked about this! He’s fucking mine, mine, mine, mine. Even the Duchess is now squealing like a pig. If I weren’t seeing it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believ
e it. The froth. The straight white teeth bared. The hissy screaming. The inhuman sounds issuing from their meticulously painted mouths. Mouths that have cited countless philosophers and critics in grandly appointed auditoriums. I watch them tug at him with a fury that no doubt they put into their graduate school applications. An endlessly entitled fury that will drive them toward the shiny pretty things of this world and not stop until they have claimed them.

  Max, meanwhile, is impassive, allowing this to happen, allowing his redwood body to be pulled in four screamingly opposing directions by rabid dolls come to life, cigarette still between his lips. Despite their violent tugging, they don’t appear to be doing much damage. At all. He stands there like a patient dad letting a bunch of toddlers climb him like a tree.

  Is he smiling? Maybe.

  Hard to say.

  Very hard to say in this shifting light, in the shadows of her blooming trees.

  But he’s looking at me, that I know. I can feel tingling on either side of my face. Down the back of my neck. Rib cage opening.

  Get ready.

  For what?

  But the knowledge is already burning in my chest like a pilot light. Just need a spark to set it ablaze.

  No, I tell him.

  He suddenly sinks to his knees as if felled, as if hurt.

  “NO!” I shout.

  They all freeze. Look at me.

  Not at me, but at the ax I’m now holding in my hands. Shaking because my own hands are shaking. Slippery because my own hands are slippery.

  The girls freeze, but don’t let go of him.

  I look at Max. Who is staring straight at me, his gaze like foresty hands on my face, opening my heart itself. Do it.

  He tilts his head back, exposing his neck, letting it catch the fiery light in the sky, and I see the ax tattoo shining blackly at me like it first did in the blue light of the bus, like it did from the very beginning.

  No.

  Yes, Samantha.

  No, I can’t, please.

  Do it.

  I look at all of my dreams and nightmares distilled into one man-shaped shape. All the love and hate I have in my heart plus one fucking bunny. His horned shadow swallowing her front lawn now, as the sun begins to rise behind him. Do bunnies have horned shadows?

  I raise the ax over my head. They cling to him, screaming at me to stop, please fucking stop!

  He smiles. Trust me.

  I take aim and strike. Ax to ax. The blade hits something terribly soft. I hear an awful crack. My whole body thrums with it.

  I hear them start to scream. I open my eyes. The boy they are fighting for isn’t a boy anymore. Where there once was a black coat and human skin, there are hooved limbs, a smooth tawny hide, thorny antlers growing out of what used to be a human head. Large dark eyes like smoke. A stag. Kicking them away with its powerful, beautiful legs. Knocking them over with a shake of its grand antlered head.

  It’s a glorious sight. To watch it strike with its furious legs and shake its elegant head no, no, no, no until they’re all felled, knocked off their heels, and they’re lying on the wet dirt in their torn black silk, whimpering softly like their own bunny boys in the basement.

  Then and only then does the creature stop. Rise to its full, majestic height. Stand exactly where it stood when I locked eyes with it here last winter, when it passed through her snowy front yard like a dream.

  He looks at me once with his eyes of smoke. Then saunters away into the trees. I watch it disappear into the leaves and the mist, the long shadows.

  Something heavy is in my hand. The handle of an ax.

  I drop it.

  38.

  Graduation at Warren, as I’m sure you know, is legendary. Really quite something, a spectacle. Champagne overflowing from glass flutes. All the shelled creatures of the deep on ice. Clouds of billowing tulle. Clusters of white tents on the blooming, budding green. And in each tent, a host of gowned assholes about to be ceremoniously released into the world, one by grinning one.

  Silky calls each of us to the podium. Reads out the awards we have won. Shakes our right hands while he pretends to give us a fake diploma we pretend to take with our left. When my name is called, I walk to the stage trying to remember all of this. But when he holds out the diploma, I forget that it’s fake, meant solely for the purposes of ceremony, and I try to take it from Silky, who holds fast to it and says through his teeth, Remember, remember the email? I don’t remember, I just think, Fine. You can have it.

