by Rufi Thorpe
“I think so, just do it slowly.”
I stood and the guard looked my way, I motioned at the vending machines and he nodded. I walked over and waited behind a woman and a five-year-old girl with sweet braids, who was getting Ding Dongs. I fed my sweaty dollar bills to the machine with shaking hands. What was I afraid of? Nothing in particular. But I hated this place powerfully.
I bought Bunny her treats. There was not enough left for the Sour Patch Kids. When I brought them back to the table she excitedly opened them and began eating and I felt that really she was more excited about the food than about seeing me.
“So how is it?” I said. “You look good.”
She did not look good. Her skin looked dull and she had a handful of tiny pimples on the left side of her face. Her hair was greasy at the roots. “It’s fine,” she said. “I mean, I get by.” She laughed.
“Do you have any friends?” I asked.
“A couple,” she said, licking up a palmful of M&M’s.
“It’s just so good to see your face,” I said, which was a lie. It was weird and sad to see her face. She didn’t look the same. But then she met my eyes fully for the first time, and the eye contact was so intense I felt I was falling, that if I didn’t concentrate I would lose consciousness. There was just her whole soul, right there. Looking at me. It was Bunny.
“I miss you every day,” she said, still holding my gaze, flowing into me.
“Do you get all my letters? Because sometimes you don’t write back,” I said. “And I never know if you don’t get it or…”
“Sometimes I’m too sad to write back,” she said.
And I started to cry. I looked up at the ceiling, trying to stop. When I looked at her again, she was still there, looking frankly at me, her eyes dry.
“I couldn’t tell you in my letters because they read them but I have a girlfriend in here,” she said softly.
“Get out!” I said, wiping my eyes, grateful to recover myself.
“She’s really cool,” she said.
“That’s amazing. What is she? I mean—what did she do?”
“She killed her stepfather because he was molesting her kid sister.”
“Oh wow,” I said, “I was kind of hoping you’d say drugs.”
She laughed. “Us murderers gotta stick together, you know.” There was a hint of a Jersey accent in her voice, and I had the impression this was a way the girls talked together to make each other laugh. Her attention was diverted for a moment as she opened the Doritos with holy reverence.
“I would offer to share, but my dad hasn’t put anything on my commissary in like a month, and all the food here has saltpeter in it to keep you calm, it’s disgusting. These chips taste like heaven.”
“They put saltpeter in the food?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know if they really do, but that’s what everyone says.”
“So does everyone know you killed someone?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Gives me massive cred in here.”
“Weird,” I said.
“I know,” she said, “they call me the Knockout. Because for in here, I’m pretty. I know you may not think I’m pretty, like, I’m not pretty out there, but in here I’m pretty.”
“I think you’re pretty,” I said, but I was so disturbed I didn’t know what to say. “How’s your dad?” I asked, even though I had consciously planned not to ask about Ray.
“Well, he had to sell our house,” she said. “And he lost his business. But he’s finally out of the last of the IRS debt, and he just bought a condo in Lake Forest and he’s doing real estate down there.”
“He still has his license?” I asked.
“He never lost it.”
“It’s just so unfair,” I said. “Sometimes I can’t get over it. That you’re in here and he’s buying a condo and probably drinking scotch with Swanson.”
She shrugged. “Is what it is.”
“Do you forgive him?” I really wanted to know. I did not forgive him. In fact, the more time passed, the more my heart calcified against him.
“Some thoughts are just too expensive to have,” she said.
I didn’t say anything, just looked at her. What a magnificent animal she was even now, all two hundred pounds of her, across the table from me, licking Cool Ranch dust from her fingers. “It’s kind of like long-distance running,” she said. “You have to keep your mind under control. You can’t start thinking about when it’s going to be over or what hurts or you’ll lose it and your form will get sloppy and soon you’ll be winded and you’ll stop before you’ve given it everything you’ve got.”
“So, like, you can’t think about when you’ll get out?”
“Exactly.”
“You can’t think about whether it’s fair or unfair that you’re here?”
“Exactly.”
She was giving prison everything she had. She was determined to survive this. It seemed to me so honorable, to be committed to life in a place like this. I wasn’t sure I would be able to do what she was doing.
“You’re too good for this world,” I said.
“No, I’m not,” she said, and smiled.
* * *
—
The next time I visited her was in late August, right before I started at Pomona. We had an okay time. I knew what to expect from the prison protocol and was less freaked out. We talked, I bought her snacks. This time I brought a whole twenty-five dollars in singles and we both gorged on Snickers and Gardetto’s.
“I haven’t had an orange soda in years,” I said.
I promised I would visit every month. Pomona was right next to Chino, it would hardly be a drive. I told her I would send her all my books I read, and it would be like she was going to college with me, and we could have a book club by mail.
But then I started college, and I did not visit her. I was absorbed by my new world. I also didn’t want to go to the prison. It was as simple as that really. I didn’t want to go, and so I didn’t, even though I knew I should. Our pattern had always been that I sent two letters for every one she sent me, but now it dropped to an equal one-to-one ratio. And then it began to slip further, and I would wait sometimes a week or two weeks to write her back. I did not visit her again until the spring semester of my freshman year, on a Saturday in March.
