The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

  “My dad would never have killed us!” I said, furious with her, with her internet wisdom, her “whole pathology.”

  “People kill people,” Bunny said. “Anyone could commit a murder if they were just put in the right situation. Right and wrong are just these labels people use to oppress each other.”

  “You are fucking crazy,” I said.

  “There is no justice in the world, Michael,” she said, composed as a baby vampire. “My father is the worst person I know, and look at him. He’s fucking rich.”

  At least that much was true.

  “Coach Eric kissed me,” she said. “When we were practicing.”

  Of course he had, I thought. That rotten, blue-eyed, Disney-villain-looking creep.

  * * *

  —

  I did not stay and help Bunny pour coyote urine in the closet of the master bedroom. But I find myself now, years later, unable to discharge from my memory that house. I can remember every room, every detail of its odd layout. I think about Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell and everything they built together, that library with its built-in bar, its secret compartments. I imagine Mrs. Mitchell had a book club and that they felt special meeting there, and maybe Mr. Mitchell played bartender, and maybe he was even hokey about it and pretended to have an Irish accent as he served the ladies Guinness or something. And their children. Imagine having grown up in that house. Imagine trying to describe it to someone else. There had been so many amazing spaces, even beyond the child’s library in the attic. There was a huge deck off the second story with a hot tub inside a screened-in gazebo. There was an artist’s studio with built-in rolling storage because Mrs. Mitchell had liked to paint. There was a two-thousand-square-foot garage filled with machinist equipment worth thousands of dollars where Mr. Mitchell had done his work. You could have parked eight cars in there. There was a tiny pond with a little bridge over it in the side yard, and there was a turtle still living in it. Bunny and I saw him, basking on the edge. Did the developer know to get the turtle out before he tore it down?

  Did adults even give two shits? It was hard to believe they did.

  I remain, in some way, in love with that house, tortured by it, even though it no longer exists. I think it may be the most perfect thing I have ever seen. Better even than the Sistine Chapel or the Taj Mahal or the Palace of Versailles.

  I used to believe you could cross a line. And once you had crossed it, you would never be the same. Metaphysically. If you stabbed someone. If you killed someone. If you ate someone. If you fucked someone. I remember after the first time I had sex, examining myself in the mirror afterward. Was I different? Or was I exactly the same? I was horrified to see my face there, my piranha underbite, my blackhead-seeded nose, the exact same, too-tender pink eyelid skin. Nothing, I suddenly knew, nothing could ever truly change me. All magic vanished from the world with a hiss.

  So why was I so uncomfortable with Bunny hitting Ann Marie in the face? Why did the thought of her kissing Coach Eric make my stomach clench? Why was I so incredibly angry that she had soaked that house in coyote urine?

  Why did I still refuse to talk, really talk, to my mother, even after all these years?

  * * *

  —

  I was walking home from my shift at Rite Aid, deep in an internal reverie, when a car door popped open right beside me and I almost screamed, sure I was about to be murdered.

  “It’s me, oh god, I scared you! Can we talk?” It was Anthony. He was sitting in the driver’s seat of the dark car and he looked like hell. The bags under his eyes were fat as change purses.

  “I shouldn’t,” I said, knowing that I would, that I wanted to get in the car and that I was helpless before that want. The most I could do was delay. “My aunt has forbidden me from talking to you or seeing you,” I said, as dryly as I could. “Or she’ll kick me out.” I shrugged in my coat. It was cold from the night sea breezes and I could feel my own saliva chill on my lips. My neighbor Mrs. Cowan’s black cat, the one with no tail, meandered down the road ahead of me.

  Anthony visibly deflated. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said. “You poor fucking kid. I’m so sorry.”

  I had never heard Anthony swear before, but here he was using no-no words. It felt good, how bad he looked, how rattled he seemed. Like all this had been a big deal for him too. Like I mattered.

