The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

  “Oh,” Aunt Deedee said, and she seemed suddenly wildly sad, almost despondent. “I feel I’ve done such a really terrible job as your guardian,” she said. “I should have talked to you about all this so much earlier—I just never thought—”

  “I’m not fucking living with him,” Jason said.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll figure out a place to live.”

  “Where?” Aunt Deedee said. “Where would you go? You can’t go live with your mother, even aside from the fact that she doesn’t have room, I won’t have it. I won’t have you living there. Are you talking about living with— your man friend?”

  “No,” I said, “I was thinking I would look into staying at a shelter until I could save enough money to rent an apartment.”

  “Oh, Michael,” Aunt Deedee said, her hand raised to her cheek like I had slapped her.

  “Well, where did you think I would go?” I shouted.

  “I don’t fucking care where he goes,” Jason said.

  “Calm down, Mountain Dew,” I said, but Aunt Deedee was already shouting him down.

  “What the good goddamn is wrong with you, Jason Clark? I mean, for heaven’s sakes! He’s your own cousin. And you don’t care where he goes? You want him to live in a shelter? Shame on you. I can’t believe I raised you. I should have taken you to church more because you don’t know the first thing about how to be a decent human being.”

  “Yeah, they teach that a lot in church, how to love faggots,” Jason said.

  “Go to your room,” Aunt Deedee said, pointing at the ceiling.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” he told her.

  “Go.”

  He went. She sat back in her chair with a great sigh and idly smoothed her pants again.

  “I’m just so tired,” she said.

  “Your shoulder okay?” I asked. Aunt Deedee had something vaguely wrong with her left shoulder. She’d never been to a doctor about it. But it had to do with being on her feet too much and being too tense and lifting things that were too heavy, and I often rubbed her back for her. I got up behind her to do so now and I could feel her relax under my hands as all her quivering little bird muscles, in her neck, in her shoulders, webbing her spine to her scapulas, almost hissed with release.

  “I can’t let you move into a shelter,” she said. “I can’t have you live with Jason. He’s too—”

  “Annoyed,” I said.

  “Hateful,” she said.

  I was beginning to come around to the idea that Aunt Deedee was going to let me stay, even though it made me feel servile and weak. There was something daring and beautiful about the idea of storming out, packing a single bag of my things, going to a shelter and quitting high school and starting my own life. I had even been fantasizing about it on some level. But when the reality of being kicked out had been so naked in the room, I found that I was terrified. If Aunt Deedee had kicked me out that night, I would have simply gone to Bunny’s house like a child playing at running away. I would never, it occurred to me, actually have gone to a shelter. I would have been too scared. And now, as I rubbed Aunt Deedee’s back, the nodes of her vertebrae so unpadded with fat that they felt like sharp rocks through her skin, I was willing to do anything to stay.

  Aunt Deedee put her face in her hands and breathed in and out. “I have to give Jason his own room. The question is where to put you where you’ll be as comfortable as possible. You could room with me?” she said, but the look on her face was reluctant.

  “Oh, no, no,” I said. “I don’t think that would be—I mean, I could sleep on the couch.”

  “I don’t want you sleeping on the couch,” she said.

  I made a sympathetic sound as I thought: I’ll get to keep going to high school. Even the sense memory that flooded me of the odor and weight of my textbooks seemed like sweet ambrosia.

  “I’ll think of something,” she said, and patted my hand on her shoulder, a signal that I could stop rubbing. But I didn’t want to stop, I didn’t want her to think of some way of fixing it later because I was certain she would change her mind.

  “I could just sleep on the couch,” I said. “Really.”

  “For tonight that’s probably best,” Aunt Deedee said.

  “No, I mean, like, until I graduate. And then I could get out of your hair. I’m already practically full-time at Rite Aid.”

