“Maybe he got scared by how turned on you made him.”

“Why would that scare him?”

“Maybe he’s secretly gay and he was freaked out because he thought you figured it out.”

“That’s only slightly more believable,” she said. And she took in a deep breath, blew it out, then said, “Wanna go swimming?”

And so we did, and I even let her almost drown me in an effort to buoy her spirits.

As it turned out, it was Ann Marie, Tyler’s girlfriend, who had spread the gossip about Bunny biting Ryan Brassard. Ryan and Tyler and Steve were all on the wrestling team, and Ryan had told them what happened, but the gossip might have been contained to the world of ringworm-infested wrestlers had Ann Marie not been in the car when the story was told. Ann Marie was a special kind of being, small, cute, mean, glossy, what might in more literary terms be called a “nymphet,” but only by a heterosexual male author, for no one who did not want to fuck Ann Marie would be charmed by her. She was extra, ultra, cringe-inducingly saccharine, a creature white-hot with lack of irony. She was not pretty, but somehow she had no inkling of this fact, and she performed prettiness so well that boys felt sure she was. She had brassy golden hair and freckles and blue eyes slightly too wide set and bulging. Even though she was short, she played varsity volleyball with Bunny.

In a town like North Shore, where everyone had known everyone forever, there were many points of connection, and before I relate what happened next that fall of our senior year, I feel the need to enumerate each point of connection we shared with Ann Marie, or else the story simply makes no sense.

Bunny and Ann Marie had known each other since they were two years old because Bunny had attended the Catholic preschool that Ann Marie’s mother ran. (This was, of course, how Ann Marie, my sleazy imp of an informant, became aware that Bunny’s mother had been having an affair with Mr. Brandon.) Ann Marie’s mother, otherwise known to the children as Ms. Harriet, was the principal, and so as a two-, three-, and four-year-old, Bunny was disciplined by Ann Marie’s mother, and Bunny’s memories of her were vivid. What was most interesting and most frightening about Ms. Harriet is that she never said what you were expecting her to, and she was completely unmoved and unfrazzled by tears, fits, tantrums, and violence. She was calm not in a way that was kind, or soft, or in any way jiggly, Bunny said. Hers was a calm made of stone. Ann Marie’s mother loved no one and hated no one and was surprised by no one. She and Ann Marie’s father were divorced and divorced early. Ms. Harriet was well done with bullshit even by the time both girls turned two. Bunny could still remember one comment Ms. Harriet had made, quite calmly, to a boy named Liam, who was prone to hitting. “Do you like to be hit?”

“No,” Liam had said.

“Do you love people who hit you?”

“No,” he had said. How old was he? Three? Maybe not even that.

“So who is going to love you if you keep on hitting? Who is going to love someone like that?”

“No one,” the boy said, tears sliding down his cheeks as he studied the tile floor at his feet.

“That’s right,” Ms. Harriet said. “So you’ve got some thinking to do and some decisions to make. You can hit. Not anybody in this world can really and truly stop you if hitting is how you want to be. But if you do, you’re risking all that love that you could have. Because nobody, nobody, nobody, is going to stand around all day for you to hit just hoping to give you love in return.”

And then she ruffled his hair.

That was the thing about Ms. Harriet, Bunny told me. She was always almost right, but a little bit wrong in a way that was scary.

What must it have been like to be Ms. Harriet, watching her own daughter grow up side by side with Bunny? What did she notice about the two girls? What judgments was Ms. Harriet forced to make about her own daughter after seeing her so clearly among her peers? Most parents wonder, are all children like this? Is my child special and wonderful? Is my child awful? But Ms. Harriet knew what all children were, she knew what normal was, and she was horrifyingly lucid about the strengths and weaknesses of her only progeny.

As a little girl, Ann Marie had been whiny and sticky, not naturally moral or empathetic, prone to being quite mean actually. She was the kind of little girl who taunted, who teased, who grabbed a toy from your hands and then ran off with it, and when you chased her, burst into tears and told the teacher you attacked her. In short, she was the sort of child other children disliked, and Ms. Harriet was daily aware of this. Bunny’s commentary was, “I always got the feeling Ms. Harriet liked me more than Ann Marie, and that made me feel so bad that I was always extra nice to Ann Marie so we became friends even though I never liked her.”

From preschool through about third grade, Bunny and Ann Marie were best friends. If Bunny had been a dog or a horse, what she possessed would have been termed “a good temperament.” But there is not a precise category for this kind of personality type in humans, one characterized chiefly by tolerance and a kind of good-hearted obliviousness. Mean jokes and pranks slid off her, and she was untroubled and unaware that she was not popular and that her friendship with Ann Marie made her even less so. As they grew older, she was aware that Ann Marie wanted to continue playing with dolls long after Bunny and other girls had stopped, but she felt only pity for whatever fever seemed to clutch Ann Marie when she looked into the inert face of a doll. Once, Ann Marie had told her that she believed dolls came alive when you weren’t looking or when you were asleep. She was the kind of girl who continued believing in Santa too long, who didn’t get the memo about the tooth fairy. A true literalist, she once informed a boy at school that he was definitely going to hell because his family didn’t go to church and that Satan was going to press hot skewers into his body. “You’re gonna rot,” she said, her eyes lit up with excitement. “You’re gonna burn!” (While the preschool was Catholic, Ms. Harriet was not, and she and Ann Marie attended the evangelical church that was pleasingly located across the street from the donut shop, and hell seemed to interest them a lot more than heaven.)

But Ann Marie was not all bad, Bunny was quick to point out. When Bunny’s mother had died when the girls were seven, Ann Marie had said nothing at all about Allison going to hell, even though Bunny’s family didn’t go to church either. If anything, Ann Marie was swept up by the tragedy of it, crying more orgiastically at the funeral than even Bunny herself. She suggested to Bunny elaborate ways that they might mourn together, and wanted to contact Bunny’s mother’s ghost using a scented candle and one of Allison’s old scarves that still smelled of her perfume. She made them black armbands that they wore for weeks.

In third grade, however, something shifted. One day on the monkey bars, Ann Marie pointed out to the other girls that Bunny’s legs were unshaven. “Look,” she said, “her legs are hairy like a man’s!” And the other girls had laughed. Bunny had not been aware that everyone had begun shaving, and she dutifully went home and asked her father for a razor, which at first alarmed him, but when she explained about the teasing, he quickly acquiesced. Ray Lampert was nothing if not keen to the necessity of fitting in, even if it meant sexualizing the legs of his eight-year-old daughter.