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble,” he said, looking out his windshield into the middle distance, like he was on a highway, was driving through a forest of things that were just shitty. That’s what his face looked like. Like when he looked at the world, all he could see were things that were stupid and shitty. I swung myself into the passenger seat and slammed the car door behind me. My book bag was in my lap. It was suddenly awkward and quiet in the car; we could hear each other breathe.

  “I realize I am behaving like a psychopath,” he said. “I—I’m not trying to stalk you. For whatever myopic reason, it did not occur to me that continuing to contact you could be putting you in jeopardy. That’s very helpful to hear actually. It makes your silence less personal.”

  That wasn’t what I wanted him to say, but I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t say anything in response. I wanted to press my silence into him like a knife. I wanted to hurt him with it. I cleared my throat.

  “I see,” he said.

  And then I couldn’t stand it anymore, because somehow, frighteningly, I could not remember why I was mad at him in that moment, and yet I still felt all the physiological sensations of anger: the prickling in the throat, the hammering heart. I wanted to make him say he loved me, and I wanted to hear his voice, just unspooling, saying more and more in the darkness. “You lied to me,” I said. That seemed like the clearest of the transgressions. It was the place to start, even though I knew it wasn’t why I was angry with him. I had lied to him just as often. I lied to everyone. I assumed that most people lied to each other, constantly, habitually. This soup is delicious, I love your earrings, of course I’ve read Proust…Civilization itself was a lie, North Shore was a lie, clothing was a lie, language was a lie.

  “I did,” Anthony said, and nodded.

  “I’m not an excuse for your midlife crisis. I’m a person,” I said. “I’m not a convertible you buy when you figure out you’re going bald.” I was getting shrill. I tried again, more reasonably toned. “Or maybe this has been an ongoing thing? Maybe you’ve been cheating on your wife this whole time with different boys?”

  “No,” Anthony said, “you were the only one.”

  “I just don’t get it, are you gay? Or?”

  “I think I’m bi,” he said.

  “Jesus,” I said. “I can’t believe you fuck women.” I had wanted, as different as we were in age and background, in this one way for us to be the same.

  “The fact that you think it’s disgusting is one of the reasons I’ve always shied away from dating men,” he said.

  “Vaginas are disgusting,” I said. “So many folds, and the smell.” I had never seen a vagina in my life, but I felt confident I never wanted to.

  “No one’s body is disgusting,” Anthony said quietly.

  “You watched your wife push a baby out of that thing and you still want to fuck it? Color me confused is all, not my cup of tea.”

  “Or maybe,” he said, “it’s easier for you to joke that your sexuality is about hating vaginas, instead of the fact that it’s about loving cock. Maybe being mean about women makes you feel better about the ways people are mean to you.”

  “Don’t fucking psychoanalyze me.” None of this was going how I wanted or needed it to go. Why had I even gotten in his car? I just wanted to be by myself and cry. I didn’t want to fight, or explain myself, or understand. I just wanted to cry with no one watching me and then smoke a cigarette in a bathtub. It seemed insane that such simple desires were so impossible to fulfill, and yet it would be years before I would have m
y own space, my own house, and be allowed to smoke in a bathtub.

  “I cheated on my wife with you,” Anthony said, “but that doesn’t make my entire life a lie.”

  “Doesn’t it, though?”

  “No,” he said, his voice resounding. He squeezed the leather of his steering wheel until it squeaked under his huge palms, and then he suddenly released it, raked his fingers through his hair, shaking with rage. “What the fuck am I doing here?”

  “You tell me,” I said.

  “When I was your age,” he said, his nostrils flaring, his rage contorting his face into something beautiful and strange, “I fell in love with my friend.”

  The way he said the word “friend” hurt me, and I knew already the kind of story it would be.