  Aunt Deedee motioned for me to return to my seat on the ottoman, and then she took hold of both of my hands and she began to speak to me in a manner so earnest it seemed old-fashioned and at first I almost got the giggles. “Michael, I need to tell you something that I don’t know how to say, and I may fail, but I will never feel quite right again if I don’t at least try to say it, which is that there is something absolutely beautiful in you. I’m not sure what it is, if it’s your brain or if it’s your soul, but it reminds me of your mother and what was so beautiful in her when she was a girl, and I don’t know if she ever spoke about this, but she is profoundly dyslexic, and back then it wasn’t talked about, it wasn’t known, what it was, and so the name for it was—just being dumb. And she would cry about it, about thinking she was retarded, and her teacher telling our mom that she was learning disabled and that she would never be able to go to college or have a job that involved reading or writing, and, well, it would mean a great deal to me if you were to go to college.”

  Her brown eyes were set at a hawkish angle in her face, and the dark circles under her eyes made her seem tough in the most fragile way possible, like a person who has tasted the poison and is speaking the truth even as they are succumbing to death.

  “To college?”

  “Jason will go to a few semesters of community college and that’s fine. Maybe he’ll join the army. He’ll do something. But you. I mean, when is the last time you even got something lower than an A?”

  “I got an A-minus in chem last year.”

  “An A-minus is an A,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “Michael, you have to go. I never went. Your mother didn’t even finish high school.”

  “She didn’t?” I asked, scandalized by this idea.

  Aunt Deedee shook her head. “Our parents didn’t go. You will be the first one. And you might be the only one. And so if I need to fight with Jason, I will fight with Jason. But what I need from you are two things.”

  “What?” I asked. We were still holding hands, which was weird, but I didn’t want to let go.

  “I need you to keep up your grades and apply to colleges, a lot of them, state schools, out of state, spread a wide net. I don’t even know what the options are, but you go to someone who knows—maybe Ray Lampert can help you—and you figure out what the other rich kids know and you copy them. And you get in, and you graduate. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, hardly able to breathe.

  “And then the second thing is I need you to stop with the online stuff. Any profiles you have, I need you to cancel them. And I need you to end things with the man you’ve been seeing. Completely. No contact.”

  “Can I write him to tell him I’m ending it?”

  “Of course,” Aunt Deedee said. “But I want you to close all your other accounts tonight. And if I hear that you’re still messing with all this, then it’s over. You’re out. Okay?”

  I wasn’t sure what had happened, but I felt tricked. I had practically broken up with Anthony already. And yet I had the feeling that Aunt Deedee’s vulnerability had been a disguise, and now I was finding myself at her mercy. Did she see something beautiful in me? Could she? Did she know enough of what was authentically me to see something beautiful there? And if she could, how could she think that the subterranean taproots I had been sending out all these years, through the internet and down into the casual embraces of men, through lives strange to me that turned my life strange, through kisses and bruises and jokes and
cruel remarks, how could she behold the entire domain I had built for myself in the dark and decide it should be amputated? The portal closed.

  I felt then that no one would ever know who I was. No one, I thought, was even capable of seeing another person clearly, let alone loving them. Aunt Deedee was merely clacking beads on a moral abacus together. College + no sex = safe + good.

  They were unspoken equations that propelled her as surely as physics equations could explain a ball’s arc through the air. I had watched my mother keep trying, and failing, to live by her own moral equations. Being nice to husband = being a good wife. Making husband angry = being a bad wife. Suddenly, blossoming in me like food dye dropped in a water glass, was a memory of his voice, angry at her, saying, “I need you to be fucking available by phone. Why is that so hard? Are you fucking nuts? You’re my wife, you’re taking care of our children, you should have your phone on you at all times.” She had taken us to the park, one of the rare days when she was in a good enough mood to want to go outside, and her phone had died, and she had been nervous about that, but she’d taken us to McDonald’s on the way home for ice cream anyway. I remember telling her, “Don’t worry about it, he probably hasn’t even called. He won’t notice. He’s at work, why would he call?” But he had called. How old had I been? Seven?

  “What?” I said.

  “I don’t want you involved in things like that,” Aunt Deedee was saying.

  “Things like what?” I asked.

  Aunt Deedee looked sad, but also frustrated because she wasn’t allowing herself to speak plainly. Finally she said, “I hope you’ve been very careful.”

  She was talking about condoms. She was talking about AIDS.

