I had always imagined that I would be there to meet Bunny when she got out. That it would be me and Ray, and we would take her to lunch and order the whole menu, and then go to Target and buy her all new clothes. I had imagined I would be part of her reentry into the world. But I was not. I didn’t hear from Ray. I didn’t know what her exact release date was, just that it was in October. I put my head down for midterms, and then before I knew it we were in December, and Bunny must theoretically be out in the world without me.

* * *

—

I started dating Evan that fall, and it was the following summer that I met up with Anthony and began a friendship with him that would last until his death from pancreatic cancer over five years later. I graduated from Pomona, class of 2015, and was accepted to the Graduate Program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell to do my PhD. My mother, Aunt Deedee, and Anthony all attended my college graduation, and there was no drama. It was as if none of it had ever happened. Anthony gave me a two-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary in a special box with a drawer containing a magnifying glass, and I had never received a better present. I still have it to this day. I moved it with me to Ithaca.

I loved upstate New York immediately. I loved the snow. A fresh snowfall never failed to make me feel like Lucy when she is first in Narnia, as though I had accidentally climbed into another world.

I dated. I fell in love with a man named Conor, who was balding and a little fat and the most joyful being I have ever run across. He saw the world, he saw it clearly, but to him it was still good fun. Even the sad parts of being alive were beautiful. And mostly human beings cracked him up. He wasn’t scared, scared of the darkness in others or in himself. He was so different from the other men I had dated. He was sane and capable. He was an engineer in robotics. He could cook only three things, but one of them was a delectable white chili. He had wide little feet and perfectly even toes.

It was after I had finished my master’s and was burrowing into the long deep years of my PhD when I ran across a YouTube video of Bunny. I would never have even seen it if I hadn’t been on Conor’s laptop. He first started watching UFC fighting because of Ronda Rousey, and he was still a fan, watching her old clips on YouTube, and in one of the recommended to-watch-next videos on the sidebar, I saw a freeze-frame of a woman who could only be a grown-up Bunny Lampert. The video was titled “Watch the Knockout Queen Mop the Floor.”

It was a boxing fight, in a ring instead of a cage. The fight lasted less than two minutes before the other girl was out cold. You could hear the fleshy slap of her body as she hit the mat. At the end, you could see Bunny go to her corner, and her trainer slapped her on the head with love, and then, clear as day, it was Ray Lampert standing there, smiling ear to ear, shouting at her, “You did it, you did it.” In a feverish trance, I watched all her fight videos. She was undefeated, 12 and 0, with 5 TKOs. Numbers like a young Laila Ali, or so every commentator of her matches liked to say. The early videos were mostly grainy, without commentary, all crowd noise. The more recent ones were obviously higher production value, televised with commentators, and in them she was wearing what became her uniform: pink satin shorts and a pink satin sports bra–style top. The Knockout Queen. I bet Ray had come up with it himself. Her most watched video had over a million views.

“This is my friend from high school,” I told Conor. “I know her.”

“Wow, how cool!” he said. “We should go to one of her matches.”

“They look like they’re mostly in California,” I said.

He laughed. “Oh, then we won’t go to one of her matches.”

“It’s just so weird—she was my friend,” I said. But I could not explain. I could not express what had happened and how formative it had been. “Her dad was really weird,” I said. “He was an alcoholic.”

“Oh yeah?” Conor said. “Where do you want to go to dinner?”

There was no one I could talk to about what had become of Bunny. Anthony was already very sick by that point; he would die just after that Christmas. I didn’t want to bother him with this, and he didn’t even know Bunny personally. I had kept in touch with none of our other high school friends, but I found myself curious about all of them, and I spent hours snooping through Naomi’s Facebook page. She had a little daughter named Tara. It did not appear she had ever gone to the Olympics. That bruised me somehow. Without consciously thinking about it, I had always counted on her to go, as if in Bunny’s place. But it looked like she had ripped off college’s face and fucked the shit out of it, and law school after that, and it was clear from her selfies with her (extremely hot) husband, from her food pics at fancy restaurants, from her adorable daughter, that she was living the good life, and that made me happy.

I watched Bunny’s fights over and over again. “This is unhealthy,” Conor would chime in.

“I am well aware,” I would say, “but I am in helpless thrall.”

And then I would watch her knock out girls again and again.

There was one fight in particular that haunted me. Bunny had her hair in cornrows, which made her look less prissy, and her opponent was a particularly dumb-looking pinheaded girl. In the close-up before the match when they touched gloves, you could see they were both already drenched in sweat. The arena must have been sweltering. Bunny was looking at the other girl like she wanted to kill her, like she wanted to smear her on the sidewalk. The other girl disgusted her. But her look was not heated. It was a chilly disdain. She would take this pinheaded girl apart.

And she did. The match was four rounds long, two-minute rounds, and Bunny was methodical and relentless the whole way through, even though they were evenly matched—the other girl had a dogged persistence and ability to take blows to the head that boggled the mind. You could see the cool intelligence in Bunny’s eyes as she evaluated the other girl’s habits, found her weaknesses. Even as she got tired and staggered, you could tell she was in control. When she finally knocked the pinheaded girl out, it was exaggerated and cartoonish; the other girl swooned as though drunk, her mouth hanging open, and then fell to the ground. The camera zoomed in on Bunny, who was smiling around her mouth guard and holding her fist in the air, walking in tight circles, trying to burn off the rest of the adrenaline.

I must have watched this video of the pinheaded girl a hundred times. The pinheaded girl did not look like Ann Marie. Her hair was darker than Ann Marie’s for one thing, and her eyes were not wide set. But it was the smallness of the head, and perhaps the way they were built, the angles of the shoulders, something. But I could not stop thinking of that pinheaded girl as Ann Marie.

“You are clinically depressed,” Conor told me.

“Maybe,” I said.

In the end, I finally called her. Obviously, it was all leading up to that. Calling her was the only thing that would break the spell and allow me to resume my life. And so I found her website, she wasn’t on Facebook for whatever reason, and I sent her an email, very short and sweet in case she didn’t read her own emails, and I got a note back, with her number, that appeared to be from her, and which said: OMG, CALL ME!!! Xoxox.