The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

  “Oh, you leaving?” he said. “It was good seeing you!” He smiled.

  “You too,” I said, and I went outside, and I speed-walked to Bunny’s Jeep, and I drove away.

  I took my GED that February, after I heard that Tyler and the other boys I named had gotten one year of probation for almost beating me to death. One year of probation. It seemed so bizarre and useless to me. I had applied to ten colleges, all the state schools back in November, and some private colleges in January, and I agreed to let Ray Lampert help me with the admissions fees, even though I wanted nothing to do with him anymore. I drove Bunny’s Jeep all around L.A. She had left her iPod in the center console and so I listened to her music. On some level, I was acting like she was dead. On some level, I thought she really was dead. I think I was pretending everyone was dead. Bunny, Ray. Aunt Deedee. Anthony. Gabby. My mother. Even myself. Every metamorphosis is violent, even disgusting. That’s why you have to hide while it is happening.

  I had applied to state schools, but I had no idea how I would afford even in-state tuition. My only hope, and it seemed like such a long shot I didn’t like to even speak of it, was a scholarship to a private college. I applied to four of them, and I got into two, with a full ride to one. Pomona College. It wasn’t Yale or Harvard, but it suited me to the ground. It was familiar and safe and free and even kind of fancy! When I moved into my dorm room, which I shared with a sullen young man named Trent, on the first day of freshman year, I felt like I had pulled off the most outrageous long con in the history of the world. And I was thrilled. I loved college. I loved every single thing about it. From the dining hall with its predictable, nourishing, bland food, to the library with its wonderful new-carpet smell, to reading Camus and studying calculus, college was for me in every way. There were free concerts, free lectures, there were art shows, there were barbecues. There were other out boys. I had never been so happy in my entire life.

  I got a work-study job answering phones in the dean’s office, and I excelled. “What a phone voice!” my boss, Mariana, said. She was an overweight perfectionist with absolutely unbearable carpal tunnel pain. She wore wrist braces every day. She loved me, and I accepted her maternal affection with gratitude, even if I didn’t feel exactly the same way about her. She even liked my gayness and would bring all matters of aesthetics to me, as though I had some special expertise. Did I think the gray header or the navy header was more executive-looking for the budget memo? What did I think about this font for graduation name tags? On some level I found this insulting, she was stereotyping, but she was also not wrong that I was better than her at picking out which header looked good. Sometimes she bought me lunch, and she always tipped me off if she knew there was going to be free food somewhere around campus.

  The first year living with Trent was somewhat miserable as he was frequently on drugs and prone to lapsing into slam poetry in regular conversation. He seldom bathed and never did his laundry so our room stank, not just of his sweat and crotch rot, but of a deeper, more earthy, troubling fecal smell. He also loved eggs, hard-boiled eggs, and he would boil a dozen and then eat them out of the pot of water as he sat on the floor, the shells and wisps of membrane scattered around him on the carpet. Still, early on in our rooming together, I had decided it was best to be straightforward and tell him I was gay and make sure he had no problem with it. I did not want to live with someone I felt unsafe around, but it took me several weeks into the fall semester to realize that I felt this way and to become sure that I had a right to it at all.

  “I absolutely understand if you feel uncomfortable,” I said, “and I’d be happy to switch rooms, no hard feelings.”

  “I think it’s righteous,” Trent said, and held up his skinny fist. “Gender is fluid and nonbinary, sexuality’s a spectrum. I’ve had sex with dudes,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I fucked a tree once.”

  “Did it hurt?” I asked.

  “Not at the time,” he said, “but later it was pretty brutal. Mr. Happy was scratched up like a Dionysian sacrifice.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  Still, it was a radical improvement over living with Jason. Trent was bizarre and ridiculous and very, very annoying, but at the end of the year he wrapped me in a bear hug I hadn’t been expecting and whispered in my ear, “I will love you forever, homie, and always put light around you in my heart.”

  We rarely saw each other on campus, but when we did he would smile and nod at me. After that first year, I became an RA, which suited me perfectly, bossing people around, having a single room, getting paid a small stipend for making sure we had enough toilet paper. I was queen of that dorm and I ruled our floor with an iron fist in a velvet glove.

  My sophomore year, I began dating a junior named Evan. He was a poet and he had handsome ears that were just on the verge of being too big but were instead distinctive. He lived off campus in an apartment because his parents were rich. He was lean and he had curly brown hair and a face that was delicate without being feminine. He had big fat lips like a little kid’s. He was very good at being adorable. I’d never met someone who could make it seem cute to have failed at something. Once, he forgot to pay his electricity bill for several months. “Michael, I, like, forgot there even was electricity. As, like, a force in the universe. What is electricity, I don’t even know!” He was a vegetarian. He was never mean to me. Not once. Not even in a single conversation was he once slightly mean. In fact, if he thought he had accidentally slighted me, he would apologize profusely. He often picked me wildflowers and gave them to me as a surprise.

