by Rufi Thorpe
She made varsity in tenth grade and had a stellar year, but the summer before junior year, she began to grow. At first she was excited. She was already tall for her age, but there was no “too tall” for volleyball. But then she kept growing. By Christmas she had grown five inches, which hurt her, her legs in particular ached constantly, but which also disorganized her coordination. I only ever occasionally attended her games, both for scheduling reasons and because I found most sporting events boring, even if I knew someone personally involved. But she reported them all to me at excruciating length, and I was aware of every missed dig, every embarrassing fall. In fact, she fell just walking around the house. She was constantly hitting her head getting into cars, misjudging curbs, suddenly stumbling over her feet. It was comical at first, and then less so. “I think we should take you to the doctor,” Ray finally said, but he put off scheduling it.
That year, her team made it to the state playoffs, and Coach Creely benched Bunny for the entire game, though the team lost anyway. Sitting on that bench had shamed Bunny more deeply than going stag to every school dance had done. She had also happened to be on her period, and Bunny’s periods were horrific, tidal affairs that she was prone to discussing in the goriest language she could conjure. After the playoff game, she had texted me that she was depressed and could I come over, her father was not home. Aunt Deedee was working late that night—she had recently been fired from the Target Starbucks and was working nights at a bar in Culver City, which meant more money but even fewer hours of sleep. I had never seen her so gray and flattened, and sometimes I worried she would just drop dead. I told Jason where I was going, and he farted at me, and I went next door, where I found Bunny still in her uniform, purple short-sleeve jersey, “buns” (the adorable name for the black panties they pretended were shorts), kneepads down around her ankles, a heating pad on her stomach, eating gummy worms.
“Dude,” she said, “you want to know the grossest thing about having a period?”
“No,” I said. “I do not.”
“When you take a shit and you wipe, it looks like peanut butter and jelly.”
“And we wonder why you don’t have a boyfriend,” I said, stealing a gummy worm from the bag in her lap.
“Ugh. I know exactly why I don’t have a boyfriend,” she said. “Because I’m fucking eight feet tall. I’m a monster.”
“You’re not a monster. You have charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent, and you know it.”
“I’m never going to have a boyfriend. I’ll probably be, like, a forty-year-old virgin, all wrinkled from too much sun, and I’ll get stocky and thick, and everyone will just assume I’m a lesbian.”
“That’s pretty insulting to lesbians,” I said.
“I wish I were a lesbian,” she said.
“It’s never too late! Are you attracted to girls?”
She seemed to think about this, chewing thoughtfully on a gummy worm. “I think they are so, so pretty. I like to look at them. I think they look pretty naked. Is that enough?”
I wasn’t sure. “Does looking at them make you hungry, like, I want that, I want to squeeze that, I want to shove my face in that?”
She laughed. “No.”
“Then you are probably not fit to be a lesbian.”
“Do you feel that way about guys?”
“No comment,” I said.
“Can I tell you something?”
“Obviously you can.”
“Penises kind of freak me out.”
“In what way?”
“Like, they look like they don’t have enough skin. They look like naked mole rats, have you ever seen those? And they are all vulnerable and pink and everything, but then, like, hard and long and pokey? Sometimes just looking at a dick, like, if it’s alone, actually kind of makes me sick to my stomach, like one of those videos where they pop a big zit?”
Her honesty gave me the giggles. “If it’s alone?” I gasped.
“Yeah, I mean, like, not in the context of a porno, but like, just a dick pic, like just, wham, right there, erect penis, no context. That doesn’t gross you out at all?”
“Not really,” I said. But it had once. I could remember getting queasy when I first started cruising Craigslist. I had known enough to expect, even at thirteen, that I would see penises. But there were so many kinds, and sometimes they had weird veiny knots in them, or oversize heads on tiny staffs, or they were too pink, or so black I didn’t know they could be that black and shiny, slick purple, almost eggplant. But it had been the pictures of anuses that had been most alarming to me. Some of them were so well bleached and manicured that they looked like doll parts, but some of them were dark brown and hairy and scary looking. But I still felt very compelled to look at them, and gradually they had become less and less frightening to look at, but the fear and the excitement went together, were almost one thing.
“I wonder why sex is so terrifying,” Bunny mused. “Like, why is it this great big thing and so full of pleasure, but also, like, very, very frightening?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I was so embarrassed sitting on that bench, it was like I couldn’t even look up. I couldn’t look at anyone, or I would start crying, you know? It was like a public shaming or something. What were those things called? Where they would lock your hands and head in a piece of wood in the town square?”
“A pillory.”
“Yeah, it was like I was pilloried.”
“I’m sure nobody but you thought of it that way,” I said.
“Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Michael. I’m taller than all the students, but I always kind of was, or at least the second tallest. But I’m”—she sat up, leaned in, almost whispered—“I mean, Michael, I’m taller than the teachers. I’m taller than my dad.” Her eyes begged me to understand the unnaturalness of this, the constant pain of it. And I knew. I knew she had to lean down to hear her friends talk. I knew that if we went anywhere besides North Shore, where they were used to her, she would have to answer endless questions: How tall are you? Are your parents tall? Do you ever wear high heels? Do you have a boyfriend? People would ask her that, just, like, at the mall.