The moment I saw her, I knew she was on drugs. Her eyes were glassy. The muscles in her face were slack. I didn’t know what drug she was on, but I knew she was on something.
“What did they do,” I asked, “put you on lithium?”
“What? No,” she said, after hugging me.
“Seriously?” I leaned in and whispered, “You’re not on drugs?”
“I swear,” she said, “I’m not!” She laughed and I knew she was lying to me. Everything was different. The way she looked at me, the way she laughed, the way she talked, the way she held her shoulders. She had this new snicker that was near silent, just bursts of air through her nostrils.
“Well, how are you?” she asked, oddly formal. She was hostile, but she was smiling. I didn’t know what to do.
“I’m fine,” I said. “How are you?”
“Oh, I’m great, I’m fucking great, I’m taking this amazing course on Sartre and the existentialists.”
“No, really?” I asked, leaning forward.
She laughed. “No. Get out. They don’t have that shit here. That was straight from one of your own letters, you don’t know your life?”
“I’m sorry I haven’t been writing as much,” I said.
“Oh, believe me, I get it,” she said.
“I meant to,” I said. “School is just really busy, and I have a job, and between the two—”
“No, don’t apologize,” she said, “I’m the one who should apologize. Everyone in here told me it would happen
. They told me, eventually your friends, your family, they will stop thinking of you as you, and start thinking of you as a prisoner. The letters will stop. They won’t put money on your books. Eventually, they will look at you just like the guards.”
“Bunny, no,” I said.
“And I thought maybe that would happen with my dad, and it did. Believe me, he stopped visiting long before you did. But I didn’t think it would happen with you. Because I thought we were real friends. I fucking told people that. Whatever, I would say, you don’t know him. But then you did what they all do. So it’s me who should apologize,” she said. “Because I was the one who was wrong.”
We stared at each other for a moment. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to have the conversation because she was high and I hated talking to intoxicated people. I had done enough of it with my own mother. You never got anywhere. They just got sort of stuck in a thought cycle, and if you were interrupting it or contradicting it, they literally could not hear you. They would do anything to just cycle through the thoughts again and stoke the anger and the hurt.
But that was only part of it. Really, I was so ashamed that I was almost unable to speak. I liked to think of her as hulking and invulnerable, but the truth was Bunny was a terrible victim. Ann Marie had been bullying her for years. The whole school had piled on the abuse. Ryan Brassard and the ear thing. And then what had lit the match of the whole powder keg was me. Was her love for me. Her defense of me.
And here she was, paying the price every day while I played around at college, examining texts and fucking boys and wrestling with the “big philosophical questions.”
I wanted to throw up.
“I brought money for snacks,” I said finally.
“That’s cool,” she said. “Buy me some Ding Dongs.”
I bought an obscene armful of chips and cookies and candy and sodas, and carried them back to our table.
“I want to say something,” I said, “that I’ve never said before, but I feel like we should really talk about it.”
She raised an eyebrow, cracked a soda.
“Thank you for defending me,” I said, my voice shaking. “When Ann Marie—thank you for defending me.”
She looked at me for a very long time. Then she looked at the table. She peeled open the slippery, thin skin of a Snickers. “You’re welcome,” she said.
“And also, also: I’m sorry. I am so sorry that all this happened to you. I’m sorry you’re in prison. I’m sorry Ann Marie died. I’m sorry for all of it. I’m sorry I didn’t visit.”
“Thank you,” she said formally, as though I had presented her with a ceremonial gift.
We talked more easily after that, but I knew things still weren’t right. I knew that the kind of transgression I had committed against her was large, was maybe the largest transgression I had made in my life. And I couldn’t undo it.
Worse than that, I found myself disliking her. Disliking her new affect, her new slang, whatever was going on with her glassy eyes. We didn’t have anything in common anymore, our worlds were so different. It was painful for me to hear about her world, and painful for her to hear about mine. Part of the social armor she had acquired to survive in prison was a nonchalant apathy that was anathema to intimacy. Every single thing I told her about my life she managed to imply was subtly stupid. Every single thing she told me about her life I was visibly troubled by. She told me about making pruno, about getting elastic strings out of the waistbands of underwear and making tiny woven rings with them, about tattoo guns made out of CD players, about some girl having an allergic reaction to calligraphy ink someone had snuck in. “Like, bitch, don’t put that in your skin, that’s for fountain pens and shit.”
I wanted to love her again so I could forgive myself and I could not, so I could not.
That day I left, and I didn’t go again. I didn’t write her, and she didn’t write me, except for one letter right before she was released, telling me I was her best friend and she hoped I still loved her. She signed it with a million x’s and o’s.
I did not know what to make of that letter. It was so saccharinely sweet that it was hard not to feel it was artificial.
I had always imagined that I would be there to meet Bunny when she got out. That it would be me and Ray, and we would take her to lunch and order the whole menu, and then go to Target and buy her all new clothes. I had imagined I would be part of her reentry into the world. But I was not. I didn’t hear from Ray. I didn’t know what her exact release date was, just that it was in October. I put my head down for midterms, and then before I knew it we were in December, and Bunny must theoretically be out in the world without me.
