The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

  In a town like North Shore, where everyone had known everyone forever, there were many points of connection, and before I relate what happened next that fall of our senior year, I feel the need to enumerate each point of connection we shared with Ann Marie, or else the story simply makes no sense.

  Bunny and Ann Marie had known each other since they were two years old because Bunny had attended the Catholic preschool that Ann Marie’s mother ran. (This was, of course, how Ann Marie, my sleazy imp of an informant, became aware that Bunny’s mother had been having an affair with Mr. Brandon.) Ann Marie’s mother, otherwise known to the children as Ms. Harriet, was the principal, and so as a two-, three-, and four-year-old, Bunny was disciplined by Ann Marie’s mother, and Bunny’s memories of her were vivid. What was most interesting and most frightening about Ms. Harriet is that she never said what you were expecting her to, and she was completely unmoved and unfrazzled by tears, fits, tantrums, and violence. She was calm not in a way that was kind, or soft, or in any way jiggly, Bunny said. Hers was a calm made of stone. Ann Marie’s mother loved no one and hated no one and was surprised by no one. She and Ann Marie’s father were divorced and divorced early. Ms. Harriet was well done with bullshit even by the time both girls turned two. Bunny could still remember one comment Ms. Harriet had made, quite calmly, to a boy named Liam, who was prone to hitting. “Do you like to be hit?”

  “No,” Liam had said.

  “Do you love people who hit you?”

  “No,” he had said. How old was he? Three? Maybe not even that.

  “So who is going to love you if you keep on hitting? Who is going to love someone like that?”

  “No one,” the boy said, tears sliding down his cheeks as he studied the tile floor at his feet.

  “That’s right,” Ms. Harriet said. “So you’ve got some thinking to do and some decisions to make. You can hit. Not anybody in this world can really and truly stop you if hitting is how you want to be. But if you do, you’re risking all that love that you could have. Because nobody, nobody, nobody, is going to stand around all day for you to hit just hoping to give you love in return.”

  And then she ruffled his hair.

  That was the thing about Ms. Harriet, Bunny told me. She was always almost right, but a little bit wrong in a way that was scary.

  What must it have been like to be Ms. Harriet, watching her own daughter grow up side by side with Bunny? What did she notice about the two girls? What judgments was Ms. Harriet forced to make about her own daughter after seeing her so clearly among her peers? Most parents wonder, are all children like this? Is my child special and wonderful? Is my child awful? But Ms. Harriet knew what all children were, she knew what normal was, and she was horrifyingly lucid about the strengths and weaknesses of her only progeny.

  As a little girl, Ann Marie had been whiny and sticky, not naturally moral or empathetic, prone to being quite mean actually. She was the kind of little girl who taunted, who teased, who grabbed a toy from your hands and then ran off with it, and when you chased her, burst into tears and told the teacher you attacked her. In short, she was the sort of child other children disliked, and Ms. Harriet was daily aware of this. Bunny’s commentary was, “I always got the feeling Ms. Harriet liked me more than Ann Marie, and that made me feel so bad that I was always extra nice to Ann Marie so we became friends even though I never liked her.”

  From preschool through about third grade, Bunny and Ann Marie were best friends. If Bunny had been a dog or a horse, what she possessed would have been termed “a good temperament.” But there is not a precise category for this kind of personality type in humans, one characterized chiefly by tolerance and a kind of good-hearted obliviousness. Mean jokes and pranks slid off her, and she was untroubled and unaware that she was not popular and that her friendship with Ann Marie made her even less so. As they grew older, she was aware that Ann Marie wanted to continue playing with dolls long after Bunny and other girls had stopped, but she felt only pity for whatever fever seemed to clutch Ann Marie when she looked into the inert face of a doll. Once, Ann Marie had told her that she believed dolls came alive when you weren’t looking or when you were asleep. She was the kind of girl who continued believing in Santa too long, who didn’t get the memo about the tooth fairy. A true literalist, she once informed a boy at school that he was definitely going to hell because his family didn’t go to church and that Satan was going to press hot skewers into his body. “You’re gonna rot,” she said, her eyes lit up with excitement. “You’re gonna burn!” (While the preschool was Catholic, Ms. Harriet was not, and she and Ann Marie attended the evangelical church that was pleasingly located across the street from the donut shop, and hell seemed to interest them a lot more than heaven.)