“I don’t know, Bunny,” I said.
“I mean, do you think there is something genetically, biologically wrong with me that I’m this tall?”
“Do you think there is something genetically, biologically wrong with me that I’m this gay?” I said, keeping her gaze, even though the more I looked at them, the weirder her eyes seemed to me, too large and shiny, the dark brown of her irises glossy and slick as melted chocolate.
She burst out laughing, belting out hee-haws so improbable that at first I thought she was faking it.
* * *
—
That winter, Bunny didn’t join the swim team as she usually did. She didn’t do anything. Ray had finally taken her to the doctor, and he wrote a note exempting her from even regular P.E. She was still growing too fast.
* * *
—
While Bunny had never been good at school, there was no sign she had the developmental delays one would expect with DNMT3A overgrowth syndrome, and a DNA test confirmed this.The concern was that there might be a tumor in her pituitary gland causing an excess production of growth hormone. Her hands had grown so much that the joints ached, and her jaw had become heavier, more manly. While these changes filled Bunny with despair and self-loathing, there was now an androgyny to her looks that I found fascinating. I had an impulse to grab her long, thick throat and push my fingers into that jaw and turn her head this way and that. She was beautiful.
Was there something wrong? Not on the ultrasound of her pituitary gland. She was taken for X-rays, where they studied her bone plates to see how much more she would grow. She was given
blood tests for which she had to consume a sugar drink she described as tasting like liquefied Smarties.
This drama unfolded slowly over that winter and spring. After two ultrasounds and an MRI, it was decided that her pituitary gland was normal, and still she grew. They X-rayed her bone plates again. Her endocrinologist promised she would stop soon. She grew another inch. By the end of junior year, she was six foot three, and an even two hundred pounds. And she felt like a complete monster.
The very moment I turned sixteen and could work legally, I had gotten a job at the local Rite Aid, mostly because it was only seven blocks from our house. To have a job, to earn money, to be able to afford my own food and clothing, was essential, but it was apparent that no one was going to teach me how to drive or give me a car to learn on, and so my employment options were geographically limited. I applied to the Starbucks, to the Rite Aid, and to the North Shore Fish Company, but the Rite Aid was the only one that called me for an interview, and when they hired me, I considered myself lucky, even though the job was painfully boring and going to work without makeup on, with my septum piercing tucked up invisibly inside my nose, caused me to feel vulnerable and nude.
As it happened, I fell immediately and hopelessly in love with my manager, Terrence, a soft-spoken father of four and former high school quarterback with floppy blond hair, who was perpetually both gentle and stoned. I loved him impersonally, abstractly, like a character in a book who, by virtue of their very distance from you, their belonging to a different world that you may never yourself enter, enflames your longing all the more. I didn’t want to fuck him exactly, though I would have (quite enthusiastically) if asked, but I was borderline obsessed with him. He carried a one hitter in his pocket, and I feared that something tragic might happen to him, specifically that he might commit suicide, though there was nothing definite that led me to believe he had plans to do so. His wife was bossy and exuberant, his four children happy and demanding, and certainly loud when they visited the store, but I got the sense that, even though he was overtly grateful for his life, he could see that he was lucky to have them and to have a steady job, he was also someone who found life’s beauty inextricably mixed with sadness. He was devoutly Catholic, and it always seemed to me that this informed the development of his personality, the way he liked to clasp the hands of the staff as we said goodbye, as though the hands were the conduit through which blessings could be communicated.
Whatever it was, it made Terrence kind, so patient with his staff that it bordered on the saintly, and he would ask old women filling their prescriptions or buying stool softeners about their days and then he would listen, listen so intently that they felt pierced by him, and I got the feeling that he really did find their days interesting to hear about, and that he loved them, loved all of us, even as, at the end of the day, as he folded his long legs into the driver’s seat of his pale blue minivan, which was always covered in dust, he found it all a bit too much, too hard to take, and he would fumble with his one hitter as though the smoke were medicine, an asthma inhaler that would force his lungs open and allow him to keep sipping the air amid the pandemonium of the living.
One night in July, during the summer between junior and senior year, I was working the register when I saw Bunny and another girl come in with two boys. It was around seven at night, which was a busy time for us, even on weekdays, because we had excellent prices on liquor and wine, and the line for the register looped around the front of the store, with mostly men and some women holding cases of beer and multiple wine bottles awkwardly in their arms like cold, abstract babies. It had come as somewhat of a surprise to me how pervasive alcoholism was, even in our picture-perfect town. On the one hand, it was a relief to know that what had happened to my own family was not singularly shameful, but I was also taken aback to learn that the majority of people found their lives so dreadful as to need to enter a near stupor every night in order to continue living it. It did not give me much hope about my own adulthood.
