“I don’t know how to say this,” I said, “and I have no intention of entering into a romantic relationship with you again, but this is weird. Is it just me?”

“No, it’s not just you,” he said.

“I still love you,” I said. “But not like—”

“I love you too.”

“Maybe we knew each other in a past life or something,” I said.

“Maybe we knew each other in this one.”

We ordered sandwiches and the bread was as good as I remembered. They came in red plastic trays with wax paper. There was a fly that kept buzzing our table. The air was hot and steamy. It should not have been the most incredible lunch I had ever had, and yet it was. He told me all about Hank and his wife and his retirement. They had recently been on a trip to Prague, which he said reminded him of me because he knew that I would love it, and he made me promise that I would go someday and think of him. I told him all about college and Evan and my mother, whom I had recently begun talking to again.

“How’s Bunny?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He was shocked. “Did you have a fight?” he asked. “You were so close.”

“No,” I said, feeling suddenly sick and unable to explain.

“Then what happened?” he asked.

* * *

—

I visited Bunny in prison exactly three times. The first two times were the first summer she was in prison before I started at Pomona. I was still living with Terrence’s family to save money. I slept on the couch in their den and I lived out of a reusable grocery bag that I kept in their laundry room. I had my life pared down to the bare essentials. Two pairs of black pants, two black T-shirts, and two white button-downs for work, my laptop. Everything else I owned, my books, my mementos, the rest of my clothes, were in a box in Ray Lampert’s garage, which in the end I never returned to get. It was just not worth it to have to look at his face.

I would have visited Bunny in prison right away, but being approved as a visitor takes time. It took time for Bunny to be assigned to a prison, time for her to go through the reception process, during which she was not allowed visitors, then time for me to fill out an arcane application, send it in, time to have my background check run and approved, time for them to notify Bunny and then for her to notify me. (Why couldn’t they notify me? Why did it have to go through her? Such questions have no answers.)

When, finally, we had secured that much, I discovered that I had to schedule my visit with her specific prison and that visiting hours were booked for the next two months straight. The prison was open for visits only on Saturday and Sunday, as well as four holidays throughout the year, and it booked up well in advance. I made an appointment for the first Saturday in June, the earliest I could get, and waited, carefully reviewing the extensive rules Bunny had forwarded to me.

I did not remember rules like this when my mother was in prison and we would visit her, but perhaps I was not aware of them because I was a child. Any bag I brought must be made out of clear plastic. I was not to wear denim pants or a blue chambray shirt. I was not to wear an orange top, orange pants, or an orange jumpsuit. I was not to wear a red shirt. I was not to wear forest-green pants or a tan shirt. I was not to wear camouflage. I must dress modestly. I was not to wear hats or gloves. I was not to wear shorts that were two inches above the knee. I was not to wear jewelry. I was not to wear a layered outfit. My keys must be no more than two in number and on a key ring with no attachments. I could bring a small unopened pack of tissues. I could bring up to fifty dollars, but it must be in one-dollar bills. I could bring ten photographs. I could bring a document no more than ten pages in length. If I violated any of these rules, I would be turned away from the prison and not allowed to see Bunny for our visit.

While some of these were easy to comply with (I did not own nor did I desire to don an orange jumpsuit), there were still so many instructions of what not to wear that I felt anxious I would forget one and accidentally wear a blue shirt or green pants. The list made me very upset. The list signaled a kind of crushing bureaucracy and micromanaged oversight that I had last experienced, in a much more mild form, in school. I felt dread that Bunny was living inside such a place.

The day of our visit I was extremely anxious. She was at California Institution for Women, which was in Corona, a full hour’s drive from Terrence’s house in Carson. I had never driven that far before, and I was still a relatively new driver, so the drive alone was terrifying to me, let alone worrying I would hit traffic or be otherwise delayed and miss my visitor’s appointment. If I was even ten minutes late, I would not be allowed to see her.

As I drove, I began to feel that this was insane. This level of scrutiny, of meaningless protocol. Why were visiting hours only on the weekends? What about people who worked on the weekends? I had had to get my shift covered by a coworker. Why were even the visitors of people in prison being punished? Because it was present in every communication from the prison I had received. This disdain for me. This weird fetish of control over me, and I was not even the one who had committed a crime.

And then I would think: She’s in for murder. She’s a murderer. You’re about to go visit a murderer. What do you expect, you friend-of-a-murderer. And she killed someone for you. In defense of you. It was only clear to me in retrospect that that was what happened.

By the time I reached the prison I was so anxious and my thinking so fragmented that everything struck me as surreal. The guards with Tasers. The metal detectors. The heavy locks on all the doors. The surveillance cameras in every room, in every hallway, on every corner, making sure that all spaces were universally seen. Nothing here could be private. Everything was monitored.

I was processed and then put in a waiting room where there were four surveillance cameras, and I sat and waited. There were lots of families, lots of other people waiting. No one was talking except the little kids. It felt very much like the DMV except there were no windows and an eerie feeling that we could not leave. The time for my visit came and went. About fifteen minutes after my appointment time, I went up to the woman behind a plate-glass window and asked if I had somehow missed my name being called, but she just said, “Sit down and wait.”

“My appointment time was fifteen minutes ago, so could you check if maybe something is—”

“Sit down and wait and your name will be called.”

“But you don’t know what my name is, so how do you know it will be called?”

“Sit down or I will call security and have you removed.”

I sat down. About thirty minutes later, a guard came in and called my name, then led me down a long hallway with blue linoleum and into the visiting room. Bunny was already sitting at one of the tables, and she waved at me in excitement until the guard chastised her. “You can hug for up to ten seconds, and after that you can hold hands, but no other touching, nothing under the table,” the guard said when we arrived at the table. “When your visit is over, you may hug again.”