In thinking about all of this, I realized that no matter what happened, even if all charges were dropped, even in a best-case scenario, there was no way that Bunny would be allowed back on the team. Her volleyball career was effectively over. It appeared that now she would be six foot three for no particular reason.

I wondered how things had gone at the police station, or if perhaps she was still there. I wondered whether she was under arrest. Or getting her hand X-rayed at Urgent Care. Or sitting at home watching RuPaul and understanding piece by piece that her life was ruined. Maybe that was a dramatic way of putting it. She was still a young white woman after all. There was still that marble kitchen, though we had not been able to get up the wine stains, blurry rust-colored splashes that we had coated in baking soda because the internet told us to. Her father would undoubtedly be able to afford to send her to college. Though her grades were bad. That had never seemed to matter because of the volleyball, but now it didn’t seem good. But she could go to community college.

Unless she was in jail. Though she probably wouldn’t go to jail. She had no priors. Her father was rich and powerful. So much depended, I realized, on Ann Marie.

I wondered how her surgery had gone.

* * *

—

When I got out of school, I had a text from Anthony. It said, I wonder why you would say something so hurtful to me. No, I do not have grandchildren. Why would you ask that?

I read the message over and over as I walked, and I didn’t know what I wanted to say back. I wasn’t sure why I was so angry at Anthony. It wasn’t really that I was angry with him for lying. The issue was not trust. I didn’t trust anyone, and the idea of expecting to trust someone and then being miffed to discover I could not seemed a luxury so laughable I could have spit on the floor like Naomi. No, it was not that Anthony had betrayed my trust. It was simply that he was older than I thought he was and that made him seem pathetic to me, and it made me feel pathetic for loving him, and I did love him.

So gross, Ann Marie’s voice said helpfully in my mind. What a pedo. He could be your granddad.

How can you touch his wrinkly old skin?

What does he even smell like? Like old sweaters? Like talcum powder?

I realized that what was unworthy in Anthony, what was so deeply uncool about being old, was that he was closer to death. And we disdained death, didn’t we? The glossy young. We looked at death and wrinkled our noses, rolled our eyes: yuck. We would have shiny hard penises forever. We would cuddle only the most velvety vulvas. Our cells would always have perfect plump walls. Our mitochondria would gush ATP like limitless fountains. We would stay young by fucking young, and we would never fuck the old, because that was how death got in—through your skin. Through your heart.

I got to Bunny’s house and rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. I opened her side gate and went around the back and peered in the windows, but I couldn’t see anyone. I had texted her several times throughout the day with no response. It didn’t seem like a good sign. I turned and looked at her pool, and I had the instinct to swim, but it was too cold. I looked up the bus routes instead. It would take two hours to get to Cedars-Sinai, where Ann Marie was.

I sat on Bunny’s patio furniture, examining my motivations. It wasn’t exactly that I wanted to spy on Ann Marie so that I could report to Bunny on her medical condition, though, of course, I was desperate for any new information so that I could adjust my own internal Vegas odds on how things would play out legally for Bunny. Goodness knows I did not expect to speak to Ann Marie herself, since she was supposed to be in a coma. If anything, the fact that she was in a coma made visiting her more appealing. I was not sure I could have handled an awake Ann Marie, not least because she wouldn’t be at all glad to see me. But I did not want to go home and run the risk of having some kind of conversation with Jason or Aunt Deedee. I would delay opening that envelope for as long as I could.

I suppose what I wanted most was to see Ann Marie’s mother, Ms. Harriet, and bring flowers, and try my best to indicate that whatever Ann Marie had said about me, she hadn’t deserved this.

I boarded the 625 bus on Main Street, holding the outrageously overpriced flowers I had bought from the local florist. As gouged as I felt by the price, the experience of buying the flowers had been nice. The woman who ran the shop had a black cat and he sat regally, as though it were a throne, on a child’s armchair arranged artfully in the window of the shop, surrounded by buckets and buckets of flowers. She had picked out yellow and pink tulips and tied them up with scraggly brown string that looked like a thousand women’s Pinterest wet dreams.

The bouquet looked strange to me, in my own hands, as I boarded the bus. How weird it was—to cut off the sexual organs of plants and give them to each other. I hoped Ms. Harriet would not see the stamens tucked inside the tulips as tiny penises the way I did. I hoped they would look like regular flowers to her, and I would look like a regular boy.

* * *

—

I had not anticipated how restrictive the visitation policy would be, and I was surprised, when I finally found Ann Marie’s floor in the Saperstein Critical Care Tower, to speak to the nurse at the front desk and be told that I could most definitely not enter. “I brought flowers,” I said. “Maybe I could just leave them?”

“Sure you can,” the nurse said.

I frowned. I did not have a card, or even a piece of paper on which to write my name or explain whom they were from. I had ridden two hours on three different buses to get here. The nurse was jarring to me in her calm casualness. After all, she was at work. This was a regular day for her, and here was a kid hemming and hawing with flowers, and she didn’t have time to deal with him, did she?

Then Ms. Harriet, Ann Marie’s mother, appeared and saved me.

“My lord, it’s Michael Hesketh,” she proclaimed in that low voice of hers. “Come here and hug me, son,” she said. “Oh, you brought flowers. Bless your heart. Don’t tell me you think this was your fault.”

I walked toward her in the hall and she folded me up into a fierce hug. Her arms felt like iron bars through her sweater. “I was going to the cafeteria, care to join me?”

I walked with her to the elevators, still carrying the flowers she had not taken from me, grateful to be in the sway of her powerful and practical energy. Ms. Harriet had the peculiar ability of collapsing things flat. Of turning shades of gray back into black and white. As soon as the elevator doors closed on us, she said, “I want you to know, before we continue any further, that I’m deeply ashamed that Ann Marie was picking on you like that. Not that it excuses Bunny Lampert, obviously, but I want you to know, I did not raise my daughter to be a homophobe or a gossip. I don’t hold with that.”

I blushed and stared down at the floor of the elevator. “Oh, gosh, Ms. Harriet, you don’t have to—”