Bunny continued sweeping. The broom’s bristles were getting stained by the wine and it seemed like maybe we were just making a bigger mess.

“But I deserve to be punished,” Bunny said.

“Listen, I trust you. I trust you to be punished. I trust you to learn from this and move on and make it right, and I trust you to accept and live through whatever winds up happening. What I don’t trust is for the system to deal fairly with you, because the system—well, the system will just not deal fairly with you.”

“So you think I should lie?”

“I think you should follow the advice of the lawyer you are lucky your father retained for you.”

“And I should allow my dad to bribe Ann Marie’s parents?”

“Could you stop him?” I asked.

Bunny laughed. “That’s the real joke, all these years I thought I was somehow ‘keeping him in line,’ like I was the one running everything. Like I had any control over what he did or didn’t do.”

“Okay, if we get the big pieces in, then I’ll get the dustpan for the little pieces, and then where’s the mop? We should mop because the wine is seriously gonna stain this white marble.”

* * *

—

It was only as we were saying good night that I found out.

We were on her porch. It was late and cold and the town was hushed enough that you could hear the Pacific in the distance, roaring as it hit the shore. Crickets chirruped. “I’m just so sorry,” Bunny said, twisting up her hands inside the sleeves of her sweatshirt. “I know my heart was in the right place, but I wasn’t thinking. Obviously. I mean, I just wanted her to shut up, I wasn’t thinking about how my, like, attacking her would make it even bigger gossip.”

“Don’t apologize,” I said. I thought she was talking about the gossip of her biting Ryan Brassard’s ear. I thought she was talking about how now there would be two strikes against her, the bite and the attack, that she would be seen as a monster.

“Does your aunt know?”

“I have no idea,” I said honestly.

“Well, just let me know how it all goes at home. I know she kind of knows you’re gay, but I mean—I just assume if I didn’t know you were dating someone, then she doesn’t know you were dating someone.”

It was like the moment in a dream before something terrible happens and the perspective shatters and you start seeing everything from three different camera angles at once.

“Oh god, you didn’t know,” she said. “I thought for sure you knew. I knew you saw Naomi and the team, and when I texted you I already thought you knew and I said I was sorry and you said don’t be silly, so I thought you knew.”

“Well. Obviously, I don’t know.”

“The reason I attacked Ann Marie was because she was talking about you.”

All the darkness of the night was trying to get inside my mouth.

“I guess she saw you and some guy kissing in a car. And she recognized you, but she also recognized the guy. I guess he used to work with her dad at SpaceX and he’s like sixty, and she was all, ‘I went to that guy’s retirement party! He’s a fucking geezer, it’s so gross.’ And I just—I just wanted to shut her mouth. I just wanted to make words stop coming out of her mouth. She was calling him a pedophile and, like, how could you be into it, and I—”

I was nodding, rapidly, as though that could help the shame disperse more quickly through my bloodstream. I knew instantly that Ann Marie had been telling the truth—that she really did know Anthony. No part of me considered for even a moment that she was wrong, that she had been mistaken when she recognized him. It was a small world, a small town, a small piece of a big city. Of course he had lied to me. Of course he was older than his profile, just as I was younger than my profile. He had fucking gray hair for lord’s sake! Of course that’s why he was always available in the daytime. He didn’t have a job because he was fucking retired. He was looking for something secret on the side because he was in the closet, probably married forty years. He probably had kids. He probably had kids older than me. That was the shame—that I had known and refused to know, and now someone had turned on the lights to reveal that I had been humping a doll, not something real, but something false, constructed by my own wishful thinking.

“I have to go,” I said. “It’s late.”

“Michael,” Bunny said.

“Are you going to be okay?” I asked. “Without your dad here?”

“He’ll probably come back before morning,” she said. “I mean, I assume he’s not gonna let me go to the police by myself.”

“Right,” I said. And I walked to the sidewalk and turned up my own front steps, so upset and surprised that I was both blind and numb, barely able to work my key in the lock, horrified at the idea of talking to anyone, of anyone even seeing my face. I could just imagine it, Ann Marie laughing and saying, “What a fucking pedo!”

Probably I would have had a torturous night under any conditions, but to have to exist in my current mental state, which was essentially a strobe of shameful images, imagining Ann Marie laughing, imagining other kids at school making grossed-out faces as they heard the story, imagining Bunny slamming Ann Marie’s head into the lockers over and over again, hearing Naomi’s voice, like celery wrapped in meat, like, just crunching, imagining Anthony kissing his children on the head, imagining Anthony attending his children’s high school graduations, imagining Anthony having sex with his wife, imagining Anthony teaching his kids to drive, buying them cars, when I would never learn to drive, and I would never be able to afford a car, and I would become a bus person, and I would not be saved; to imagine all of this in a fast-forward phantasmagoria while also sitting in the same room as my farting, burping cousin Jason, who was playing Call of Duty on his computer late, late into the night, wearing headphones, so all I could hear was his gross voice talking to his buddies through his headset and the plastic creaking of the controls as he hammered them, pretending to shoot imaginary people, was creating such a high-pitched distress inside my body that it seemed impossible that I could continue to lie there unmoving, scrolling through my phone.

I was obsessively monitoring the Instagram and Facebook accounts of everyone we knew. I wanted to know what was happening to Ann Marie, but I also wanted to know if anyone was talking about Anthony and me. If the gossip spread far and fast enough, it would enter my household, and I was genuinely uncertain if I would still be allowed to keep living there once Aunt Deedee knew that my sexuality was no longer merely theoretical (and therefore clean, sympathetic even), but now actual (and therefore dirty, saturated with human fluid, dangerous).