* * *

—

All things considered, for Ann Marie to be the one to spread the story of how Bunny bit Ryan Brassard was part of a much larger narrative in both of their lives, which made it both worse and better. Bunny assumed that the gossip would die down eventually the way it always had, even though this wound felt so much more personal and terrible than Ann Marie calling her monkey or pointing out her legs were hairy or even TPing her house. But it was not world ending, and it was especially tolerable because in volleyball things were taking an extraordinary turn. They had a new assistant coach, Coach Eric, who was a volleyball player at UCLA forced to take the season off due to a shoulder injury, and he was warm and praising where Coach Creely was cold and withholding. He had dark hair and blue eyes, which made him look slightly malevolent, like a Siberian Husky, even though he was overtly friendly. Of course Bunny had a horrible crush on him; he was six foot seven and she had to look up into his dreamy blue eyes (barf). But it didn’t interfere with her playing. In fact, quite the opposite. It was almost as if her hypersensitivity to his gaze supercharged her from moment to moment, causing her to vibrate at an unusual new frequency.

Bunny had her new legs, and Naomi was lit from within by the cold, hard light of securing a college scholarship. It was the only thing Naomi had ever cared about: getting the fuck out of here. Naomi lived in Hawthorne but had secured transfer into North Shore through a series of careful lies. (What was hard was not transferring into our district, but getting Hawthorne to relinquish her and the $60 a day the school would receive for her attendance. If she had to forge a letter saying her mother worked in North Shore for an aerospace company, so be it.) But coming from our (more highly ranked) high school with a 4.23 GPA, making varsity volleyball, varsity basketball, and varsity track, Naomi wasn’t just interested in going to college: She was interested in ripping the face off college and fucking its throat. She was interested in burning the whole rigged system to the ground. Once I asked her who her favorite teacher was and she said, “I don’t have a favorite.”

“You don’t like any of them?”

“To be totally honest, I hope they all die,” she said.

To say that I adored Naomi would have been an understatement.

On the court, the two of them were a dazzling pair, and I began attending their games, which they couldn’t seem to lose, just to watch them. I even dragged my little sister, Gabby, to a couple under the mistaken illusion that she might see in Bunny and Naomi a possible future for herself, but she was unimpressed with the way the girls looked strung like puppets, so smoothly and perfectly did they move in unison. She couldn’t feel the power radiating off them, or see the way the entire team was oriented by the guiding pulses their bodies sent out. I took an abstract interest in the concept of sports at that time, maybe because of Anthony’s enthusiasm, but I viewed them through my own sociological filter as a vestige of our primordial past.

Part of the reason that man was such a social animal had come from our need to hunt large game together; our ability to work as a group, silently communicating to achieve a goal, was an ancient skill. Of course, plans were made in advance, strategies were devised, huddles had. But once they were on the court, those girls shared a special collective mental space, and in that wordless place, Bunny and Naomi were queens. Every turn of their knee, every flick of their eyes, every twitch of their shoulders was part of the reality they were weaving together in which the team existed. Their power was great enough that it didn’t matter to Bunny and Naomi, that at bottom, Ann Marie was their enemy. And that had always been the function of this kind of space, in the hunting party, and in its natural extension: the war party. To insist on the primacy of our social connection. To create the bedrock for morality and society itself. We needed to be able to murder together, and that was exactly why we had to learn to be good to one another, no matter our disagreements or grievances.

The team was greater than the self, and so while Ann Marie prattled to anyone who would listen about how Bunny was a biter, and made jokes like “I thought rabbits were vegetarian!” (so funny I could scream), Bunny remained ultimately neutral toward her, and when they were playing, Ann Marie was a dutiful member of Bunny’s conquering army.

And conquer they did. They were Division 1, the best in Southern California, and they had already won enough games to secure a spot in the semifinals of the state championship, which was scheduled for November 7.

To review: Bunny’s date with Ryan Brassard was in July, Donna Morse’s murder was August 28, the first day of school was September 6, the semifinals were going to be November 7, the anniversary of Bunny’s mother’s death was October 25, and Bunny’s eighteenth birthday was October 28.

* * *

—

Bunny once told me about the day her mother died. This is what she said:

“I was in second grade, and I got pulled out of class and taken to the principal’s office. I thought I’d done something wrong, but no one would tell me what it was, no one would tell me until my dad got there. I remember he was wearing sunglasses and he didn’t take them off, even when he was inside the office, even as he signed me out he kept them on, so his eyes were just shiny black bulges, like a bug’s. And everyone looked so sad, but I still didn’t know, I still didn’t know why, until we got out to the car, and I could smell the new leather of his car, getting in that hot car, and he didn’t turn on the engine right away, and I kept thinking: Please turn it on, turn on the air, roll down the windows. But he turned to me, and he still had his sunglasses on, and he said, ‘Your mother’s been in an accident.’ And for ten minutes after that, I still thought she was alive, because he was making it sound like that. I assumed we were going to the hospital to go see her, and I kept asking how bad it was, and he said, ‘Bad,’ and I kept asking, but he just said, ‘Bad, Bunny.’

“But he didn’t drive us to the hospital. He drove us to McDonald’s, and he bought us milkshakes. We were sitting on a bench outside by the play area, which is a place we had spent a lot of time, and I wanted to go play but I knew I couldn’t, and I felt so creepy because I knew all of this was staged. He was taking me somewhere and making it be a certain way. He had planned that he would buy me a milkshake and tell me here, but I still didn’t know what he was going to tell me. As soon as he finally told me, I felt this strange hiss of release, because now they wouldn’t fight anymore. Now there would be quiet in our house.

“And I knew that wasn’t the reaction that I was supposed to have, and that I was being watched carefully, that I was supposed to have a reaction and it needed to be the right reaction, because he had set up this whole scenario, this whole space that was designed to hold my reaction, but I had no idea what it was supposed to be. They had been fighting so badly for so long that I worried he would think I was siding with her if I cried, but of course I was devastated at the loss of her, I mean, she was my mother.