  “And he loved me. And we kissed each other, touched each other, all of it was a secret. It was so secret it was almost a secret from ourselves. We didn’t know what we were doing because we couldn’t afford to know. It was so dangerous just to be ourselves that it seemed dangerous to see, to feel, to be. It was like a dream where one thing morphs into another, and what maybe started out as a fear that we were not like other boys, that we were attracted to men, became a fear that our deepest selves in every particular were blasphemous, and that if we ever truly communicated with anyone the world would end. It was another time, there’s no way you can understand what it was like.”

  “I understand,” I said, and I thought I did.

  “My mom, she didn’t grow up watching Will & Grace. It was—I’m sure you have some stereotype in your mind about what the world was like before Prop 8 was struck down, but you will never understand what it meant for it to be that way, the kind of—the kind of deformity of consciousness that takes place. The way you can pretend you aren’t thinking certain things, refuse to notice that you notice what you notice. Anyway, I will never know exactly what happened or why, but word got out at school. I don’t know how someone found out. But the bullying was…was so tremendous that I had to leave the school.”

  “My friend,” I said, my voice nervous on the word because it meant so much and it meant so little. Bunny was my only friend, but she was not my friend in the way that Anthony had used the word. She was not my lover, and yet, in some way I knew I loved her more than I had ever loved anyone before, more even than I loved Anthony. “Not a boyfriend, just a friend, beat up another girl because that girl saw us making out. In your car. And she was telling. And now the girl is in the hospital in a coma and she might not wake up. And my friend might go to jail, or else maybe nothing will happen. Her dad is really rich, so.”

  “You weren’t out,” he said, a guess instead of a question.

  “I mean—I wasn’t not out. I wore makeup and I had my little piercing and my sass. I’m sure people knew. But no, I was not out out.”

  “Sometimes I wish I could have grown up in your generation. Just the freedom. Gay, bi, poly, queer—you could—I know it feels like the world is ending now, but coming out won’t end your world. You’ll see—it will be—”

  And then I was so angry that the words ripped out of me just like the string on a FedEx envelope shreds the cardboard, unzipping myself, exploding with thoughts I didn’t even know I had inside me until I spit them into the close air of his car. “You tell me, ‘Oh, you don’t know what it was like, you could never understand the past, it was so hard’—well, you can’t fucking understand the present. You don’t know what it is to grow up in a country that has only ever been at war. To do active shooter drills in fucking kindergarten. To grow up knowing you’ll never make a living wage. You’ll never own a house. That the whole game is rigged, and you’ll work your whole life and have nothing to show for it.

  “Sometimes I look at all these houses. These mansions. Sometimes I walk through this town and wonder: Who needs a house like this? Who needs a three-car garage? Who needs a master bedroom big enough for a couch by a fireplace? Who needs fucking LaCantina doors that slide so the whole front of your house is open? And the answer is: Everyone. Everyone wants their own personal fucking mansion, and everyone is willing to do whatever it takes to get one. We’re like rats at the feeding machine, pushing the lever, confused when all we get are shocks. And sometimes I walk around this neighborhood and I wish that everyone in it would die and all the houses would turn to ash and fall down in piles of clean black powder like sand, and everything that has ever been done could be undone.”

  “God, I love you,” Anthony said, looking at me with his wet brown eyes, pure and beautiful as the eyes of a deer. I felt I could see him as he had been at every point in his life: as a hopeful little boy, as an arrogant teenager, as an earnest college student, as a tired father, as a man, a brave man, a man who chases after his own vitality and refuses to give up on what is right even when it’s wrong.

  Reader, I fucked him in his car.

  * * *

  —

  Part of the fallout of my conversation with Aunt Deedee was that I had been relocated to the tiny room that had been a walk-in closet on the first floor, and so I no longer had a window into Bunny’s bedroom. I no longer had a window at all. Jason had our old bedroom to himself, which delighted him. Whenever we encountered each other in the house, he would address me as “faggot.” “Good morning, faggot!” he would say. “Would you like some cereal, faggot? There’s milk left.”

