“What?” I said.

“I don’t want you involved in things like that,” Aunt Deedee was saying.

“Things like what?” I asked.

Aunt Deedee looked sad, but also frustrated because she wasn’t allowing herself to speak plainly. Finally she said, “I hope you’ve been very careful.”

She was talking about condoms. She was talking about AIDS.

“I’ve been careful,” I said. And I hated her so completely that it seemed to me that I would never love her again.

“Oh good, Michael.” She squeezed my hands. “So sleep on the couch for tonight. Tomorrow, we’ll figure out a more permanent place for you.”

Tomorrow, I imagined her saying, we’ll figure out a more permanent place for your disgusting, diseased, morally frightening body, which is too much for my son to handle, my son, who is eighteen years old and who may soon enlist in the army because he is willing and able to kill people, but I will refuse you the comfort of your normal bed, on this, one of the worst nights of your life, in order to appease his bigotry and coddle his feelings of superiority to you.

What is wrong with you? I thought in the dark, after she had gone, as I listened to the fan in the refrigerator cycle on and off, over and over. Why can’t you accept that this is what love is like?

For the following weeks, Bunny was in a kind of limbo. She had been suspended from school, initially for thirty days, which was far in excess of the normal suspension for fighting on campus, Ray Lampert liked to point out. He’d thrown a fit in the principal’s office, Bunny told me. “I thought he was gonna pop! His face was bright red, and he said, ‘You’re telling me this is how you would handle two boys getting in a fistfight in a locker room?’ And Principal Cardenas was like, ‘This was not a fistfight, this was an unprovoked assault.’ And he said: ‘Hate speech against a fellow student doesn’t count as aggravation?’ It was so, so embarrassing.” (I had already had a deeply uncomfortable sit-down with Principal Cardenas where I had declined an offer of school counseling for the effects of said hate speech.)

As for the beating itself, Bunny was processing what had happened about as well as a congressman responds to a school shooting. She kept returning to two ideas, one of which was: “I would never do that.” In other words, the awake, normal Bunny would never choose for what happened to have happened. She also phrased this as: “If I had known it would hurt her so much—I just didn’t think—” She felt terrible that Ann Marie was in a coma, so terrible that she had panic attacks and at one point even threw up in a potted plant at the mall, but she also never took true responsibility for her role in Ann Marie’s injuries. She had not meant to do that, and therefore she was innocent of the consequences.

The other idea she kept returning to was that there was “something wrong” with her. She found the fact that she had only fragmented memories of the fight to be deeply embarrassing, and together with the fact that she had bitten Ryan Brassard’s ear, each contributed to a narrative she was developing about herself, that she was “crazy” or “out of control.” She associated these problems with her height, with some way she was a “monster” or a “freak.”

In later years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about those words, “monster” and “freak.” They are very different words. “Monster” is from the Old French monstre, from the original Latin monstrum, meaning a portent, or a warning. A monster was something malformed, afflicted by God’s wrath, and was a warning to the community to examine their moral standards. “Freak,” on the other hand, was a much jauntier word of much less certain origin, thought to have derived from Middle English friken, “to move nimbly or briskly,” from Old English frician, “to dance.” It is a wild move you unexpectedly bust out, a sudden change in tempo, and so a “freak of nature” is more a jaunty deviation from the norm than a sign that God is mad. In other words, I had always looked at Bunny as a freak, a beautiful, exciting, pulsating freak. But now Bunny worried she was a monster. Because on some level she had always seen herself that way.

She was deeply, morbidly ashamed. But her shame never managed to lead her out of herself and toward empathy for others, but instead led her into self-involved circles. Why had she been unjustly made this way? Why had this fate befallen her? She had no agency, it seemed. The question was not: Why had she done this? The question was: Why had God done this to her? Not that she believed in God either.

Perhaps I am being unfair. I think it astonished her that her friendship with Naomi had popped like a soap bubble. Where had it gone? It had seemed so tangible. Those girls had spent hours and hours together, took Spanish together, ate lunch together, went to practice together. And then it was all gone, vanished as if it had never been. Naomi had been straightforward about it too. The very first time Bunny texted her after the fight, Naomi had texted back within minutes: I’m sorry, I can’t be friends anymore. Donezo.

At school, almost especially because she wasn’t there to make them feel awkward, kids spoke about Bunny freely, their disgust bright in the daylight. They had always known there was something wrong with her. She was sick. They hoped she got help, but they also hoped she never came back to school again. And wasn’t it weird she didn’t have any real friends? Besides being a star athlete? Not that that could be helped when you were built like that. Poor Ryan Brassard, everyone agreed. In retrospect, he had been lucky to get only a bite on the ear.

I heard all kinds of things. I heard one girl volunteer that she knew for a fact that Bunny didn’t wrap up her used tampons in toilet paper but put them in the trash at school all bloody and exposed. I heard girls agree together that she had a weird way of scratching her boobs after she took off her sports bra. One girl posted a picture of the volleyball team on Facebook that went viral, in which, because of the perspective of the photo, Bunny, who was closest to the camera, seemed nearly twice the size of her classmates. Overnight, Bunny had gone from being the princess of North Shore—happy, popular, a varsity athlete, and daughter of one of the most influential men in town—to being a disgusting pig everyone agreed they had never liked.

I seethed. I wanted to scream, “Yeah, well, I remember when you went to her fifteenth birthday party and you certainly fucking liked the full-on carnival her dad put on in the backyard, and if I recall you threw up cotton candy right into their pool, so take your corny, basic, lip-kit idiocy right back to the YouTube channel you came from.” But I did not say things like that. When you are seventeen, no one demands moral continuity of social bonds. Everyone was trying on new personalities all the time, weren’t they? Innocent enough, wasn’t it? And this was just another one, a phase that they would remember when they were older: Remember when we were all united during senior year by hating Bunny Lampert?

And why shouldn’t they? Their friend Ann Marie was on a ventilator, in a coma, and her gel manicure was starting to grow out in an upsetting way. (Why was it so upsetting that Ann Marie’s fingernails kept growing? But it was!) Bunny was practically a murderer because Ann Marie could seriously die, and if she didn’t, then that was just luck. Bunny might as well be a murderer. In essence, her peers felt, she already was.