Bunny, who had never cultivated her social standing or even understood that she had any, that the friendlessness she had occasionally experienced before was far from rock bottom, was bewildered by this change of affairs. I, of course, did not report to her with blistering accuracy the things being said about her at school, but she found out soon enough. It was a small town. Kids crossed the street in groups so as not to pass her on the sidewalk. If she approached a group of girls at the Starbucks they froze, pretended not to see or hear her. “Hey, guys!” she would say. “Guys!” And they would exchange a look and then walk away from her.

She cried about it. A lot. I held her while she cried about it. I bore the brunt of those misplaced tears, and I found myself often bored, exhausted by the expanse of her anguish, burned by the heat of her skin, her cheeks red as if slapped, her lashes webby black with salted tears. If anything, it seemed that Bunny was more upset by losing all of her friends and her life and her future career as an Olympic volleyball player than she was over the fact that Ann Marie was in a coma and the swelling in her brain was not going down, not going down, day after day, not going down. But perhaps that is only because the shunning by her peers felt more immediate, less abstract. Perhaps it was because at the end of the day, she was a teenage girl to whom being liked means everything, or almost everything.

Legally, Bunny was still waiting, and the district attorney was waiting, to see if Ann Marie would be waking up. We were all waiting for Ann Marie to wake up. (Or since it was a medically induced coma, I guess we were really waiting for the swelling in her brain to go down enough that they could bring her out of the coma, but for some reason no one referred to it this way, and we all spoke of Ann Marie magically waking up as if on her own, like Sleeping Beauty with no prince.) Ms. Harriet had called Ray Lampert herself and said as much. “I don’t believe in an eye for an eye, and I am not in any way interested in making life harder for Bunny than it needs to be, however if there are medical bills beyond my ability to cope with, then of course I will have to address that. This is life. Things happen. I’m not trying to paint Bunny as some kind of villain. Although I do think maybe counseling would be a good idea. I’m just saying, let’s be realistic. Your kid hurt my kid. My kid may never be the same. So I can’t promise what I will do. I will have to do what seems to me the most correct thing to do in the moment, and if you would help us buy a house maybe we can work on that when all this is over.”

And while they waited, Ray got tired of Bunny sulking around his house and eating everything in sight, and so he put her to work in his office. At first this disturbed his assistant, Cassie, the blond woman who had offered me that Two Palms Realty blanket on the Fourth of July all those years ago. She was devoted, pathologically, to Ray Lampert, and she took any attempts to help her as an insult to her ability. She assigned Bunny to put doorknob flyers on every house in North Shore, made her hand-collate photocopies, told her to relabel all the already labeled files so that the font of the labels would all match. “We want a united look,” she said. As though customers were looking through the files. As though the united look would be observed by anyone other than Cassie herself. Eventually she relegated some of the more annoying computer work, keeping all the postings active on the various websites, uploading endless virtual tours, but even this mindless busywork, Cassie seemed to believe, was almost sacred in its importance.

Bunny told me about all of this when we would get together, usually every three or four days, in the weeks after her assault on Ann Marie. We didn’t see each other more often than that, and I’m not sure why. My aunt, while expressing a certain apprehension about my friendship with Bunny “all things considered,” had not vetoed it. If I had wanted to, I could probably have spent every evening hanging out with Bunny and Ray Lampert. I could see the lights of the TV flickering inside their house. Considering that Aunt Deedee had emptied out what was literally a walk-in closet and put a twin-size bed in there and called it “Michael’s room,” it wasn’t like hanging out in my own house was great. But I didn’t want to go over there too much. In fact, every time I saw Bunny, I felt more and more distant from her.

The first moment I noticed it, I didn’t even know what it was. The feeling was caused by an offhand remark that Ray had made. Her father had mentioned to her that perhaps she should take up boxing, since it was somewhat unusual for a woman to have the upper body strength necessary for a knockout. I was not aware in the moment that this remark bothered me, and I did not experience distaste per se, but the comment did get lodged in my head and I would think of it randomly even weeks later. Imagine this being Ray Lampert’s takeaway. That his daughter was specially gifted, but this time, as a boxer.

I was similarly perturbed by the fact that Ray Lampert had arranged for the assistant coach, Eric, to work with Bunny three or four times a week to “keep her sharp, just in case.” He told me this as we were all eating pho together on Main Street on a Saturday afternoon. “Just in case?” I asked.

“In case something changes,” Ray Lampert said, as though this were the most reasonable thing in the world. As though the school would magically reverse its decision and reinstate Bunny just in time for her to play in the championship game. Bunny slurped her pho, nodding, like it all made perfect sense. She was on lunch break from her new job at her dad’s office. They were open even on Saturdays. She was wearing professional clothes that Ray had bought for her in a spree at Target, ruffly, cheap, polyester chiffon things that fit Bunny absurdly. On Bunny, a knee-length skirt was practically mid-thigh. “Things could change!” Ray Lampert said, and laughed. “Life is a fickle bitch.”

In fact, things were changing. Ms. Harriet was changing. She called Ray Lampert at ten o’clock one night when Bunny and I were watching a movie in their living room. Ray picked up the phone, and we knew by the way he greeted her that it was Ms. Harriet. Through wrenching sobs, she told Ray that her baby was never gonna wake up again, that he stole her baby, that everything he touched turned to shit, that there was a curse on him and black evil that poured off him and she had seen it in Bunny as a baby.

When Ray finally got her off the phone (and one did have to commend him, he kept his head admirably and was responding with much kinder, floofier BS than I could have summoned: “Oh, Harriet, I hear you are so upset. I hear your grief”), he told us verbatim what she had been saying in a cruel impersonation of her voice. He and Bunny laughed, and I knew it was nervous laughter, but it disconcerted me anyway. “Ann Marie’s not going to die,” Ray Lampert said, as though Ms. Harriet were being absurd. He had spoken to his friend who was a doctor, who said a medically induced coma could be necessary for days, even weeks. There was no reason to believe Ann Marie would die based simply on the length of the coma. They understood how Ms. Harriet could be afraid of that, of course they could. But they were more distant from the problem. They could be more objective. Ray had done some research online. And the odds were good.

There was no humanity in them. Or perhaps there was too much humanity in them.