“He said I’m really tight, which is a compliment, right?”

“Yeah, but if it’s causing you active pain, then not so much.”

She took off her sunglasses and sat up on her lounger then, and she looked more sad than I had ever seen her, even after Ryan Brassard told everyone she had bitten his ear. “But it’s supposed to hurt! That’s like the first thing anyone tells a girl about sex is that it’s gonna hurt and she’s gonna bleed, but no one ever tells you when it will stop being like that. I don’t even care,” she said, “I would keep doing it except—”

She broke off and there was a wet sound in her voice like tears were coming, but then none came. She put her sunglasses back on and sat perfectly still, like she was killing someone far away with her mind.

“What is it?”

“He has a girlfriend,” she said with a tremendous exhale. Sometimes I marveled at the sheer size of her lungs. They must be the size of grocery bags in her chest. “Which I knew! And I thought I didn’t care, but obviously I do.”

“Well,” I said, searching for a bright side. After all, my boyfriend had a fucking wife.

“And I told myself I was fine with it, but he teases me about it. He’ll be on the phone with her and start fingering me and keep talking to her, and when I pull away or get mad, he’s like, ‘Don’t get all butt hurt.’ Or he will make fun of me for being jealous. He says I’m irrational, he calls me his irrational little bull.”

I hesitated, because calling Bunny an irrational little bull was both apt and kind of cute, but these were all still giant red flags, just waving in the lusty breeze. “I don’t like this, Bunny. It’s one thing to have a girlfriend but to call her in front of you and then try to finger you—that’s power-tripping.”

“I think he thinks he’s just being funny,” she said. “He says if he didn’t know better he’d fall in love with me.”

“What is that supposed to even mean?”

“I have no idea,” Bunny said. “But I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be a compliment.”

“That’s the shadiest compliment I’ve ever heard.”

“I don’t know,” she said, and shrugged. It struck me as perverse, a grown man treating such a majestic creature as Bunny Lampert this way. With her large hands and soft little titties, she was a Wagnerian fantasy of a milkmaid, a baby Valkyrie. Was Eric insane? Did he stomp on flowers and piss on kittens?

“Fuck that boy,” I said.

She smiled. “Indeed, I already have.”

“Walk on him in your heels, grind his face into the mud, honey. That boy is trash.”

“You are sweet to me,” she said, and picked up my hand, kissed my wrist. “But I don’t think I’m the kind of girl who is going to get Prince Charming.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just nothing.”

“It’s not nothing,” I said.

“Well, Michael, I’m a fucking murderer.”

“No, you’re not,” I said, before I could think about it.

“But I am,” she said, with such sureness I was terrified.

* * *

—

Because I was living with Ray and Bunny, I had front-row seats for everything that came next. We did not attend Ann Marie’s funeral; Ray thought it would be offensive, and his lawyer advised against it. I was there when his lawyer, a man named Swanson, whose lips were too red and who wore truly unattractive glasses, little beady grandma wire-frame dealies that made him look ten years older than he was, swept into the house at ten o’clock at night, also drunk, demanding that Ray pour him a scotch and then getting angry at the quality of the scotch (“Swanson, I don’t drink scotch! Forgive me, this was a gift from a client, blame him, not me!”), and told us that Ms. Harriet had called the DA and was demanding murder charges.

“There’s no way,” Ray said. “It’s involuntary manslaughter at the most, which you yourself said was a wobbler. Misdemeanor manslaughter. That’s the most they’ll do.”

“Ray, I’m telling you that the DA was making noise about going for second degree murder.” I was beginning to understand the dynamic between Ray and Swanson. They were like frat boys, even though neither of them had probably ever been in a fraternity. Maybe Swanson had, but there was deep acne scarring on his cheeks and he was a pedant through and through, so I doubted it. The man had no style, no swagger, he’d been pretending to be forty his whole life and now he had finally grown into it. But together they were making up for the youths they’d never had, or something along those lines.

“How? How would that ever fucking fly?”

“He’s saying she has a violent past. Some incident where she bit a kid.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Ray turned to us, the silent peanut gallery curled up under a fake-fur throw on the couch. “You never bit anybody, did you?”

“Uhh…” Bunny said. “Well, it was like—”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Ray said.

“I’m not a criminal defense attorney,” Swanson said. “Ray! I can’t take this to trial, you know I’m not a trial lawyer. We’ve gotta get you somebody else.”

“It has to be you,” Ray said. “I want you. You’re the only one I trust.”

“I know a great guy,” Swanson said, sucking down the rest of his poor-quality scotch. “His name is Remi, and he’s the best, he can sit in, and—”

“I don’t want Remi, I want fucking Swanson! Because you’re an animal, Swan! You’re a fucking dirty, cheating, little animal and I want you in my court.” The two men embraced. Ray was almost crying. Bunny was frantically chewing her nails.

“We’ll see what happens,” Swanson said. “Who knows. Some of those witness accounts, I mean, we could go in there and argue mutual combat.”

“But she didn’t hit me back,” Bunny said. Both men looked annoyed with her for interrupting.

“I thought you couldn’t remember anything,” Ray said in a singsong parody of her voice.

“Maybe she did hit you back, you hit her, you didn’t know your own strength, it was a hell of a punch and then she fell just the right way. These things happen. They happen all the time.”

“But that’s not what happened,” Bunny said.