“She should have listened to the 911 dispatcher and stayed out,” I said. “Spencer was already dead. She couldn’t save him. She was already too late.”

Donna Morse had not been smart.

If she had been smarter, she would have succeeded in not being murdered.

Bunny and I were smart. Something like that could never happen to us. We would never let our own murderous fathers get out of hand. Our murderous fathers were more refined, confined themselves to smashing vases and brief bouts of strangulation.

Bunny was especially hung up on why Donna hadn’t fought him off harder. “How could you let yourself be slammed into the kitchen counter like that? I mean, after the first few times, aren’t you like, enough, get off me?”

“Maybe he was stronger than her,” I said.

Bunny shook her head. She couldn’t imagine it. She couldn’t fathom it. What it was to be physically weak. To be overpowered.

“I think she was waiting,” she said. “I think she assumed he would stop. That it would be like all the other times, and he would slam her head once, twice, but not keep going. But she’d seen the kid already. How could she not know he was going to take it all the way? She thought she could calm him down. That was her mistake.”

Donna made false calculations. Donna had failed.

There was no discussion of whether Luke had been smart or not smart. There was no discussion of what Luke should have done. Luke was, somehow, not a person.

We needed to pretend violence was something we could control. That if you were good and did the right things, it wouldn’t happen to you. In any event, it was easier for me then to demand that Donna become psychic and know how to prevent her own murder than it was for me to wonder how Luke could have controlled himself. It was easier for all of us that way.

* * *

—

When school started, I was mostly concerned with how I would continue to see Anthony, since we could meet only in the daytime due to my housing situation, and we could not meet at his place because of his marriage (I presumed; he never actually said as much). Still, we often talked of ways we could sneak away, a fake camping trip with a fake flyer I could show my aunt, though I did not mention to him that my aunt would never believe that I wanted to go camping. We would go, he said, to the Hotel Angeleno, which was a round turret with windows on all sides so that every room had a balcony overlooking Los Angeles, and we would go to the Getty, he said, and look at the art together.

It was senior year, and for all my classmates the specter of the future loomed, but for me the questions, over where I would live, what I would do, whether or not I would go to college and how, were kaleidoscopic and overwhelming. The relationship with Anthony had unseated me from my usual pragmatism and suddenly anything, even impossible things, seemed like real possibilities. Maybe I would get into college and get a free ride and live in some kind of idealized dormitory setting, and Anthony and I could go on dates, and maybe he would take me to the symphony, and maybe we would fly to Paris together, and after brief, wrenchingly beautiful sodomy, we would eat croissants and notice together a stray cat dans la rue.

Maybe I would become homeless and begin to prostitute myself in Inglewood and eventually be murdered. Maybe I would go to community college and continue living with my aunt and working at Rite Aid and would stop seeing Anthony altogether and my life would go on much as it had. All of these futures seemed equally possible to me, and I spent my days lurching from one scenario to another, and so I did not exactly notice that some kind of vicious gossip was going around the school until the third or fourth day of the year, when I saw a fat, ruddy-faced boy named Scott, who was on the wrestling team and who was rumored to have absolutely chronic ringworm, snap his jaws at Bunny in the hall and growl, “You can bite me anytime, girl.”

Bunny stared at him, as expressionless as a mannequin, and then slowly rotated toward her locker and opened it.

“What was that about?” I asked her.

“Nothing,” she said, but I noticed that her head was wobbling on her neck oddly, as though the muscles had given out and she was having to keep her head perfectly balanced upon the nub of her spine. She seemed, if anything, not upset but ill.

“Did he say you could bite him?”

“Yes,” she said, and closed her locker and walked away from me, her head still carefully balanced on her neck as though it might tumble off.

A few carefully posed questions throughout the day provided me with the rest of the story. It was regarding Ryan Brassard and the night I had seen them together at the Rite Aid in July. In none of the stories I heard were drugs ever mentioned. In none of the stories were the other boy or the girl, Samantha, mentioned. In one, the setting had been Ryan’s bedroom. In another, it had been Ryan’s car. In all of them, Bunny had behaved somehow inappropriately. She was a slut. She was begging him for it. She jammed his hand down her pants, or she had stuck her too-large hand down his. She had writhed like an animal, she had squealed or made noises like a pig. In all of the stories, the crescendo of the action was that she had bitten him on the ear, nearly drawing blood, or in some versions actually drawing blood. Ryan had gotten scared of her and dropped her at her house. In one story, he had not even done that, just told her to get out of his own house, slamming the door in her face. She was disgusting. She was a whore. One boy speculated to me that Bunny must have a huge vagina, and he would like to see it, as he imagined it was the size of a cow’s vagina.

I texted her repeatedly, but she did not reply. I knew she had volleyball practice after school, and so I went to my shift at Rite Aid but asked Terrence if I could leave early, and since I rarely made such requests, he complied, and by seven p.m. I was knocking on the door to Bunny’s house desperately, pounding really, forgetting altogether that they had a doorbell, as though I were afraid to find her murdered inside.

When she swung open the door, I almost fell. She stared at me with some confusion, her face blank and pale, her lips almost white. Her hair was pulled back in a sweaty ponytail. She was still in her gym clothes, her kneepads pushed down around her ankles, and she didn’t say anything, just stepped back so I could come inside. I could see she had been watching TV, and spread out on the coffee table were Cheetos, cookies, what looked like part of a muffin, a can of AriZona iced tea. She had not been crying. She had been eating.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she said, and threw herself on the couch.

“What happened?” I asked.

“What, with Ryan?”

“Well, yes. And, I mean, everything! Bitch, do you want a hug?” I asked, standing there, not knowing whether I should sit down or where.

“No, thank you,” she said. Her eyes were glued to the TV.