  I think Aunt Deedee had hoped that the small victory of kicking me out of his room and forcing me into a literal closet (!) would pacify him, and he did seem happy about it, but he did not seem satisfied. A fire does not stop after consuming a single log. I knew he would keep trying to get me out, but all I had to do was get through senior year. I could outlast him. For me, the situation was also a kind of improvement, since I had a new solitude in my tiny room, where I was free to watch porn or makeup tutorials without censure.

  In retrospect, it seems clear that I should have had more of a reaction to being treated so uncivilly in my own home, a space where I was supposed to be, at least in theory, safe. But I had never been safe in my own home. Not even as a child. In fact, I had been much more alarmed when my own father commented that he thought one of the bag boys at the Albertsons might be a “poof.” I had no idea what being a poof meant, but I knew it was dangerous. I didn’t immediately associate it with sexuality, at that age, around six or seven, I associated the word with a makeup poof, something soft and pink. Jason calling me a faggot and thinking it was funny or rebellious or interesting to do so was disgusting, yes, but also pathetic and childish. A bit of the moron doth protest too much, methinks. So I would answer him: “Hey, dudebro, why don’t you go drink some ranch and swim with your shirt on?”

  “Go suck a cock, homo,” he would say when he saw me getting home from school.

  “Your pussy is way too dry to be riding my dick like this,” I would say as I shouldered past him into my room.

  And I think my rage felt as good to me as his rage felt to him.

  The only place it was tolerable to exist in my house was in my tiny, windowless room, which was fine for studying or sleeping, especially at first, but as the weeks wore on, I found myself spending more and more time at Bunny Lampert’s house, even though I was still finding Bunny extremely hard to take. For one thing, she had begun wearing her mother’s (very large) sapphire engagement ring on her right hand. This, together with her ridiculous new office wear, made her feel elegant, causing her to use her arms and arch her torso in new, oddly artificial ways. Maybe she wouldn’t even finish high school, she said, languorously stretching. Maybe she would get her GED and go to work for her father. Maybe she would marry Coach Eric, who was still coaching her three times a week. It would be nice, she admitted, to play volleyball for the sheer joy of it. She had gotten so narrow in her thinking, focused on the wrong things. “I mean,” she said, leaning in conspiratorially, “it’s just a game!”

  The Coach Eric business w
as extremely distressing. He had kissed her at the end of one of their practice sessions on the beach. There were several volleyball courts down at the beach, free for anyone to use, and mostly they remained unused except in the height of summer, but Eric and Bunny spent an afternoon down there three times a week. That Friday they had stayed to see the sun set; the sun was setting earlier and earlier as winter settled in, and they’d sat, sweaty and exhausted in the sand, their bodies too close.

  “I could hear his knee creak when he moved it,” she said to me later, rapturous. And then he had kissed her, and, as she put it, “smashed her down on the sand.” I took this to be the most unromantic description of dry humping I had ever heard, and I did not ask questions, desperate to have no further particulars root themselves in my imagination.

  “This is,” I said as brightly as I could, “a super-bad idea! And you should stop! Immediately! ’K?”

  “Phh,” Bunny said. “Says the king of online hookups.”

  I had lost credibility with her.

  The next time they met, he told her it was a horrible mistake, never to be repeated, that she must not tell anyone, that they must go on as before, that he would hold himself in check. But of course it proved “difficult to control himself” around her, and Bunny for her part was doing absolutely anything she could to break his resolve, from wearing her shortest, tightest shorts to accidentally spilling water all over her breasts. She was a comically large Lolita. Coquettishness was also not something that came naturally to Bunny; “on the nose” was her flirting style in toto.

  “So then I said that having a nice butt was like my number one quality that I was looking for in a husband, and he kind of did this thing with his eyebrow, like, did you just say that? And then I said, ‘And you have a nice one!’ And he blushed!”

  I mean, I was fish-mouthed, just blinking, trying to take it all in.