So I called her right then, afraid I would lose my nerve if I waited, and she picked up on the first ring and said, “Well, that was instant gratification!”

“I know!” I said. “I just got your message.”

“I just sent it!”

“Modernity!”

“Or whatever,” she said. “You serving up some academic realness now?”

I laughed. “I guess so.”

“God, I’m so glad you called!” she said. Her voice sounded exactly the same. I felt seventeen again. It was truly surreal.

“I don’t have long hair anymore,” I blurted out.

She laughed. “How do you wear your hair now, Michael, my love?”

“God, I feel so stupid.”

“Don’t.”

“So you’re a boxer?”

“Yep.”

“And do you like that?”

“I love it. It’s like I was born to do it,” she said. “I mean, I’d much rather do MMA because that’s where all the money is, but I’m too big. The UFC’s highest weight class for women is featherweight, which is like one forty-five, and I just can’t cut enough weight to get down there and still, like, keep my eyes open.”

“Oh yeah,” I was saying, but I had instinctively withdrawn. I realized I was hoping that she would say she hated it, that Ray was making her do it. I didn’t like the idea that she was born to do it. But on the other hand, boxing was a legitimate sport. What she was doing wasn’t wrong. It was like a televised thing, not something to be ashamed of. She was an athlete, which is what she had always been.

We went on talking about the trivialities of our lives, catching up as best we could. In moments it would feel like everything was the way it used to be, and in other moments I would catch sight of a side of her I didn’t recognize. She swore a lot. About her most recent fight she said she “dominated that binch.”

“Ugh, binch. Don’t say binch,” I said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Wait, what were we talking about?” she asked.

Then we started talking about meeting up. She was going to be in New York City the following month for a match, would I come down? I said I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

“I’ll get you tickets to the match!” she said. “I’ll book you a hotel! I’m writing a note so I don’t forget!”

“Oooh, yay!” I said, even though the idea of watching the match live horrified me. But I agreed to meet her at a diner she particularly liked off Union Square on the Wednesday before her match. I would take the campus-run bus down. She would book us in the same hotel. It was all arranged.

* * *

—

I entertained fantasies of missing my bus accidentally/on purpose, or of standing Bunny up in some way, only because I was so nervous, but in the end I caught my bus, and I took a cab downtown, and I was a little bit late, but not too late, and when I walked into the diner, my heart dropped down to my stomach. Ray and Bunny were sitting in a booth in the back, and they both waved at me. She had said nothing about Ray joining us, and I was deeply unprepared. I had thought since I was an adult and no longer brought my parents everywhere, Bunny would be the same. I could not anticipate or control how strongly seeing his face made me react. Why was it easier for me to walk around North Shore and park in the same parking lot I had been almost beaten to death in than it was for me to look at Ray Lampert’s face?

His nose was the dark raspberry of a true alcoholic, but his forehead lift had held up well. It was like my subconscious had simply stored all my animus from that time in his file, and now looking at him was allowing it to spill out and spread panic all over everything. But I walked over to their booth like a normal person, and did an impression of a normal person saying hello, sitting down, taking off my denim jacket, which was stupid to wear, it was too hot in the city in September.

I sat next to Ray, mainly so I wouldn’t have to look at him, and he immediately put his arm around me and began slapping me with his giant, warm hands. “Well, look at you!” he crowed. “What a handsome queer you turned out to be!”

“You’re not allowed to call me queer,” I said, trying to say it in a friendly way.

“I thought that was the word now! It’s not fag, is it?”

“No, ‘queer’ is a fine word, it’s just you aren’t allowed to call me that.”

“I don’t get it,” he said. “Did I do something wrong?”

“Hey, Michael,” Bunny said, as though I had just gotten there, and I thought she was just trying to end the mess I was in with her dad, and so I focused on her, and made eye contact, and I smiled, and for one long moment that’s all we did, smile at each other, and it was good. She looked incredible. She was in peak physical form. Her skin glowed with vitality. Maybe boxing was good for her. Maybe I was just being a ninny. After everything, I marveled, Bunny Lampert was so damn beautiful. Part of it was that the world had changed around her, and people now saw Serena Williams and understood that she was gorgeous. Part of it was that her face had settled into itself somehow. Part of it was just the luster of extreme physical health. But she was a knockout. She took my breath away.

We ordered. Bunny requested seven egg whites and a side of broccoli and two chicken breasts, which caused the waitress to do some eyebrow lifting, which caused Ray to brag about Bunny’s boxing record to the waitress. “She may even be,” he said, “in fact she probably is, the best female boxer in the world.” The dynamics were all very familiar, and at first that felt oddly good, who we used to be and how we used to act coming back to me so vividly, like I was rediscovering something I had lost.

“Have you heard from, oh god, what’s her name? Oh, I know her name, it’s right there, I just can’t get it,” Bunny said.

“Kelsey?”

“No. God, no, we were friends with her. She was black. It’s right there, I just can’t get it.”

“Naomi?” I said, shocked that Bunny could forget her name.

“Yes! Naomi!” Bunny said. “Whatever happened to her?” And so I told Bunny everything I knew about Naomi from Facebook, and since Bunny was not on Facebook all of this was news to her. I filled her in on what I knew of the others, and told her about my life, but when I spoke too long about my work and my dissertation, I could sense her attention wandering. There was a lot we couldn’t speak of with Ray there. Bunny didn’t mention her time in prison, her girlfriend, or what any of that was like.