“I know that’s stupid now. Obviously, he was expecting me to cry. I was seven, well, almost eight, but I was a kid. That’s why he had bought me the milkshake. That’s why he had tried to take me someplace happy. But at the time, I thought it was some sort of secret deal he was offering: If you accept her absence, then everything will be milkshakes between you and me. If you let go of her, then I will love you, and I will be fun dad, and everything will be okay. And honestly, it seemed like a great deal. A scary deal, but one I could not afford to pass up. So I snuggled into his arms and I asked him if Mommy was in heaven, and he said yes.

“And the older I got, the grosser my reaction seemed to me. My mother had died, and I thought it was part of the war between my mother and father? And I had better side with the victor if I still wanted to get milkshakes. Because. You know. Look what had happened to her.

“I had always thought that, on some level. That he had caused her to die. Not literally, like he had arranged the accident. But mystically. Psychically. Like the force of his personality had bucked her off like a thrown rider, to say: Life is for Ray Lampert. You must go elsewhere.

“And every year, all day long, when it’s the day, when it’s her day, I feel like I’m trapped in that hot car, begging him to turn on the engine and start the air. So, yeah, that’s why I don’t really like Halloween or my birthday.”

Indeed, Bunny hated Halloween. She hated everything about it. She hated the day itself, she hated movies about witches, she hated pumpkin carving, she hated costumes of any kind, she hated haunted houses, she hated fake teeth, she hated fog machines, she hated the song “Thriller.” She even hated the color orange. Because that year, her mother not yet buried, Ray Lampert took her trick-or-treating, and kept asking, “Are you having fun?”

And Bunny had said yes. She’d said, “Yes, Daddy!” Because that was what she thought she was supposed to say.

Sometimes I wonder: Did Bunny really say all of that to me? I have presented it here in quotations. But the memory is years distant now. I feel I can recall it so clearly. But was she really that insightful? Sometimes I wish she wasn’t. Sometimes I wish she was just a big dumb cow that all this happened to.

On October 28 I knew it was Bunny’s birthday and so I had gone to Starbucks early and gotten Bunny’s order, which was a caramel macchiato and a pumpkin scone. (Bunny could not get fat no matter what she ate, and honestly, it was disgusting to watch.) I brought it to her house and rang the doorbell and she popped out, like she always did, and she was happy I had brought her a treat. We walked together, then parted ways at school: she had Spanish; I had AP English. “Don’t worry,” I told her, “soon it will be over,” and she nodded. The span of time between the anniversary of her mother’s death and Halloween was absolute torture each year, and she always felt like she’d escaped something if she made it to the first day of November.

I saw her in the hallway before lunch, but she said she was going to the library because she had to finish her homework for sixth period, and I didn’t press it.

About three p.m., right as I was leaving AP French and was going to head home and get changed for my shift at Rite Aid, I saw an ambulance pull up in front of the school. I had time, I wasn’t in a rush, and so I waited to see who the ambulance was there for. The paramedics took their gurney and scurried toward the gym. I thought one of the girls had probably passed out or something. That happened last spring when there was a heat wave, a girl had passed out during band practice because she stood with her knees locked for too long. When the paramedics came back, they were trotting and the girl lying there had the oxygen mask on, but her face was unmistakably bloody and already swelling in a way that looked fake. Her nose was under her left eye like a cubist painting. She was not awake or moving. It was Ann Marie.

Half the volleyball team was trotting after her down the hall, and Coach Creely was working her way past them, yelling at them to go back to the locker room and finish getting showered and to go the hell home, except then Principal Cardenas, who wore a lot of pencil skirts and pendant necklaces, came out of the office and into the hall and said that no, all the girls needed to stay because they were going to be interviewed by the police, and she ushered them into the reception area of the main office, a fishbowl-style room paneled in glass. There weren’t enough chairs in there to hold them all, and the volleyball girls were all unusually tall and big anyway, so they looked positively crammed in there, a herd of giraffes. I kept waiting, thinking Bunny would come, or that she was already in the fishbowl and I would see her, but I didn’t.

Then Naomi came, walking up the hallway all by herself.

“What happened?” I asked her. She shook her head, like she couldn’t talk, wouldn’t. Like if she opened her mouth a frog would push out.

“That was Ann Marie, right? What happened, I mean—did she fall? Like, off something? Or?”

“Bunny hit her.”

“No.”

Naomi had reached where I stood in the hall and she closed her eyes and bowed her head and let out a big sigh. “Jesus, that was crazy, Michael. That was some of the craziest shit I’ve ever seen.”

“What happened?”

“We were changing, and Ann Marie was, you know, just talking talking talking, and I guess Bunny had enough because she—still in her bra and panties, hadn’t even finished changing—just goes over there, and grabs her, starts smashing her head into her locker. Boom, boom, boom. Sounded like celery wrapped in meat, like, just crunching.” Naomi’s face was screwed up tight at the memory of this sound. She shook her head again.

“Nobody could get her off, I mean, nobody tried, it all happened fast, and then she had her on the ground, and we were all yelling, stop, stop, you know? And it looked like she wasn’t going to, and she was just going to kill her? But then she suddenly leapt off, like, wham, she was off her, like Ann Marie’s body was electrified and she got shocked. And she starts going, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, oh god, what happened?’ Like she didn’t even know. So.” Naomi shrugged.

“Where is Bunny now?”

“She’s still in there with Coach Eric. I mean, I think they’re gonna let her shower before they arrest her or whatever.”

“But what was it about?” I asked. “What was Ann Marie saying that made Bunny lose it?”

“Honestly, I wasn’t paying attention. I pretty much just tune that girl out, and I was thinking about this calc test I took earlier.” Naomi shrugged and then did an uncharacteristic thing, which was spit on the floor. “I hate this place,” she said to me very seriously and calmly.

I did not ask Naomi to clarify, even though her comment bewildered me. What did her hatred of high school have to do with this sudden display of violence and what could only be a very bad outcome for our mutual friend? I did not understand, did not have the tools, the lenses and filters for understanding how all of this seemed to Naomi. Our collective whiteness. Our glistening safety. Our innocence displayed, as though it were a virtue instead of a collective cosseting. A sniveling softness. Children, wandering around in adult bodies, swiping their parents’ credit cards to buy sugary drinks at Starbucks. The kind of place Ann Marie could be queen of. The kind of place Bunny could be fool enough to lose.