The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

  They played the 911 call on the local news. She argued with the dispatcher, who told her to go back to her home. “The police are coming, ma’am, they are on their way.” “I can’t wait. I can’t wait out here when my baby could be in there hurting, please, I can’t.” “You must return to your house.” But she didn’t return to her house, she went into Luke’s, and she screamed as she saw her three-year-old boy bloody on the carpet, his face and most of the right side of his head missing. They did not play the rest of the 911 call because it was too graphic. Luke didn’t shoot her with the gun, though he still had four rounds, but he beat her to death by slamming her head into the kitchen counter over and over again. When the police arrived, he had just finished shooting himself in the head. They heard the gunshot as they broke down the door.

  It was so terrible that it seemed to be from another world. I remember, too, a quote from the medical examiner that wound up in the paper, describing Donna’s skull as not just fractured but turned into a “mosaic of bone chips.” The violence was otherworldly. We couldn’t understand how someone could have performed it in a place that was so familiar to us.

  “Doesn’t it seem weird,” Bunny asked one Sunday afternoon, a rare one that I wasn’t working at Rite Aid, as we sunned ourselves on her back patio, our skin glistening from the pool. “Doesn’t it seem weird that it was Donna Morse?”

  I knew instantly what she meant. Donna, who was neither beautiful nor smart, who had not said one interesting thing as far as either of us could ever tell, seemed an unlikely object for such all-consuming desire. That was what we thought somehow. That all of this violence was over Donna, was, in essence, her fault, as though Donna were the gunpowder and Luke a helpless cannon, a series of mechanical pieces inexorably igniting her. If she had been beautiful or capricious, mysterious or charming, we could have understood how someone could have fallen so in love with her that it drove them to murder.

  “It’s like, just get another girlfriend,” Bunny said.

  “They had a kid together,” I said, but I wasn’t even sure what such a bond entailed. My own father had seemed to find it easy enough to let us go. They had gotten divorced while my mom was in prison, and he had certainly never contacted me again. Whatever life he lived he must have found sufficiently distracting to forget us. And as a child I had felt his love as physically as the heat of the sun. So where had it gone?

  “Phh,” Bunny snorted. “Like he loved the kid.”

  Did fathers love their children? It seemed only some of them did. Others were immune somehow, or they could turn it on and off, and we assumed that because of Luke’s violence, or perhaps because of the tattoo of a giant angry moon on his calf, or perhaps because he wore a beanie even in summer, that he was the kind of father who felt nothing for his offspring, or who felt the wrong things. We saw him often enough at the dog park, which was right off our street. He had a sandy-colored pit bull named Pecan. But even Hitler had a dog.

  “She should never have let Spencer go with him,” Bunny said. “She should have fought harder in court to keep Luke from getting visitation.”

  “She should have listened to the 911 dispatcher and stayed out,” I said. “Spencer was already dead. She couldn’t save him. She was already too late.”

  Donna Morse had not been smart.

  If she had been smarter, she would have succeeded in not being murdered.

  Bunny and I were smart. Something like that could never happen to us. We would never let our own murderous fathers get out of hand. Our murderous fathers were more refined, confined themselves to smashing vases and brief bouts of strangulation.

  Bunny was especially hung up on why Donna hadn’t fought him off harder. “How could you let yourself be slammed into the kitchen counter like that? I mean, after the first few times, aren’t you like, enough, get off me?”

  “Maybe he was stronger than her,” I said.

  Bunny shook her head. She couldn’t imagine it. She couldn’t fathom it. What it was to be physically weak. To be overpowered.

  “I think she was waiting,” she said. “I think she assumed he would stop. That it would be like all the other times, and he would slam her head once, twice, but not keep going. But she’d seen the kid already. How could she not know he was going to take it all the way? She thought she could calm him down. That was her mistake.”

  Donna made false calculations. Donna had failed.

  There was no discussion of whether Luke had been smart or not smart. There was no discussion of what Luke should have done. Luke was, somehow, not a person.

  We needed to pretend violence was something we could control. That if you were good and did the right things, it wouldn’t happen to you. In any event, it was easier for me then to demand that Donna become psychic and know how to prevent her own murder than it was for me to wonder how Luke could have controlled himself. It was easier for all of us that way.

  * * *

  —

  When school started, I was mostly concerned with how I would continue to see Anthony, since we could meet only in the daytime due to my housing situation, and we could not meet at his place because of his marriage (I presumed; he never actually said as much). Still, we often talked of ways we could sneak away, a fake camping trip with a fake flyer I could show my aunt, though I did not mention to him that my aunt would never believe that I wanted to go camping. We would go, he said, to the Hotel Angeleno, which was a round turret with windows on all sides so that every room had a balcony overlooking Los Angeles, and we would go to the Getty, he said, and look at the art together.

  It was senior year, and for all my classmates the specter of the future loomed, but for me the questions, over where I would live, what I would do, whether or not I would go to college and how, were kaleidoscopic and overwhelming. The relationship with Anthony had unseated me from my usual pragmatism and suddenly anything, even impossible things, seemed like real possibilities. Maybe I would get into college and get a free ride and live in some kind of idealized dormitory setting, and Anthony and I could go on dates, and maybe he would take me to the symphony, and maybe we would fly to Paris together, and after brief, wrenchingly beautiful sodomy, we would eat croissants and notice together a stray cat dans la rue.