  Despite these things, I never managed to fall in love with Evan. I cared about him. I lusted after him. I loved his narrow buttocks and his delicate, ticklish rib cage. I loved the large oblong brown mole on his pale forearm. But I did not fall in love with him the way I fell in love with Anthony, and I wondered if maybe I was too happy to fall in love, too already fulfilled.

  I did see Anthony again while I was in college. It was the summer between sophomore and junior year, and I texted him out of the blue, and said: I just wanted to say thank you for our time together. I don’t think I was grown up enough to thank you at the time, but I think in many ways you saved my life.

  We texted back and forth, and he mentioned he would love to get together for lunch nonromantically to catch up, and I said I was driving out that way to drop a friend off at LAX, which was true, and we agreed to meet in North Shore at a sandwich shop where they made their own bread that Bunny and I used to go to all the time.

  I lied to myself that I was not nervous about this encounter, but I changed my shirt five times before taking my friend to the airport. I didn’t want to reopen the romantic door with Anthony, and at that point Evan and I were still technically together, although I already knew it was mostly over, but I did want Anthony to be impressed when he saw me. Gone was my septum piercing, gone the black eyeliner. I had cut my long hair at Evan’s insistence, but it was very chic the way the girl had done it, short on the sides and long and floppy on top. I had a tan. I had muscles. I was wearing shoes made out of actual leather. I was terrified.

  It wasn’t just seeing Anthony. It was being in North Shore again. It was being in a place Bunny had been. By that point, she had been released from prison, but I knew she wasn’t in North Shore anymore, so it wasn’t that I was afraid to run into her. I was afraid of the memory of her, but also the memory of who I had been. I found my own self unfathomable and grotesque. How had I subsisted on so little? How had I lived hunched over in fear of my very self, scuttling about like a crab? I felt ashamed that I had ever been anything other than I was now.

  I was also, on some level, upset that the town still existed. That people went on living here as though nothing had happened, which was absurd, obviously. I kept expecting to be recognized, but I met no one I knew. The town, I saw, had gotten richer. Its metamorphosis was almost complete. On
every block there were only one or two of the old houses clinging to existence between the mansions.

  The sandwich shop was exactly the same, its ambient air temperature as hot and weirdly humid as ever. I recognized the woman behind the counter, though I did not know her name, but she didn’t recognize me. And then I saw Anthony at a table in the back, and I knew all of a sudden that I was wildly happy to see him. Just to look at his face produced ripples of joy in my solar plexus. It was involuntary. I walked over, and he looked up from his book. “Good golly Miss Molly,” he said.

  “I’m so happy to see you,” I said. I was busy looking at him, and I was beaming stupidly as I took the chair across from him. He looked older, but it was hard to say why. Perhaps it was a softness in the jaw, a feebleness in the neck. He had lost some weight and his shoulders were narrower and more bowed. But he was still smiling at me with those wonderful, slightly crooked teeth. I had not known I would recognize his teeth. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I can’t stop looking at you.”

  “I can’t stop looking at you either,” he said.

  “It’s okay, it doesn’t actually matter what we say.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” he agreed.

  I suppose I had thought that I dreamed it. That I was so desperate for love back then that I was willing to project it onto even an old man who lied to me. But it was still here, whatever it was. I didn’t know whether to call it love or joy or just connection, but it was all of those things, and it was generated by our proximity, like an electromagnetic field. I had never felt anything like it with anyone else, and the fact that it was still here—what did it mean?

  “I brought this book for you,” he said. He flashed me the cover. It was a book of Adrienne Rich poems. I liked Adrienne Rich, but I didn’t have any of her collections, so I was happy. It seemed so amazing and wonderful. That he would bring me a present. As though he had known all along that it would be like this, exactly the same as it had been, only different.

  “I don’t know how to say this,” I said, “and I have no intention of entering into a romantic relationship with you again, but this is weird. Is it just me?”

  “No, it’s not just you,” he said.

  “I still love you,” I said. “But not like—”

  “I love you too.”

  “Maybe we knew each other in a past life or something,” I said.

  “Maybe we knew each other in this one.”

  We ordered sandwiches and the bread was as good as I remembered. They came in red plastic trays with wax paper. There was a fly that kept buzzing our table. The air was hot and steamy. It should not have been the most incredible lunch I had ever had, and yet it was. He told me all about Hank and his wife and his retirement. They had recently been on a trip to Prague, which he said reminded him of me because he knew that I would love it, and he made me promise that I would go someday and think of him. I told him all about college and Evan and my mother, whom I had recently begun talking to again.

  “How’s Bunny?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He was shocked. “Did you have a fight?” he asked. “You were so close.”

  “No,” I said, feeling suddenly sick and unable to explain.

  “Then what happened?” he asked.

  * * *

  —

  I visited Bunny in prison exactly three times. The first two times were the first summer she was in prison before I started at Pomona. I was still living with Terrence’s family to save money. I slept on the couch in their den and I lived out of a reusable grocery bag that I kept in their laundry room. I had my life pared down to the bare essentials. Two pairs of black pants, two black T-shirts, and two white button-downs for work, my laptop. Everything else I owned, my books, my mementos, the rest of my clothes, were in a box in Ray Lampert’s garage, which in the end I never returned to get. It was just not worth it to have to look at his face.