* * *
—
I started dating Evan that fall, and it was the following summer that I met up with Anthony and began a friendship with him that would last until his death from pancreatic cancer over five years later. I graduated from Pomona, class of 2015, and was accepted to the Graduate Program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell to do my PhD. My mother, Aunt Deedee, and Anthony all attended my college graduation, and there was no drama. It was as if none of it had ever happened. Anthony gave me a two-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary in a special box with a drawer containing a magnifying glass, and I had never received a better present. I still have it to this day. I moved it with me to Ithaca.
I loved upstate New York immediately. I loved the snow. A fresh snowfall never failed to make me feel like Lucy when she is first in Narnia, as though I had accidentally climbed into another world.
I dated. I fell in love with a man named Conor, who was balding and a little fat and the most joyful being I have ever run across. He saw the world, he saw it clearly, but to him it was still good fun. Even the sad parts of being alive were beautiful. And mostly human beings cracked him up. He wasn’t scared, scared of the darkness in others or in himself. He was so different from the other men I had dated. He was sane and capable. He was an engineer in robotics. He could cook only three things, but one of them was a delectable white chili. He had wide little feet and perfectly even toes.
It was after I had finished my master’s and was burrowing into the long deep years of my PhD when I ran across a YouTube video of Bunny. I would never have even seen it if I hadn’t been on Conor’s laptop. He first started watching UFC fighting because of Ronda Rousey, and he was still a fan, watching her old clips on YouTube, and in one of the recommended to-watch-next videos on the sidebar, I saw a freeze-frame of a woman who could only be a grown-up Bunny Lampert. The video was titled “Watch the Knockout Queen Mop the Floor.”
It was a boxing fight, in a ring instead of a cage. The fight lasted less than two minutes before the other girl was out cold. You could hear the fleshy slap of her body as she hit the mat. At the end, you could see Bunny go to her corner, and her trainer slapped her on the head with love, and then, clear as day, it was Ray Lampert standing there, smiling ear to ear, shouting at her, “You did it, you did it.” In a feverish trance, I watched all her fight videos. She was undefeated, 12 and 0, with 5 TKOs. Numbers like a young Laila Ali, or so every commentator of her matches liked to say. The early videos were mostly grainy, without commentary, all crowd noise. The more recent ones were obviously higher production value, televised with commentators, and in them she was wearing what became her uniform: pink satin shorts and a pink satin sports bra–style top. The Knockout Queen. I bet Ray had come up with it himself. Her most watched video had over a million views.
“This is my friend from high school,” I told Conor. “I know her.”
“Wow, how cool!” he said. “We should go to one of her matches.”
“They look like they’re mostly in California,” I said.
He laughed. “Oh, then we won’t go to one of her matches.”
“It’s just so weird—she was my friend,” I said. But I could not explain. I could not ex
press what had happened and how formative it had been. “Her dad was really weird,” I said. “He was an alcoholic.”
“Oh yeah?” Conor said. “Where do you want to go to dinner?”
There was no one I could talk to about what had become of Bunny. Anthony was already very sick by that point; he would die just after that Christmas. I didn’t want to bother him with this, and he didn’t even know Bunny personally. I had kept in touch with none of our other high school friends, but I found myself curious about all of them, and I spent hours snooping through Naomi’s Facebook page. She had a little daughter named Tara. It did not appear she had ever gone to the Olympics. That bruised me somehow. Without consciously thinking about it, I had always counted on her to go, as if in Bunny’s place. But it looked like she had ripped off college’s face and fucked the shit out of it, and law school after that, and it was clear from her selfies with her (extremely hot) husband, from her food pics at fancy restaurants, from her adorable daughter, that she was living the good life, and that made me happy.
I watched Bunny’s fights over and over again. “This is unhealthy,” Conor would chime in.
“I am well aware,” I would say, “but I am in helpless thrall.”
And then I would watch her knock out girls again and again.
There was one fight in particular that haunted me. Bunny had her hair in cornrows, which made her look less prissy, and her opponent was a particularly dumb-looking pinheaded girl. In the close-up before the match when they touched gloves, you could see they were both already drenched in sweat. The arena must have been sweltering. Bunny was looking at the other girl like she wanted to kill her, like she wanted to smear her on the sidewalk. The other girl disgusted her. But her look was not heated. It was a chilly disdain. She would take this pinheaded girl apart.
And she did. The match was four rounds long, two-minute rounds, and Bunny was methodical and relentless the whole way through, even though they were evenly matched—the other girl had a dogged persistence and ability to take blows to the head that boggled the mind. You could see the cool intelligence in Bunny’s eyes as she evaluated the other girl’s habits, found her weaknesses. Even as she got tired and staggered, you could tell she was in control. When she finally knocked the pinheaded girl out, it was exaggerated and cartoonish; the other girl swooned as though drunk, her mouth hanging open, and then fell to the ground. The camera zoomed in on Bunny, who was smiling around her mouth guard and holding her fist in the air, walking in tight circles, trying to burn off the rest of the adrenaline.