I didn’t know what to do. Wasn’t I her friend? Didn’t I have the right to expect to be her confidant? I sat down on one of the pretty French armchairs. “Did you bite him?” I asked.

She shut her eyes.

“Bunny, what the fuck happened that night?”

“Whatever he said happened, apparently.” Her eyes were still closed. I heard the air-conditioning click on. I got up, stood over her on the couch.

“I am your friend,” I said. “I don’t care if you bit him! I’m not going to judge you! I just want you to let me in, and—” I must have been shouting at her, though I hadn’t meant to, because her eyes snapped open and she lunged at me, pushing me so that I fell awkwardly over their coffee table and then she was on top of me, sitting on my stomach, pinning my hands to the floor above my head.

“I don’t want to fight you,” she said, “but I really do not want to talk about this. I thought it was normal, okay? I read it in Cosmo.”

I could hardly breathe; she was so heavy on top of me. I gasped, nodded.

“I got carried away and I bit him on the ear, but I did not make him bleed, I just bit him too hard, okay?” She was shouting down into my face.

I nodded. Tried to take a deep breath so I could talk. “It is normal,” I said. “People do bite each other’s ears when they make out.”

She looked at me quizzically. “They do?”

I nodded. “I can’t breathe,” I said. “Could you?”

“Oh, sorry,” she said, and clambered off me, grabbed the sad bottom half of the muffin, and began peeling its wrapper as she sat back on the couch. “All day long I’ve been cursing that fucking Cosmo article, like, why put something in there if it’s not true? I mean, some of that stuff always made me wonder, like about licking balls, do guys like that? Licking balls?”

“Some guys,” I said, sitting up.

“Or, like, they said to put an ice cube on a guy’s dick.”

“That sounds pretty terrible,” I said.

“That’s what I thought!” she cried. She finished the muffin and threw the limp, crumb-covered liner on the coffee table like it was a used tissue. “It’s all just fucking bullshit, you know? And he didn’t act weird that night! I mean, he said ow when I bit his ear, and I said sorry, but we kept kissing after that! So I don’t get how it was some big deal!”

“Was that your…first kiss?” I asked.

“Yes. Yes,” she said, “that was my first goddamn kiss and I was, like, I don’t know if that pill was really Molly, but I was loopy, and I thought he, like, loved me, like we had this soul connection, and I told him stuff, stuff I totally shouldn’t have told him, and I’m so stupid, I can’t believe I was that stupid.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Like about my dad throwing up all the time and how scared I sometimes was that he would crash the car like my mom and then I’d be an orphan, and you know, I don’t even spend that much time thinking about that stuff, but somehow I was just talking all about it.” She shrugged, shoved another handful of Cheetos into her mouth.

“Oh, Bunny,” I said.

“Don’t say that,” she said, raising an orange-dust-covered finger at me and shaking it. “I am not a victim. It’s not like they put a gun to my head and told me to swallow that pill. I knew it was drugs!”

“I know, but this really isn’t your fault. I think Ryan is making a really big deal out of something that seems pretty normal.”

She seemed to grow calmer, and she began licking the cheese dust off her fingers.

“So it is normal to bite someone’s ears?”

“Yes.”

“This is so frustrating! I thought it was! Why did he get so freaked out, then?”

I didn’t know. I had my guesses. “So how did that night end exactly?”

“Well, we were making out in his car, and I don’t know, there was this other part where we were all in the park, him and me and Samantha and that guy Steve, and then I don’t know where they went, only the idea was that they were going to do it, like, the big joke was that they were leaving us because they wanted to go do it, and so Ryan said he would take me home and then we were kissing in his car, and I bit his ear and said sorry, and it was fine, and then I got out and we were just outside my house, and I snuck in and went to bed.”

“And that’s it?” I asked.

“Well, yeah.”

“Did you, I mean, was there any other stuff that happened? Like sex stuff?”

“No!” she shouted. “Are you crazy? But, I mean, like, I was very handsy. I felt like a cat being petted, it felt so good to touch him and be touched, and I kept touching his hair which maybe bugged him?”

“And then what happened? Did you text him the next day?”

“No, well, he called me the next day, and he said he couldn’t be my boyfriend because I terrified him. Which, I was like, ‘In what way do I terrify you?’ But he just kept saying, ‘You’re not the girl for me, Bunny,’ and I was like, what do I do with that? I didn’t get it. But I must have—there must have been something about me, some way I did everything wrong, that just—just grossed him out.”

I was both angry and sad that she had not told me any of this before. She had never shown me the texts she sent him or anything, but I could distinctly remember her saying, “Gosh, I texted him like five times and he hasn’t responded. Isn’t that rude?” It had seemed humiliating enough to me, but now to discover that this had been a face-saving lie to cover an even more painful reality made me want to bite Ryan Brassard’s ear off myself. “What a fucking limp-dick loser,” I said.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You just—you intimidated him!”

“I did not,” she said. “I scared him.”

“Bunny, nothing is wrong with you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Well, obviously I did.”

“No,” I said, and I reached out and squeezed her naked calf in my hand. “Do not eat this. Do not take this in as information about yourself. This is not valid data. This does not mean you are bad at sex, or you are gross, it means only that Ryan Brassard is a scaredy-cat, limp-dick, manipulative little shit who wants a girl who will just lie there quietly while he excites himself.”

Bunny laughed. “I don’t know. I mean, it’s pretty ballsy of him to have asked me out in the first place. He’s only five nine. Like, you have to at least give him credit for that.”