But even once she was shorn, Ann Marie liked to point out that Bunny’s stubble was thicker than the other girls’, that Bunny’s throat was too thick, that Bunny walked like a boy. Bunny, in fact, did not walk like a boy. She walked like a girl who was naturally 90 percent fast-twitch muscle fiber and who was already a head taller than the tallest boy. She walked like a girl who could, and sometimes did, lift up the entire end of the living room couch to scout for change underneath. She walked like a girl who could dangle one-handed from a monkey bar while she ate an apple with the other hand. “They shouldn’t have named you Bunny,” Ann Marie said with a laugh, “they should have named you Monkey!”

When the break came, it was quick and tawdry. Ann Marie and the other girls had a sleepover to which Bunny was not invited, and the mother of the girl whose house it was drove them all to Bunny’s house—she said it had to be the house of a friend, someone who would know they weren’t doing it to be mean—and she let them TP the entire front of Bunny’s house.

Ray Lampert was furious. He didn’t care what PC cant that mother had been spouting, Ray Lampert knew that you TPed the loser kid’s house, and this TP on his front lawn meant that Bunny, and himself by extension, were losers. Bunny was never to see Ann Marie again, Ann Marie was not to come to their house, she was to be entirely blacklisted. (Everyone had agreed on the fact that it was Ann Marie who had come up with the idea of TPing someone’s house and also the one who suggested they do it to Bunny Lampert.)

Bunny felt two ways about all of this. On the one hand, she was righteously angry. Ann Marie had made her father angry, and to Bunny there was no greater transgression. She took off her half of the best friend necklace and never put it on again. But she was also somewhat relieved. She had disliked Ann Marie for years but had suppressed this knowledge, and now she found great joy in not spending hours and hours being criticized and bossed around. (Ann Marie was the kind of kid constantly instructing other kids: “No, color it like this. Use this marker. No, you’re doing it wrong, it’s not supposed to be like that.”) Bunny decided at that point that girls were simply too complicated to be friends with, and she began playing basketball with the boys, who accepted and adored her immediately. After school she went skateboarding with them. They liked to travel in herds, buying candy and going from one of their houses to the next depending on which video game they wanted to play. It was heaven.

But by sixth grade, coincidentally the year I moved to North Shore, the other girls had figured out that Bunny had cornered the boy market, and these girls wanted the boys to be their boyfriends, and so they started playing basketball too. Bunny argued that they shouldn’t be allowed to play. They were girls. “But you’re a girl,” the boys replied, confused. They knew the girls would ruin the basketball game, but they were now more interested in the girls than they were in the basketball. And so Bunny’s paradise was ruined. Dates, which were nothing more than a group of boys and girls going to the mall together, began to be arranged. She would sometimes go on these, paired off with a boy who made it very clear to her that he was not really asking her on a date but wanted to include her out of friendship. She watched as Keith Moore spent money to buy sunglasses for Michelle, and this spending of money worked everyone into a froth, because it meant that Keith Moore maybe even loved Michelle, or else it meant that he had bought Michelle and now Michelle would have to kiss him or do whatever he wanted and be his slave.

As it would happen, Bunny began volleyball at around the same time, and so it was easy to let go of one world and dive into the next. Practice was a better place for her to be than at the movies platonically holding hands with a boy who told her about his crush on someone else. All of those girls, who had once been her best friends, and all of those boys, who had once been her best friends, were no longer her friends at all. And she entered high school mysteriously friends with nobody at all, despite the fact that she was well liked by everybody, and considered popular by dint of her father’s omnipresent quasi-celebrity.

In high school, Ann Marie found true ascendancy. All of the things that had made other children dislike her, the overly high spirits, the bossiness, the meanness, suddenly made her attractive to both boys and girls. Her preening, always fussing over her hair, her clothes. When she complained that her mother had bought her the wrong socks and these ones looked cheap, every girl around her looked down at her own feet and realized she was wearing the wrong ones. Ann Marie took herself so seriously that even the smallest, most pedestrian details of her life were charged. You had to be careful because Dr Pepper Chapstick was actually chemically addicting. Your underwear should be at least as expensive as your shirt. Using vanilla scented products made you irresistible to boys because subliminally they wanted to eat you. This sense of drama, the momentousness of the mundane, was intoxicating to the teen girls around her, and even if they didn’t believe everything she said (she was aggressively pro-enema, for instance), talking to her made them feel important. Ann Marie was a creature specially adapted to the unique and fleeting habitat of a white, suburban high school.

By tenth grade she made varsity volleyball and became again a daily presence in Bunny’s life. She also began dating Tyler Jenkins, who was on the wrestling team, and she liked to ask other girls in the locker room for water so she could take her teeny tiny birth control pill, just so everyone knew she was taking it, which meant she and Tyler had sex, which meant she was desirable and queenly. And while Bunny disliked Ann Marie, and disliked a world that saw fit to worship her, she also took comfort in the fact that Ann Marie was only five foot six and unwilling to work very hard. She was coordinated and mean, and this had taken her far in the world of high school athletics, but it would never take her where Bunny was going. How could Bunny, then, begrudge her this tiny kingdom, if that was what Ann Marie wanted? Queen of lip gloss, queen of fucking boys, queen of being at the right parties. She would never win a gold medal for that.

And so Bunny found it in her heart to ignore Ann Marie and treat her with a distant respect. She was, after all, part of the team. In the meantime, Bunny had made friends with a girl named Naomi, the only black girl on the volleyball team, who was extremely reserved and stone-faced, but who could really spill the tea once she trusted you and was wickedly hilarious and mean. Naomi was also tall, and also great, and also going places, and also naturally repelled by Ann Marie. “That girl is trivial” was all Naomi had to say about the matter, and so she and Bunny cemented a bond based on being serious about the correct things, and ignoring everything else, though Bunny was never quite as good at the ignoring part as Naomi.

Naomi didn’t play with boys. Naomi did schoolwork, church, sports, and not one thing else. She didn’t even watch the TV you were supposed to watch. She didn’t even help her mother with the cooking. Naomi didn’t like me, though I found her intriguing, and I was rarely able to get more than a drowsy “hello” from her in the halls. If pressed about how she was doing, she would always answer the same, “Just getting through it.” Bunny and I both wished we could be more like Naomi, and we often spoke about her, wondering where her steely discipline had come from and why we didn’t have it. Naomi didn’t care if the socks she wore were the “right” socks or the “wrong” socks. Naomi didn’t care if not one single boy had a crush on her. And it wasn’t just pretense, at least so far as we could tell. She literally gave not two shits about any of us really. She was biding her time. Her real life, she seemed to imply, would begin shortly, and she would dust us completely when she got there.