  But Ann Marie was not all bad, Bunny was quick to point out. When Bunny’s mother had died when the girls were seven, Ann Marie had said nothing at all about Allison going to hell, even though Bunny’s family didn’t go to church either. If anything, Ann Marie was swept up by the tragedy of it, crying more orgiastically at the funeral than even Bunny herself. She suggested to Bunny elaborate ways that they might mourn together, and wanted to contact Bunny’s mother’s ghost using a scented candle and one of Allison’s old scarves that still smelled of her perfume. She made them black armbands that they wore for weeks.

  In third grade, however, something shifted. One day on the monkey bars, Ann Marie pointed out to the other girls that Bunny’s legs were unshaven. “Look,” she said, “her legs are hairy like a man’s!” And the other girls had laughed. Bunny had not been aware that everyone had begun shaving, and she dutifully went home and asked her father for a razor, which at first alarmed him, but when she explained about the teasing, he quickly acquiesced. Ray Lampert was nothing if not keen to the necessity of fitting in, even if it meant sexualizing the legs of his eight-year-old daughter.

  But even once she was shorn, Ann Marie liked to point out that Bunny’s stubble was thicker than the other girls’, that Bunny’s throat was too thick, that Bunny walked like a boy. Bunny, in fact, did not walk like a boy. She walked like a girl who was naturally 90 percent fast-twitch muscle fiber and who was already a head taller than the tallest boy. She walked like a girl who could, and sometimes did, lift up the entire end of the living room couch to scout for change underneath. She walked like a girl who could dangle one-handed from a monkey bar while she ate an apple with the other hand. “They shouldn’t have named you Bunny,” Ann Marie said with a laugh, “they should have named you Monkey!”

  When the break came, it was quick and tawdry. Ann Marie and the other girls had a sleepover to which Bunny was not invited, and the mother of the girl whose house it was drove them all to Bunny’s house—she said it had to be the house of a friend, someone who would know they weren’t doing it to be mean—and she let them TP the entire front of Bunny’s house.

  Ray Lampert was furious. He didn’t care what PC cant that mother had been spouting, Ray Lampert knew that you TPed the loser kid’s house, and this TP on his front lawn meant that Bunny, and himself by extension, were losers. Bunny was never to see Ann Marie again, Ann Marie was not to come to their house, she was to be entirely blacklisted. (Everyone had agreed on the fact that it was Ann Marie who had come up with the idea of TPing someone’s house and also the one who suggested they do it to Bunny Lampert.)

  Bunny felt two ways about all of this. On the one hand, she was righteously angry. Ann Marie had made her father angry, and to Bunny there was no greater transgression. She took off her half of the best friend necklace and never put it on again. But she was also somewhat relieved. She had disliked Ann Marie for years but had suppressed this knowledge, and now she found great joy in not spending hours and hours being criticized and bossed around. (Ann Marie was the kind of kid constantly instructing other kids: “No, color it like this. Use this marker. No, you’re doing it wrong, it’s not supposed to be like that.”) Bunny decided
at that point that girls were simply too complicated to be friends with, and she began playing basketball with the boys, who accepted and adored her immediately. After school she went skateboarding with them. They liked to travel in herds, buying candy and going from one of their houses to the next depending on which video game they wanted to play. It was heaven.