  I would have visited Bunny in prison right away, but being approved as a visitor takes time. It took time for Bunny to be assigned to a prison, time for her to go through the reception process, during which she was not allowed visitors, then time for me to fill out an arcane application, send it in, time to have my background check run and approved, time for them to notify Bunny and then for her to notify me. (Why couldn’t they notify me? Why did it have to go through her? Such questions have no answers.)

  When, finally, we had secured that much, I discovered that I had to schedule my visit with her specific prison and that visiting hours were booked for the next two months straight. The prison was open for visits only on Saturday and Sunday, as well as four holidays throughout the year, and it booked up well in advance. I made an appointment for the first Saturday in June, the earliest I could get, and waited, carefully reviewing the extensive rules Bunny had forwarded to me.

  I did not remember rules like this when my mother was in prison and we would visit her, but perhaps I was not aware of them because I was a child. Any bag I brought must be made out of clear plastic. I was not to wear denim pants or a blue chambray shirt. I was not to wear an orange top, orange pants, or an orange jumpsuit. I was not to wear a red shirt. I was not to wear forest-green pants or a tan shirt. I was not to wear camouflage. I must dress modestly. I was not to wear hats or gloves. I was not to wear shorts that were two inches above the knee. I was not to wear jewelry. I was not to wear a layered outfit. My keys must be no more than two in number and on a key ring with no attachments. I could bring a small unopened pack of tissues. I could bring up to fifty dollars, but it must be in one-dollar bills. I could bring ten photographs. I could bring a document no more than ten pages in length. If I violated any of these rules, I would be turned away from the prison and not allowed to see Bunny for our visit.

  While some of these were easy to comply with (I did not own nor did I desire to don an orange jumpsuit), there were still so many instructions of what not to wear that I felt anxious I would forget one and accidentally wear a blue shirt or green pants. The list made me very upset. The list signaled a kind of crushing bureaucracy and micromanaged oversight that I had last experienced, in a much more mild form, in school. I felt dread that Bunny was living inside such a place.

  The day of our visit I was extremely anxious. She was at California Institution for Women, which was in Corona, a full hour’s drive from Terrence’s house in Carson. I had never driven that far before, and I was still a relatively new driver, so the drive alone was terrifying to me, let alone worrying I would hit traffic or be otherwise delayed and miss my visitor’s appointment. If I was even ten minutes late, I would not be allowed to see her.

  As I drove, I began to feel that this was insane. This level of scrutiny, of meaningless protocol. Why were visiting hours only on the weekends? What about people who worked on the weekends? I had had to get my shift covered by a coworker. Why were even the visitors of people in prison being punished? Because it was present in every communication from the prison I had received. This disdain for me. This weird fetish of control over me, and I was not even the one who had committed a crime.

  And then I would think: She’s in for murder. She’s a murderer. You’re about to go visit a murderer. What do you expect, you friend-of-a-murderer. And she killed someone for you. In defense of you. It was only clear to me in retrospect that that was what happened.

  By the time I reached the prison I was so anxious and my thinking so fragmented that everything struck me as surreal. The guards with Tasers. The metal detectors. The heavy locks on all the doors. The surveillance cameras in every room, in every hallway, on every corner, making sure that all spaces were universally seen. Nothing here could be private. Everything was monitored.

  I was processed and then put in a waiting room where there were four surveillance cameras, and I sat and waited. There were lots of families, lots of other people waiting. No one was talking except the little kids.
It felt very much like the DMV except there were no windows and an eerie feeling that we could not leave. The time for my visit came and went. About fifteen minutes after my appointment time, I went up to the woman behind a plate-glass window and asked if I had somehow missed my name being called, but she just said, “Sit down and wait.”

  “My appointment time was fifteen minutes ago, so could you check if maybe something is—”

  “Sit down and wait and your name will be called.”

  “But you don’t know what my name is, so how do you know it will be called?”

  “Sit down or I will call security and have you removed.”

  I sat down. About thirty minutes later, a guard came in and called my name, then led me down a long hallway with blue linoleum and into the visiting room. Bunny was already sitting at one of the tables, and she waved at me in excitement until the guard chastised her. “You can hug for up to ten seconds, and after that you can hold hands, but no other touching, nothing under the table,” the guard said when we arrived at the table. “When your visit is over, you may hug again.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said, and Bunny and I hugged while the guard watched. She was so much taller than me that I felt like a child pressed up against her chest. She smelled like sweat. She was wearing a sky-blue, short-sleeve button-down shirt and dark teal trousers. Both items were bulky and ill-fitting, designed to mask any physical beauty that might accidentally become manifest. We sat down and looked at each other.

  “Did you bring money?” was the first thing she said to me.

  “I brought ten singles,” I said. “Is that enough?”

  She nodded. “Okay, I want an M&M’s, a Doritos, a Sprite, and if there is any money left, then Sour Patch Kids.”

  “Can I get up and walk over there?” I asked, nodding with my head at the vending machines.