  Maybe I would become homeless and begin to prostitute myself in Inglewood and eventually be murdered. Maybe I would go to community college and continue living with my aunt and working at Rite Aid and would stop seeing Anthony altogether and my life would go on much as it had. All of these futures seemed equally possible to me, and I spent my days lurching from one scenario to another, and so I did not exactly notice that some kind of vicious gossip was going around the school until the third or fourth day of the year, when I saw a fat, ruddy-faced boy named Scott, who was on the wrestling team and who was rumored to have absolutely chronic ringworm, snap his jaws at Bunny in the hall and growl, “You can bite me anytime, girl.”

  Bunny stared at him, as expressionless as a mannequin, and then slowly rotated toward her locker and opened it.

  “What was that about?” I asked her.

  “Nothing,” she said, but I noticed that her head was wobbling on her neck oddly, as though the muscles had given out and she was having to keep her head perfectly balanced upon the nub of her spine. She seemed, if anything, not upset but ill.

  “Did he say you could bite him?”

  “Yes,” she said, and closed her locker and walked away from me, her head still carefully balanced on her neck as though it might tumble off.

  A few carefully posed questions throughout the day provided me with the rest of the story. It was regarding Ryan Brassard and the night I had seen them together at the Rite Aid in July. In none of the stories I heard were drugs ever mentioned. In none of the stories were the other boy or the girl, Samantha, mentioned. In one, the setting had been Ryan’s bedroom. In another, it had been Ryan’s car. In all of them, B
unny had behaved somehow inappropriately. She was a slut. She was begging him for it. She jammed his hand down her pants, or she had stuck her too-large hand down his. She had writhed like an animal, she had squealed or made noises like a pig. In all of the stories, the crescendo of the action was that she had bitten him on the ear, nearly drawing blood, or in some versions actually drawing blood. Ryan had gotten scared of her and dropped her at her house. In one story, he had not even done that, just told her to get out of his own house, slamming the door in her face. She was disgusting. She was a whore. One boy speculated to me that Bunny must have a huge vagina, and he would like to see it, as he imagined it was the size of a cow’s vagina.

  I texted her repeatedly, but she did not reply. I knew she had volleyball practice after school, and so I went to my shift at Rite Aid but asked Terrence if I could leave early, and since I rarely made such requests, he complied, and by seven p.m. I was knocking on the door to Bunny’s house desperately, pounding really, forgetting altogether that they had a doorbell, as though I were afraid to find her murdered inside.

  When she swung open the door, I almost fell. She stared at me with some confusion, her face blank and pale, her lips almost white. Her hair was pulled back in a sweaty ponytail. She was still in her gym clothes, her kneepads pushed down around her ankles, and she didn’t say anything, just stepped back so I could come inside. I could see she had been watching TV, and spread out on the coffee table were Cheetos, cookies, what looked like part of a muffin, a can of AriZona iced tea. She had not been crying. She had been eating.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said, and threw herself on the couch.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “What, with Ryan?”

  “Well, yes. And, I mean, everything! Bitch, do you want a hug?” I asked, standing there, not knowing whether I should sit down or where.

  “No, thank you,” she said. Her eyes were glued to the TV.

  I didn’t know what to do. Wasn’t I her friend? Didn’t I have the right to expect to be her confidant? I sat down on one of the pretty French armchairs. “Did you bite him?” I asked.

  She shut her eyes.

  “Bunny, what the fuck happened that night?”

  “Whatever he said happened, apparently.” Her eyes were still closed. I heard the air-conditioning click on. I got up, stood over her on the couch.

  “I am your friend,” I said. “I don’t care if you bit him! I’m not going to judge you! I just want you to let me in, and—” I must have been shouting at her, though I hadn’t meant to, because her eyes snapped open and she lunged at me, pushing me so that I fell awkwardly over their coffee table and then she was on top of me, sitting on my stomach, pinning my hands to the floor above my head.

  “I don’t want to fight you,” she said, “but I really do not want to talk about this. I thought it was normal, okay? I read it in Cosmo.”

  I could hardly breathe; she was so heavy on top of me. I gasped, nodded.

  “I got carried away and I bit him on the ear, but I did not make him bleed, I just bit him too hard, okay?” She was shouting down into my face.

  I nodded. Tried to take a deep breath so I could talk. “It is normal,” I said. “People do bite each other’s ears when they make out.”

  She looked at me quizzically. “They do?”

  I nodded. “I can’t breathe,” I said. “Could you?”

  “Oh, sorry,” she said, and clambered off me, grabbed the sad bottom half of the muffin, and began peeling its wrapper as she sat back on the couch. “All day long I’ve been cursing that fucking Cosmo article, like, why put something in there if it’s not true? I mean, some of that stuff always made me wonder, like about licking balls, do guys like that? Licking balls?”

  “Some guys,” I said, sitting up.