  But by sixth grade, coincidentally the year I moved to North Shore, the other girls had figured out that Bunny had cornered the boy market, and these girls wanted the boys to be their boyfriends, and so they started playing basketball too. Bunny argued that they shouldn’t be allowed to play. They were girls. “But you’re a girl,” the boys replied, confused. They knew the girls would ruin the basketball game, but they were now more interested in the girls than they were in the basketball. And so Bunny’s paradise was ruined. Dates, which were nothing more than a group of boys and girls going to the mall together, began to be arranged. She would sometimes go on these, paired off with a boy who made it very clear to her that he was not really asking her on a date but wanted to include her out of friendship. She watched as Keith Moore spent money to buy sunglasses for Michelle, and this spending of money worked everyone into a froth, because it meant that Keith Moore maybe even loved Michelle, or else it meant that he had bought Michelle and now Michelle would have to kiss him or do whatever he wanted and be his slave.

  As it would happen, Bunny began volleyball at around the same time, and so it was easy to let go of one world and dive into the next. Practice was a better place for her to be than at the movies platonically holding hands with a boy who told her about his crush on someone else. All of those girls, who had once been her best friends, and all of those boys, who had once been her best friends, were no longer her friends at all. And she entered high school mysteriously friends with nobody at all, despite the fact that she was well liked by everybody, and considered popular by dint of her father’s omnipresent quasi-celebrity.

  In high school, Ann Marie found true ascendancy. All of the things that had made other children dislike her, the overly high spirits, the bossiness, the meanness, suddenly made her attractive to both boys and girls. Her preening, always fussing over her hair, her clothes. When she complained that her mother had bought her the wrong socks and these ones looked cheap, every girl around her looked down at her own feet and realized she was wearing the wrong ones. Ann Marie took herself so seriously that even the smallest, most pedestrian details of her life were charged. You had to be careful because Dr Pepper Chapstick was actually chemically addicting. Your underwear should be at least as expensive as your shirt. Using vanilla scented products made you irresistible to boys because subliminally they wanted to eat you. This sense of drama, the momentousness of the mundane, was intoxicating to the teen girls around her, and even if they didn’t believe everything she said (she was aggressively pro-enema, for instance), talking to her made them feel important. Ann Marie was a creature specially adapted to the unique and fleeting habitat of a white, suburban high school.

  By tenth grade she made varsity volleyball and became again a daily presence in Bunny’s life. She also began dating Tyler Jenkins, who was on the wrestling team, and she liked to ask other girls in the locker room for water so she could take her teeny tiny birth control pill, just so everyone knew she was taking it, which meant she and Tyler had sex, which meant she was desirable and queenly. And while Bunny disliked Ann Marie, and disliked a world that saw fit to worship her, she also took comfort in the fact that Ann Marie was only five foot six and unwilling to work very hard. She was coordinated and mean, and this had taken her far in the world of high school athletics, but it would never take her where Bunny was going. How could Bunny, then, begrudge her this tiny kingdom, if that was what Ann Marie wanted? Queen of lip gloss, queen of fucking boys, queen of being at the right parties. She would never win a gold medal for that.

  And so Bunny found it in her heart to ignore Ann Marie and treat her with a distant respect. She was, after all, part of the team. In the meantime, Bunny had made friends with a girl named Naomi, the only black girl on the volleyball team, who was extremely reserved and stone-faced, but who could really spill the tea once she trusted you and was wickedly hilarious and mean. Naomi was also tall, and also great, and also going places, and also naturally repelled by Ann Marie. “That girl is trivial” was all Naomi had to say about the matter, and so she and Bunny cemented a bond based on being serious about the correct things, and ignoring everything else, though Bunny was never quite as good at the ignoring part as Naomi.

  Naomi didn’t play with boys. Naomi did schoolwork, church, sports, and not one thing else. She didn’t even watch the TV you were supposed to watch. She didn’t even help her mother with the cooking. Naomi didn’t like me, though I found her intriguing, and I was rarely able to get more than a drowsy “hello” from her in the halls. If pressed about how she was doing, she would always answer the same, “Just getting through it.” Bunny and I both wished we could be more like Naomi, and we often spoke about her, wondering where her steely discipline had come from and why we didn’t have it. Naomi didn’t care if the socks she wore were the “right” socks or the “wrong” socks. Naomi didn’t care if not one single boy had a crush on her. And it wasn’t just pretense, at least so far as we could tell. She literally gave not two shits about any of us really. She was biding her time. Her real life, she seemed to imply, would begin shortly, and she would dust us completely when she got there.

