“Tell Auntie Bunny,” she said, and kissed my ear, my cheek, my hair.

“Well, you know how it happened?” I asked.

“No, I mean, I know you were beat up, but when I asked you before you said you couldn’t remember it.”

“Oh, I can remember it,” I said.

“Who was it?” Bunny asked, her voice so cold and serious I worried she would go out and murder whoever I said.

“Ann Marie’s boyfriend, Tyler, and Jonah Anderson, and Riley Masterson, do you know him?”

She nodded. She knew them all.

“And then, well, I think Jason was there.”

“You think?”

“I don’t have a clear visual memory of his face, only his voice and his laugh, and he only came halfway through and by then I was really out of it. But they were debating whether or not to pee on me, and—”

“To pee on you?” Her voice was rippling with hate.

“They didn’t, though,” I said. “They decided not to.” I tried to rearrange my hands on my stomach in a way that was more comfortable for my IV, and I felt like a prim old woman.

“Who else?” she asked.

“Bunny, you can’t tell anyone,” I said. “You can’t go out and beat them up. You have to promise. I’m telling this only to you. This information exists only within the sacred oasis of our friendship. I didn’t even tell the cops.”

“Why on earth would you not tell the police?”

I sighed. “I probably will if they ever come back; I just hadn’t decided what to tell them about Jason. I can’t—I can’t guarantee he was there. I can’t promise that my brain, during the horror of it all, didn’t just insert him.”

“So tell them that—tell them you’re not sure, but you think you remember him.”

I don’t know why that wasn’t the answer I wanted. “I don’t like police,” I said. “I don’t like lawyers and courtrooms. I don’t want those boys to go to prison! Prison would be the worst thing in the world for them. But if they never get caught and it’s this horrible guilty secret they have for their whole lives that just, like, festers—I mean, I can just see that being better.”

“They deserve to be punished,” Bunny said.

“But prison isn’t punishment,” I said. “Look, the first weekend my mom was out of prison, you know what she did?”

“What?”

“She picked up me and Gabby and she took us to Target and she had us shove gift cards to Outback Steakhouse down my little sister’s panties and then took us out to lunch there and explained how she needed us to help her panhandle for twenty bucks so she could buy some heroin to hide inside the ad card of a magazine, then seal it up in mailing plastic, and return-to-sender to a friend of hers on the inside.”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s like this whole scam—they don’t search prison mail if it’s from a corporate business, right? Like one of those magazines that is sealed in plastic? So her friend had given her a magazine addressed to her in the prison—look, none of this matters, suffice it to say that we spent the first weekend back with our mother on, like, a criminal scavenger hunt.”

“I don’t understand how this connects,” Bunny said, nuzzling her head into the crook of my neck.

“Prison will not make them better people. Prison will make them worse people. No one should go to prison unless you just need them to never be with regular people again. Like, whoops, you’re a terrible person, never coming back here, buh-bye. For everyone else, all prison does is make things worse.”

“Okay,” Bunny said.

“Okay?”

“I just, I see what you mean,” she said.

“And maybe justice needs to be made manifest on earth, I can see the human impulse to try to make the world look like it should, where bad people are punished and good people succeed, but, like, sometimes it seems very weird and childish to me.”

“I don’t see how it’s childish.”

“I just mean, what you remember and what I remember—they will never be the same. Trying to re-create what happened and arrive at a definitive assignation of fault is so simplistic and idealistic that it seems like playing pretend. Like, sure, this person is ‘guilty.’ This person is ‘innocent.’ Isn’t it weird?”

“What about DNA evidence, video cam footage. I mean, maybe our ways of knowing are imperfect, but if you add together everything we do know, you can arrive at something pretty close. I mean really pretty close.”

“I get it, I do,” I said, “I just—I just have no feeling for it. I’m not necessarily arguing it can’t be done, I just personally, as a victim—it will do nothing for me and how I recover from this to see those boys charged and then a trial and all of that.”

“What do you think would help you?”

“Well.” I licked my lips. I really didn’t know. “I mean, first of all, I would love to never see any of them again so long as I live.”

“That’s why you should have them arrested!”

“But that’s the other thing, Bunny, who do you think everyone is going to hate? Them for attacking me, or me for jeopardizing their ‘bright futures’?”

“No one is going to hate you, Michael,” she said.

“Well,” I said. “I guess we’ll see.”

* * *

—

When Detectives Brown and Carmine returned the following day, they were very obviously real detectives. I was in the middle of eating an impossibly delicious salad. Really it was just iceberg lettuce and ranch dressing, but the cold, sweet way the leaves hissed open between my molars was so life-giving I felt I would never want to eat anything else ever again. Scottie had been released earlier that morning and I was a little sad. His daughter, a fat, jolly woman, had come to get him, and Scottie had introduced us and had his wheelchair pushed up close to my bed so that he could “get a look at” me.

“You are a brave young man,” he said to me. “You are considerate and kind and strong and brave and I just marvel that I’ve had a chance to meet you.”

I had never had anyone say words quite like that to me, and it was surprisingly painful. My eyes stung. I wondered if he would feel that way if he knew I was gay.

“I wish my grandson would grow up to be a young man like you. He’s only four now, but I hope someday he will be like you.” He reached up his gentle hand to pat my bed.