I hadn’t been seeing Bunny lately because she was doing a volleyball intensive at Cal State Fullerton for the summer, and she often didn’t come home until eight o’clock at night, and then was so tired she just collapsed after sending me a few weird gifs and strings of heart emojis. I did my best not to resent her unavailability because I also knew this summer was a turning point for her. She had finally stopped growing, maybe, possibly, at least it was thought by her doctor and repeated frequently by Ray Lampert that she had stopped growing (Ray was always strangely gleeful about Bunny’s size, like she was a 4-H project or an Amazonian orphan he had adopted from Themyscira; he told anyone who would listen that his daughter, his baby girl, was taller than him now), and whether this was true or not, her growth had at least slowed enough to allow her to regain her coordination, and she was learning her “new legs,” as she called them. She could now jump vertically twenty-nine inches in the air, which was better than most pro football players. Even as boys seemed more out of reach than ever, the Olympics had come back into view, and she seemed psychologically able to handle this exchange.
So I was surprised to see her, and I was even more surprised to see her with two boys I didn’t know well, and the girl, who I vaguely knew was named Samantha because she had been in my biology class freshman year. I disliked having to ring up people from my high school. It was a small town and a small school, and while I didn’t know everyone’s names, I always knew them by sight and they knew me, and it was awkward that they were buying things and I was selling things, that they had money to spend on items they didn’t need, and I needed money so badly that I was wearing a blue smock.
As I continued to ring people up, I watched them move through the store. I couldn’t tell if they were stoned or drunk, but I knew they were not normal, were giggling and looking around the store like it was an alien planet. Bunny had picked up a stuffed toy, a lion Beanie Boo with huge plastic eyes, and was cuddling it even as one of the boys was prying it from her hands and putting it back on the shelf. “Ooh, gum!” the dark-haired girl said. “Gum sounds amaaazing right now.”
I watched them as they got in the long line for the register, as they pawed through the items lining the display, picking up miniature-size hand sanitizers as though they had no idea what they were, examining alien writing on packages of candy. They were each buying a soda and a variety of snacks, and Bunny had picked up the toy lion again. “I can’t believe you’re buying that,” the girl said to her.
“Look at his eyes,” Bunny said, and smiled into his plastic eyes as though she could see real emotion there, some enchanting vulnerability. “I mean, I have to.”
I did not like any of this, and I was extremely anxious not to be the one who rung up their purchases, but I was relieved to see that when their turn came they each paid separately, and Bunny hung back, timing it so that she could come to my register. Terrence, my manager, was in his office, so I was relatively unobserved, and I skipped the canned lines I was supposed to say to her: “Did you find everything you were looking for?” And started with: “What the hell are you doing here—are you high?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and I saw that her pupils were huge, and I knew whatever she was on, it was more than weed, more than vodka pilfered from someone’s mom. “Ryan asked me out on a date and then we went to the mall and then we all took these pills, and I feel amazing, but now I’m really scared. Am I okay? Is everything okay?”
“You need to go home,” I said. “Just tell them you have to go home and then walk there—do not drive. Just walk home. I get off in two hours, I’ll come take care of you.”
“I don’t know how,” she said. I had rung up her items and bagged them, and there was a limited amount of time left for us to talk without holding up the line.
“What do you mean you don’t know how? You’re at Rite Aid. It’s seven blocks. You’ve walked from here to your house a million times.”
“I think
I would get lost,” she said.
“It wants you to swipe your credit card,” I said.
She fumbled with her wallet and swiped her card.
“You are not good to be hanging out with boys like this. Do you understand? You need to go home. Bunny, are you listening?”
She nodded, and I could tell she was on the verge of tears. “How long have we been in this store?” she asked me.
“Ten minutes,” I said.
“Oh good,” she said, “I thought we had been in here for hours!” And then she laughed, and I knew she was not going to go home. “There is,” she said, and paused, “some kind of shadow on your face.”
“There’s nothing on my face,” I said.
“You look so sad!”
“Take your card and fucking go,” I said.
“Why are you mad at me?” she asked, but she took her card and put it back in her wallet. Her friends were waiting for her by the exit, holding their bags, cracking open their sodas, giggling.
“Just go,” I said, so angry I was getting tunnel vision and my heart was pounding.
As soon as she left, I felt guilty for getting angry at her, and guilty for not doing more to protect her. And yet, I knew that this was the world. I knew that this was what teenagers did. I knew that Bunny was so desperate to be seen as sexually attractive that she probably would have had sex with one of those boys stone-cold sober, even if they had Cheeto breath and there was bad lighting. I had no reason to suspect those boys had drugged her in order to get in her pants, no reason to imagine them ignoring her protests as they took it too far, no evidence that she would wind up scared and missing pieces of her memory the next morning. Bunny didn’t need my protection. She could probably pick up one of those boys and throw them. And I had no knowledge of those particular boys and whether they were a good or a bad sort. I knew only that one of them was on the wrestling team and they both took Spanish. I hoped that they would all go to someone’s house and eat too much candy and watch a movie whose plot they couldn’t follow. I hoped they would get lost staring at someone’s fish tank, saying things like “Isn’t it crazy that fish exist?”