  As I stand there, I look for Ava in the crowd, a reflex. Something I find myself still doing, something I can’t seem to help. No black silk. No belligerent cigarette dangling from blue-red lips. No different-colored eyes gazing at me through a fishnet veil. I try to leave the podium, but Silky keeps my hand clasped in his fist, his face still fixed into a smile for invisible cameras. There are no cameras, I want to tell him. There is no one to capture this momentous occasion for me. But I don’t grab him by his tie and hiss this in his ear despite the overwhelming temptation. I just walk back to my hard white chair. Try very hard not to look to my left. Where they’re sitting on the opposite side of the tent. In the front row for easy access because of all the injuries. Sitting in a straight line, chairs exactly as far apart as they ought to be, no closer. Between them they have three broken legs, two broken arms, six shattered ribs, and two sprained ankles. The Duchess is wearing a neck brace.

  Book arts accident, I heard they told everyone. In the press room. So sad. We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn’t we?

  * * *

  —

  When it’s over, I stand among tent pillars wrapped with billowing tulle, watching people clink glasses and tell each other congratulations, congratulations, with well-bred smiles. The faculty patiently deliver the same camera-perfect smile over and over for each acolyte with an iPhone. Little trays of food architecture go floating by. Flutes of champagne, don’t mind if I do each time. Staring at all the perfect light she hated. The stately trees she hated. Overhearing all the talk of grand summer plans, at which she would roll and roll her eyes. If I close my eyes, I can almost feel her black silk shoulder against mine. Can almost hear what she might say under her breath. Can we get the hell out of here? You know I only come here for you.

  “Samantha, there you are.”

  Under the white tent, the low afternoon light on his face, he looks spectacularly unfrightening. Just a man. Not much older or taller than I am. Awkward, like I am. His expression well meaning under his untamed mane of hair. He saw me standing alone. He just wanted to say hi and congratulations.

  “Not taking part in any of the revelry? The picture-taking?” he asks me. His voice is open, familiar, almost kind, bringing back with it the light, the leaves of that first fall. When he was what I needed most—a friendly face, someone to talk to, someone who believed in me.

  I feel my eyes well up inexplicably, stupidly, and I look down at my shoes, the wet grass they stand in. Then I look up at him. If he sees that I’ve cried, he pretends not to notice.

  “Maybe later,” I tell him.

  He nods, smiles as if he understands. Awkward pause. Very awkward.

  “By the way, I enjoyed your thesis,” he offers suddenly, like a benediction.

  “You did?”

  “Yes, very much. It was . . .” He trails off, searching for the right word.

  Last year, I would have been on my hind legs waiting for this word like a starved dog. Head cocked. Panting for this biscuit of adjectives that would make me or break me. That could make me or break me. This afternoon, I just wait.

  “Different. From what I expected. From what you came in with. Anyway, I liked it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I really do think your writing is going to take you places, Samantha. I thin
k it will bring you great things. I always have.”

  He smiles again. Another silence. I fill it with nothing. I fill it with absolutely nothing as we both turn away and allow ourselves to be absorbed in other clusters.

  Or not so much absorbed in my case, as gently seized. By an arm draped in silk. Ursula in her spring iridescence looking pleased as punch with herself and not a little drunk. She stands at the helm of a ring of broken girls. Four crooked pink-and-white bodies. Four drugged faces that twitch when they try to fake-smile. At me.

  Hello, Samantha.

  I do not return their smiles.

  After they got kicked to the ground, after the stag sauntered off into the trees, I walked away, leaving the ax on the wet lawn, leaving them lying there in the dawn mist. Back at my apartment, I waited for the police to call. For the dean to call. For their lawyers to call and tell me they’d see me in court, thank you. Nobody called. I was free to sit and stare out the window, my hands open and empty at my sides, sometimes seeing my own reflection, sometimes the bricks and sliver of sky beyond, sometimes both, for as long as I liked. Forever, even.

  Except I didn’t. Eventually, I went back to the house. Her house. Our house. My house. Gathered my half-filled notebooks off the attic floor. Went up on the roof where we danced. Finished the story. Looking up every now and then at the tree he must have planted in the corner of the garden. Where I buried her.

  “I was just about to congratulate my girls,” Ursula says now, “my pioneers, and then I realized: we couldn’t have a proper toast without Samantha, could we?”

  Of course not, they murmur politely. Voices reduced to whispers, limply holding up flutes of champagne with their bandaged hands.

  “Congratulations,” they actually say to me, quietly, very quietly. Like they didn’t murder my soul mate. Like I didn’t summon a demonic animal man to destroy their souls. Like we’re actually just five young women graduating from an arts program. Warren’s first all-female cohort. Such trailblazers we are, yes?