  “Or, like, they said to put an ice cube on a guy’s dick.”

  “That sounds pretty terrible,” I said.

  “That’s what I thought!” she cried. She finished the muffin and threw the limp, crumb-covered liner on the coffee table like it was a used tissue. “It’s all just fucking bullshit, you know? And he didn’t act weird that night! I mean, he said ow when I bit his ear, and I said sorry, but we kept kissing after that! So I don’t get how it was some big deal!”

  “Was that your…first kiss?” I asked.

  “Yes. Yes,” she said, “that was my first goddamn kiss and I was, like, I don’t know if that pill was really Molly, but I was loopy, and I thought he, like, loved me, like we had this soul connection, and I told him stuff, stuff I totally shouldn’t have told him, and I’m so stupid, I can’t believe I was that stupid.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Like about my dad throwing up all the time and how scared I sometimes was that he would crash the car like my mom and then I’d be an orphan, and you know, I don’t even spend that much time thinking about that stuff, but somehow I was just talking all about it.” She shrugged, shoved another handful of Cheetos into her mouth.

  “Oh, Bunny,” I said.

  “Don’t say that,” she said, raising an orange-dust-covered finger at me and shaking it. “I am not a victim. It’s not like they put a gun to my head and told me to swallow that pill. I knew it was drugs!”

  “I know, but this really isn’t your fault. I think Ryan is making a really big deal out of something that seems pretty normal.”

  She seemed to grow calmer, and she began licking the cheese dust off her fingers.

  “So it is normal to bite someone’s ears?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is so frustrating! I thought it was! Why did he get so freaked out, then?”

  I didn’t know. I had my guesses. “So how did that night end exactly?”

  “Well, we were making out in his car, and I don’t know, there was this other part where we were all in the park, him and me and Samantha and that guy Steve, and then I don’t know where they went, only the idea was that they were going to do it, like, the big joke was that they were leaving us because they wanted to go do it, and so Ryan said he would take me home and then we were kissing in his car, and I bit his ear and said sorry, and it was fine, and then I got out and we were just outside my house, and I snuck in and went to bed.”

  “And that’s it?” I asked.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Did you, I mean, was there any other stuff that happened? Like sex stuff?”

  “No!” she shouted. “Are you crazy? But, I mean, like, I was very handsy. I felt like a cat being petted, it felt so good to touch him and be touched, and I kept touching his hair which maybe bugged him?”

  “And then what happened? Did you text him the next day?”

  “No, well, he called me the next day, and he said he couldn’t be my boyfriend because I terrified him. Which, I was like, ‘In what way do I terrify you?’ But he just kept saying, ‘You’re not the girl for me, Bunny,’ and I was like, what do I do with that? I didn’t get it. But I must have—there must have been something about me, some way I did everything wrong, that just—just grossed him out.”

  I was both angry and sad that she had not told me any of this before. She had never shown me the texts she sent him or anything, but I could distinctly remember her saying, “Gosh, I texted him like five times and he hasn’t responded. Isn’t that rude?” It had seemed humiliating enough to me, but now to discover that this had been a face-saving lie to cover an even more painful reality made me want to bite Ryan Brassard’s ear off myself. “What a fucking limp-dick loser,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “You just—you intimidated him!”

  “I did not,” she said. “I scared him.”

  “Bunny, nothing is wrong with you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Well, obviously I did.”


  “No,” I said, and I reached out and squeezed her naked calf in my hand. “Do not eat this. Do not take this in as information about yourself. This is not valid data. This does not mean you are bad at sex, or you are gross, it means only that Ryan Brassard is a scaredy-cat, limp-dick, manipulative little shit who wants a girl who will just lie there quietly while he excites himself.”

  Bunny laughed. “I don’t know. I mean, it’s pretty ballsy of him to have asked me out in the first place. He’s only five nine. Like, you have to at least give him credit for that.”

  “Maybe he got scared by how turned on you made him.”

  “Why would that scare him?”

  “Maybe he’s secretly gay and he was freaked out because he thought you figured it out.”

  “That’s only slightly more believable,” she said. And she took in a deep breath, blew it out, then said, “Wanna go swimming?”

  And so we did, and I even let her almost drown me in an effort to buoy her spirits.

  As it turned out, it was Ann Marie, Tyler’s girlfriend, who had spread the gossip about Bunny biting Ryan Brassard. Ryan and Tyler and Steve were all on the wrestling team, and Ryan had told them what happened, but the gossip might have been contained to the world of ringworm-infested wrestlers had Ann Marie not been in the car when the story was told. Ann Marie was a special kind of being, small, cute, mean, glossy, what might in more literary terms be called a “nymphet,” but only by a heterosexual male author, for no one who did not want to fuck Ann Marie would be charmed by her. She was extra, ultra, cringe-inducingly saccharine, a creature white-hot with lack of irony. She was not pretty, but somehow she had no inkling of this fact, and she performed prettiness so well that boys felt sure she was. She had brassy golden hair and freckles and blue eyes slightly too wide set and bulging. Even though she was short, she played varsity volleyball with Bunny.