  * * *

  —

  All things considered, for Ann Marie to be the one to spread the story of how Bunny bit Ryan Brassard was part of a much larger narrative in both of their lives, which made it both worse and better. Bunny assumed that the gossip would die down eventually the way it always had, even though this wound felt so much more personal and terrible than Ann Marie calling her monkey or pointing out her legs were hairy or even TPing her house. But it was not world ending, and it was especially tolerable because in volleyball things were taking an extraordinary turn. They had a new assistant coach, Coach Eric, who was a volleyball player at UCLA forced to take the season off due to a shoulder injury, and he was warm and praising where Coach Creely was cold and withholding. He had dark hair and blue eyes, which made him look slightly malevolent, like a Siberian Husky, even though he was overtly friendly. Of course Bunny had a horrible crush on him; he was six foot seven and she had to look up into his dreamy blue eyes (barf). But it didn’t interfere with her playing. In fact, quite the opposite. It was almost as if her hypersensitivity to his gaze supercharged her from moment to moment, causing her to vibrate at an unusual new frequency.

  Bunny had her new legs, and Naomi was lit from within by the cold, hard light of securing a college scholarship. It was the only thing Naomi had ever cared about: getting the fuck out of here. Naomi lived in Hawthorne but had secured transfer into North Shore through a series of careful lies. (What was hard was not transferring into our district, but getting Hawthorne to relinquish her and the $60 a day the school would receive for her attendance. If she had to forge a letter saying her mother worked in North Shore for an aerospace company, so be it.) But coming from our (more highly ranked) high school with a 4.23 GPA, making varsity volleyball, varsity basketball, and varsity track, Naomi wasn’t just interested in going to college: She was interested in ripping the face off college and fucking its throat. She was interested in burning the whole rigged system to the ground. Once I asked her who her favorite teacher was and she said, “I don’t have a favorite.”

  “You don’t like any of them?”

  “To be totally honest, I hope they all die,” she said.

  To say that I adored Naomi would have been an understatement.

  On the court, the two of them were a dazzling pair, and I began attending their games, which they couldn’t seem to lose, just to watch them. I even dragged my little sister, Gabby, to a couple under the mistaken illusion that she might see in Bunny and Nao
mi a possible future for herself, but she was unimpressed with the way the girls looked strung like puppets, so smoothly and perfectly did they move in unison. She couldn’t feel the power radiating off them, or see the way the entire team was oriented by the guiding pulses their bodies sent out. I took an abstract interest in the concept of sports at that time, maybe because of Anthony’s enthusiasm, but I viewed them through my own sociological filter as a vestige of our primordial past.

  Part of the reason that man was such a social animal had come from our need to hunt large game together; our ability to work as a group, silently communicating to achieve a goal, was an ancient skill. Of course, plans were made in advance, strategies were devised, huddles had. But once they were on the court, those girls shared a special collective mental space, and in that wordless place, Bunny and Naomi were queens. Every turn of their knee, every flick of their eyes, every twitch of their shoulders was part of the reality they were weaving together in which the team existed. Their power was great enough that it didn’t matter to Bunny and Naomi, that at bottom, Ann Marie was their enemy. And that had always been the function of this kind of space, in the hunting party, and in its natural extension: the war party. To insist on the primacy of our social connection. To create the bedrock for morality and society itself. We needed to be able to murder together, and that was exactly why we had to learn to be good to one another, no matter our disagreements or grievances.

  The team was greater than the self, and so while Ann Marie prattled to anyone who would listen about how Bunny was a biter, and made jokes like “I thought rabbits were vegetarian!” (so funny I could scream), Bunny remained ultimately neutral toward her, and when they were playing, Ann Marie was a dutiful member of Bunny’s conquering army.

  And conquer they did. They were Division 1, the best in Southern California, and they had already won enough games to secure a spot in the semifinals of the state championship, which was scheduled for November 7.