  “I’ve been careful,” I said. And I hated her so completely that it seemed to me that I would never love her again.

  “Oh good, Michael.” She squeezed my hands. “So sleep on the couch for tonight. Tomorrow, we’ll figure out a more permanent place for you.”

  Tomorrow, I imagined her saying, we’ll figure out a more permanent place for your disgusting, diseased, morally frightening body, which is too much for my son to handle, my son, who is eighteen years old and who may soon enlist in the army because he is willing and able to kill people, but I will refuse you the comfort of your normal bed, on this, one of the worst nights of your life, in order to appease his bigotry and coddle his feelings of superiority to you.

  What is wrong with you? I thought in the dark, after she had gone, as I listened to the fan in the refrigerator cycle on and off, over and over. Why can’t you accept that this is what love is like?

  For the following weeks, Bunny was in a kind of limbo. She had been suspended from school, initially for thirty days, which was far in excess of the normal suspension for fighting on campus, Ray Lampert liked to point out. He’d thrown a fit in the principal’s office, Bunny told me. “I thought he was gonna pop! His face was bright red, and he said, ‘You’re telling me this is how you would handle two boys getting in a fistfight in a locker room?’ And Principal Cardenas was like, ‘This was not a fistfight, this was an unprovoked assault.’ And he said: ‘Hate speech against a fellow student doesn’t count as aggravation?’ It was so, so embarrassing.” (I had already had a deeply uncomfortable sit-down with Principal Cardenas where I had declined an offer of school counseling for the effects of said hate speech.)

  As for the beating itself, Bunny was processing what had happened about as well as a congressman responds to a school shooting. She kept returning to two ideas, one of which was: “I would never do that.” In other words, the awake, normal Bunny would never choose for what happened to have happened. She also phrased this as: “If I had known it would hurt her so much—I just didn’t think—” She felt terrible that Ann Marie was in a coma, so terrible that she had panic attacks and at one point even threw up in a potted plant at the mall, but she also never took true responsibility for her role in Ann Marie’s injuries. She had not meant to do that, and therefore she was innocent of the consequences.

  The other idea she kept returning to was that there was “something wrong” with her. She found the fact that she had only fragmented memories of the fight to be deeply embarrassing, and together with the fact that she had bitten Ryan Brassard’s ear, each contributed to a narrative she was developing about herself, that she was “crazy” or “out of control.” She associated these problems with her height, with some way she was a “monster” or a “freak.”

  In later years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about those words, “monster” and “freak.” They are very different words. “Monster” is from the Old French monstre, from the original Latin monstrum, meaning a portent, or a warning. A monster was something malformed, afflicted by God’s wrath, and was a warning to the community to examine their moral standards. “Freak,” on the other hand, was a much jauntier word of much less certain origin, thought to have derived from Middle English friken, “to move nimbly or briskly,” from Old English frician, “to dance.” It is a wild move you unexpectedly bust out, a sudden change in tempo, and so a “freak of nature” is more a jaunty deviation from the norm than a sign that God is mad. In other words, I had always looked at Bunny as a freak, a beautiful, exciting, pulsating freak. But now Bunny worried she was a monster. Because on some level she had always seen herself that way.

  She was deeply, morbidly ashamed. But her shame never managed to lead her out of herself and toward empathy for others, but instead led her into self-involved circles. Why had she been unjustly made this way? Why had this fate befallen her? She had no agency, it seemed. The question was not: Why had she done this? The question was: Why had God done this to her? Not that she believed in God either.

  Perhaps I am being unfair. I think it astonished her that her friendship with Naomi had popped like a soap bubble. Where had it gone? It had seemed so tangible. Those girls had spent hours and hours together, took Spanish together, ate lunch together, went to practice together. And then it was all gone, vanished as if it had never been. Naomi had been straightforward about it too. The very first time Bunny texted her after the fight, Naomi had texted back within minutes: I’m sorry, I can’t be friends anymore. Donezo.

