“Oh, okay,” I said, and Bunny and I hugged while the guard watched. She was so much taller than me that I felt like a child pressed up against her chest. She smelled like sweat. She was wearing a sky-blue, short-sleeve button-down shirt and dark teal trousers. Both items were bulky and ill-fitting, designed to mask any physical beauty that might accidentally become manifest. We sat down and looked at each other.

“Did you bring money?” was the first thing she said to me.

“I brought ten singles,” I said. “Is that enough?”

She nodded. “Okay, I want an M&M’s, a Doritos, a Sprite, and if there is any money left, then Sour Patch Kids.”

“Can I get up and walk over there?” I asked, nodding with my head at the vending machines.

“I think so, just do it slowly.”

I stood and the guard looked my way, I motioned at the vending machines and he nodded. I walked over and waited behind a woman and a five-year-old girl with sweet braids, who was getting Ding Dongs. I fed my sweaty dollar bills to the machine with shaking hands. What was I afraid of? Nothing in particular. But I hated this place powerfully.

I bought Bunny her treats. There was not enough left for the Sour Patch Kids. When I brought them back to the table she excitedly opened them and began eating and I felt that really she was more excited about the food than about seeing me.

“So how is it?” I said. “You look good.”

She did not look good. Her skin looked dull and she had a handful of tiny pimples on the left side of her face. Her hair was greasy at the roots. “It’s fine,” she said. “I mean, I get by.” She laughed.

“Do you have any friends?” I asked.

“A couple,” she said, licking up a palmful of M&M’s.

“It’s just so good to see your face,” I said, which was a lie. It was weird and sad to see her face. She didn’t look the same. But then she met my eyes fully for the first time, and the eye contact was so intense I felt I was falling, that if I didn’t concentrate I would lose consciousness. There was just her whole soul, right there. Looking at me. It was Bunny.

“I miss you every day,” she said, still holding my gaze, flowing into me.

“Do you get all my letters? Because sometimes you don’t write back,” I said. “And I never know if you don’t get it or…”

“Sometimes I’m too sad to write back,” she said.

And I started to cry. I looked up at the ceiling, trying to stop. When I looked at her again, she was still there, looking frankly at me, her eyes dry.

“I couldn’t tell you in my letters because they read them but I have a girlfriend in here,” she said softly.

“Get out!” I said, wiping my eyes, grateful to recover myself.

“She’s really cool,” she said.

“That’s amazing. What is she? I mean—what did she do?”

“She killed her stepfather because he was molesting her kid sister.”

“Oh wow,” I said, “I was kind of hoping you’d say drugs.”

She laughed. “Us murderers gotta stick together, you know.” There was a hint of a Jersey accent in her voice, and I had the impression this was a way the girls talked together to make each other laugh. Her attention was diverted for a moment as she opened the Doritos with holy reverence.

“I would offer to share, but my dad hasn’t put anything on my commissary in like a month, and all the food here has saltpeter in it to keep you calm, it’s disgusting. These chips taste like heaven.”

“They put saltpeter in the food?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t know if they really do, but that’s what everyone says.”

“So does everyone know you killed someone?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Gives me massive cred in here.”

“Weird,” I said.

“I know,” she said, “they call me the Knockout. Because for in here, I’m pretty. I know you may not think I’m pretty, like, I’m not pretty out there, but in here I’m pretty.”

“I think you’re pretty,” I said, but I was so disturbed I didn’t know what to say. “How’s your dad?” I asked, even though I had consciously planned not to ask about Ray.

“Well, he had to sell our house,” she said. “And he lost his business. But he’s finally out of the last of the IRS debt, and he just bought a condo in Lake Forest and he’s doing real estate down there.”

“He still has his license?” I asked.

“He never lost it.”

“It’s just so unfair,” I said. “Sometimes I can’t get over it. That you’re in here and he’s buying a condo and probably drinking scotch with Swanson.”

She shrugged. “Is what it is.”

“Do you forgive him?” I really wanted to know. I did not forgive him. In fact, the more time passed, the more my heart calcified against him.

“Some thoughts are just too expensive to have,” she said.

I didn’t say anything, just looked at her. What a magnificent animal she was even now, all two hundred pounds of her, across the table from me, licking Cool Ranch dust from her fingers. “It’s kind of like long-distance running,” she said. “You have to keep your mind under control. You can’t start thinking about when it’s going to be over or what hurts or you’ll lose it and your form will get sloppy and soon you’ll be winded and you’ll stop before you’ve given it everything you’ve got.”

“So, like, you can’t think about when you’ll get out?”

“Exactly.”

“You can’t think about whether it’s fair or unfair that you’re here?”

“Exactly.”

She was giving prison everything she had. She was determined to survive this. It seemed to me so honorable, to be committed to life in a place like this. I wasn’t sure I would be able to do what she was doing.

“You’re too good for this world,” I said.

“No, I’m not,” she said, and smiled.

* * *

—

The next time I visited her was in late August, right before I started at Pomona. We had an okay time. I knew what to expect from the prison protocol and was less freaked out. We talked, I bought her snacks. This time I brought a whole twenty-five dollars in singles and we both gorged on Snickers and Gardetto’s.