My impulse, since I was her friend, was to act as if this were something that had happened to her, instead of something she had done. “Your poor hand!” I cried, as though she had not hurt her hand bashing a girl’s head in.

“I can move all the fingers,” she said. We both looked up as Ray answered a call on his cell phone and went into the kitchen to pace and talk.

“How is Ann Marie?” I asked, because I didn’t want to ask why Bunny hadn’t been arrested. Or perhaps she had been and had already been let out on bail. I didn’t know how those things worked. We had not been able to afford bail for my own mother. In movies it seemed like the kind of thing you could do in a day, but movies were terribly inaccurate regarding the banalities of the court system.

“She’s okay. My dad went to the hospital and kind of smoothed things over.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, basically he is going to pay for her nose job, because, you know, insurance might not cover the very best plastic surgeon, so he promised to hook them up and cover the difference and all her medical bills and all that.”

Bunny looked a little bit green.

“Well, that’s good,” I said.

She nodded, not looking at me, and I realized she was about to start crying. “He told them he’d get them a house. He told them he’d make sure they got a house for below market. They’ve been trying to buy for like two years. And, basically, like, he bribed them. He fucking bribed them not to press charges. And I feel so sick, I keep thinking I’m asleep. Like, I can’t keep track of what’s real.”

“So you didn’t get arrested or anything?”

“No, well, the DA could still press charges. So I still have to go to the police station tomorrow morning. But that was basically the whole afternoon. Dad’s lawyer was over here prepping me.”

“Prepping you in what sense?”

“How to lie. Essentially. What to say.”

“What are you supposed to say?”

“That I went to hit her and then I fell and she fell with me and bonked her head and I crashed on top of her and she hit her head again on the bench on the way down.”

“And that’s not what happened?”

“Well, I mean, I don’t know.” She looked at me blankly.

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I don’t remember most of it.” She was playing with the pendant of her necklace, a tiny silver hippo no bigger than her pinky nail, scraping it back and forth across the chain on her neck. “I remember being so mad at her and walking over to her, and then it was like waking up, I just sort of came to on top of her.”

“What happened anyway?” I asked. “I mean, what triggered it?”

The tiny hippo went scrape, scrape, scrape on the chain at her throat. Bunny’s eyes were unfocused and I didn’t know if she was thinking about how to answer or if she was completely zoned out. “Fucking hell,” we heard Ray Lampert yell in the kitchen and then a horrible clatter, like pots and pans falling from high up, and then glass shattering. We ran in to him, and then ran out of the kitchen just as quickly. He was taking plates out of the cupboard one by one and sending them sailing across the room to shatter on the marble floor. He swept the metal fruit basket filled with junk to the floor. He threw a full bottle of wine. We waited, crouched and panting outside the door of the kitchen. Just as suddenly as he began, he seemed to stop. “Fucking hell,” he said again, but this time slower and sad.

“What is it, Daddy?” Bunny asked from the doorway in her best good-girl voice, still too afraid to enter the kitchen.

“Ann Marie has a bleed in her brain.”

* * *

—

The CT scan Ann Marie had in the emergency room had shown a concussion but no hematoma, but then, just as they were getting ready to discharge her, she’d started slurring her words. Gotten real sleepy.

The result of the second CT scan showed a very small subdural hematoma in her occipital lobe. The result of the third CT scan a few hours later showed a slightly larger subdural hematoma in her occipital lobe. The bleed was growing and it was putting pressure on her brain. They were rushing her to surgery to drill a hole through her skull to try to relieve the pressure. And then she would be put in a medically induced coma.

Battery on school property was Section 243.2 in the California penal code. Even if Ann Marie’s parents didn’t want the DA to press charges, and who knew if Ray’s magical house promise would still stand in the face of a brain bleed, the state still could. It would all depend on the mind-set of the prosecutor. Prosecutors, Ray’s lawyer had explained, had almost unfettered discretion in which cases they prosecuted.

Their decision would depend on the seriousness of Ann Marie’s injuries, which were growing more serious by the second. And Bunny would be tried as an adult because the crime had been committed on her literal eighteenth birthday.

“I can’t fucking be here,” Ray Lampert said, looking around at the kitchen filled with broken glass. “I’m gonna go to Charity’s. I’ll call you as I hear stuff.” He shuffled through the glass in his slippers, trying not to pick up his feet or get cut. “Jesus Christ,” he said, before walking out the front door, still in his bedroom slippers, a glass of scotch in his hand.

“Who is Charity?” I asked.

“I don’t really know,” Bunny said. “I assume he’s dating her.”

Without Ray in the house, we were able to function more smoothly. We muted the news and began to sweep the broken debris in the kitchen into piles as we talked.

“I just feel so, so sick,” Bunny said. “What do I do? Do I go in there tomorrow and lie? How on earth can that be the right thing to do?”

“But if you tell the truth, what will happen?”

“I’ll probably go to jail. I don’t know. I don’t have any priors.”

All I could think about was my mother. I pulled out the trash bin from its built-in cubby and began to ferry the bigger pieces of broken glass and porcelain into it. Everything was dripping with wine. “Bunny,” I said, “judges don’t like violent women. I don’t know how to say this. My mom cut my dad superficially with a fruit knife and she got three years. If a man had done it, if it was just a regular domestic violence dispute and the woman who got stabbed, he probably wouldn’t have even seen the inside of a jail cell.”

“You think?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe that’s an exaggeration. But that’s what it seems like. I mean, look at Luke and Donna Morse. How was he not in jail for beating her all those times? My mom said it’s different when it’s the woman who’s violent. It strikes people as abnormal. Like, it’s natural for a guy to just ‘lose his temper,’ but if a woman does the same thing, then it’s a sign of something deeper wrong, like psychologically or almost metaphysically.”