  At school, almost especially because she wasn’t there to make them feel awkward, kids spoke about Bunny freely, their disgust bright in the daylight. They had always known there was something wrong with her. She was sick. They hoped she got help, but they also hoped she never came back to school again. And wasn’t it weird she didn’t have any real friends? Besides being a star athlete? Not that that could be helped when you were built like that. Poor Ryan Brassard, everyone agreed. In retrospect, he had been lucky to get only a bite on the ear.

  I heard all kinds of things. I heard one girl volunteer that she knew for a fact that Bunny didn’t wrap up her used tampons in toilet paper but put them in the trash at school all bloody and exposed. I heard girls agree together that she had a weird way of scratching her boobs after she took off her sports bra. One girl posted a picture of the volleyball team on Facebook that went viral, in which, because of the perspective of the photo, Bunny, who was closest to the camera, seemed nearly twice the size of her classmates. Overnight, Bunny had gone from being the princess of North Shore—happy, popular, a varsity athlete, and daughter of one of the most influential men in town—to being a disgusting pig everyone agreed they had never liked.

  I seethed. I wanted to scream, “Yeah, well, I remember when you went to her fifteenth birthday party and you certainly fucking liked the full-on carnival her dad put on in the backyard, and if I recall you threw up cotton candy right into their pool, so take your corny, basic, lip-kit idiocy right back to the YouTube channel you came from.” But I did not say things like that. When you are seventeen, no one demands moral continuity of social bonds. Everyone was trying on new personalities all the time, weren’t they? Innocent enough, wasn’t it? And this was just another one, a phase tha
t they would remember when they were older: Remember when we were all united during senior year by hating Bunny Lampert?

  And why shouldn’t they? Their friend Ann Marie was on a ventilator, in a coma, and her gel manicure was starting to grow out in an upsetting way. (Why was it so upsetting that Ann Marie’s fingernails kept growing? But it was!) Bunny was practically a murderer because Ann Marie could seriously die, and if she didn’t, then that was just luck. Bunny might as well be a murderer. In essence, her peers felt, she already was.

  Bunny, who had never cultivated her social standing or even understood that she had any, that the friendlessness she had occasionally experienced before was far from rock bottom, was bewildered by this change of affairs. I, of course, did not report to her with blistering accuracy the things being said about her at school, but she found out soon enough. It was a small town. Kids crossed the street in groups so as not to pass her on the sidewalk. If she approached a group of girls at the Starbucks they froze, pretended not to see or hear her. “Hey, guys!” she would say. “Guys!” And they would exchange a look and then walk away from her.

  She cried about it. A lot. I held her while she cried about it. I bore the brunt of those misplaced tears, and I found myself often bored, exhausted by the expanse of her anguish, burned by the heat of her skin, her cheeks red as if slapped, her lashes webby black with salted tears. If anything, it seemed that Bunny was more upset by losing all of her friends and her life and her future career as an Olympic volleyball player than she was over the fact that Ann Marie was in a coma and the swelling in her brain was not going down, not going down, day after day, not going down. But perhaps that is only because the shunning by her peers felt more immediate, less abstract. Perhaps it was because at the end of the day, she was a teenage girl to whom being liked means everything, or almost everything.

  Legally, Bunny was still waiting, and the district attorney was waiting, to see if Ann Marie would be waking up. We were all waiting for Ann Marie to wake up. (Or since it was a medically induced coma, I guess we were really waiting for the swelling in her brain to go down enough that they could bring her out of the coma, but for some reason no one referred to it this way, and we all spoke of Ann Marie magically waking up as if on her own, like Sleeping Beauty with no prince.) Ms. Harriet had called Ray Lampert herself and said as much. “I don’t believe in an eye for an eye, and I am not in any way interested in making life harder for Bunny than it needs to be, however if there are medical bills beyond my ability to cope with, then of course I will have to address that. This is life. Things happen. I’m not trying to paint Bunny as some kind of villain. Although I do think maybe counseling would be a good idea. I’m just saying, let’s be realistic. Your kid hurt my kid. My kid may never be the same. So I can’t promise what I will do. I will have to do what seems to me the most correct thing to do in the moment, and if you would help us buy a house maybe we can work on that when all this is over.”