cv

e call them Bunnies because that is what they call each other.

Seriously. Bunny.

Example:

Hi, Bunny!

What did you do last night, Bunny?

I hung out with you, Bunny. Remember, Bunny?

That’s right, Bunny, you hung out with me and it was the best

time I ever had.

Bunny, I love you.

I love you, Bunny.

And then they hug each other so hard I think their chests are

going to implode. I would even secretly hope for it from where I sat,

stood, leaned, in the opposite corner of the lecture hall, department

lounge, auditorium, bearing witness to four grown women—my

academic peers—cooingly strangle each other hello. Or good-bye. Or

just because you’re so amazing, Bunny. How fiercely they gripped

each other’s pink-and-white bodies, forming a hot little circle of

such rib-crushing love and understanding it took my breath away.

And then the nuzzling of ski-jump noses, peach fuzzy cheeks.

Temples pressed against temples in a way that made me think of the

labial rubbing of the bonobo or the telepathy of beautiful,

murderous children in horror films. All eight of their eyes shut tight

as if this collective asphyxiation were a kind of religious bliss. All

four of their glossy mouths making squealing sounds of monstrous

love that hurt my face.

I love you, Bunny.

I quietly prayed for the hug implosion all year last year. That

their ardent squeezing might cause the flesh to ooze from the

sleeves, neckholes, and A-line hems of their cupcake dresses like so

much inane frosting. That they would get tangled in each other’s

Game of Thrones hair, choked by the ornate braids they were

forever braiding into each other’s heart-shaped little heads. That

they would choke on each other’s blandly grassy perfume.

Never happened. Not once.

They always came apart from these embraces intact and

unwounded despite the ill will that poured forth from my staring

eyes like so much comic-book-villain venom. Smiling at one

another. Swinging clasped hands. Skins aglow with affection and

belonging as though they’d just been hydrated by the purest of

mountain streams.

Bunny, I love you.

Completely immune to the disdain of their fellow graduate

student. Me. Samantha Heather Mackey. Who is not a Bunny. Who

will never be a Bunny.

I pour myself and Ava more free champagne in the far corner of

the tented green, where I lean against a white Doric pillar bedecked

with billowing tulle. September. Warren University. The Narrative

Arts department’s annual welcome back Demitasse, because this

school is too Ivy and New England to call a party a party. Behold the

tiger-lily-heavy centerpieces. Behold the Christmas-lit white gauze

floating everywhere like so many ghosts. Behold the pewter trays of

salmon pinwheels, duck-liver crostini topped with little sugared

orchids. Behold the white people in black discussing grants they

earned to translate poets no one reads from the French. Behold the

lavish tent under which the overeducated mingle, well versed in

every art but the one of conversation. Smilingly oblivious to the fact

that they are in the mouth of hell. Or as Ava and I call it, the Lair of

Cthulhu. Cthulhu is a giant squid monster invented by a horror

writer who went insane and died here. And you know what, it makes

sense. Because you can feel it when you’re walking down the streets

beyond the Warren Bubble that this town is a wrong town.

Something not quite right about the houses, the trees, the light.

Bring this up and most people just look at you. But not Ava. Ava

says, My god, yes. The town, the houses, the trees, the light—it’s all

fucked.

I stand here, I sway here, full of tepid sparkling and animal livers

and whatever hard alcohol Ava keeps pouring from her Drink Me

flask into my plastic cup. “What’s in this again?” I ask.

“Just drink it,” she says.

I observe from behind borrowed sunglasses as the women whom

I must call my colleagues reunite after a summer spent apart in

various trying locales such as remote tropical islands, the south of

France, the Hamptons. I watch their fervent little bodies lunge for

each other in something like rapture. Nails the color of natural

poisons digging into each other’s forearms with the force of what I

keep telling myself is feigned, surely feigned, affection. Shiny lips

parting to call each other by their communal pet name.

“Jesus, are they for real?” Ava whispers in my ear now. She has

never seen them up close. Didn’t believe me when I first told her

about them last year. Said, There is no way grown women act like

that. You’re making this up, Smackie. Over the summer, I started to

think I had too. It is a relief in some ways to see them now, if only

to confirm I am not insane.

“Yes,” I say. “Too real.”

I watch her survey them through her fishnet veil, her David

Bowie eyes filled with horror and boredom, her mouth an

unimpressed red line.

“Can we go now?”

“I can’t leave yet,” I say, my eyes still on them. They’ve pulled

apart from one another at last, their twee dresses not even rumpled.

Their shiny heads of hair not even disturbed. Their skins glowing

with health insurance as they all crouch down in unison to

collectively coo at a professor’s ever jumping shih tzu.

“Why?”

“I told you, I have to make an appearance.”

Ava looks at me, slipping drunkenly down the pillar. I have said

hello to no one. Not the poets who are their own fresh, grunty hell.

Not the new incoming fiction writers who are laughing awkwardly

by the shrimp tower. Not even Benjamin, the friendly administrator

to whom I usually cling at these sorts of functions, helping him

dollop quivering offal onto dried bits of toast. Not my Workshop

leader from last spring, Fosco, or any other member of the esteemed

faculty. And how was your summer, Sarah? And how’s the thesis

coming, Sasha? Asked with polite indifference. Getting my name

wrong always. Whatever response I offer—an earnest confession of

my own imminent failure, a bald-faced lie that sets my face aflame

—will elicit the same knowing nod, the same world-weary smile, a

delivery of platitudes about the Process being elusive, the Work

being a difficult mistress. Trust, Sasha. Patience, Sarah. Sometimes

you have to walk away, Serena. Sometimes, Stephanie, you have to

seize the bull by the horns. This will be followed by the recounting of

a similar creative crisis/breakthrough they experienced while on a

now-defunct residency in remote Greece, Brittany, Estonia. During

which I will nod and dig my fingernails into my upper-arm flesh.

And obviously I haven’t talked to the Lion. Even though he’s

here, of course. Somewhere. I saw him earlier out of the corner of

my eye, more maned and tattooed than ever, pouring himself a glass

of red wine at the open bar. Though he didn’t look up, I felt him see

me. And then I felt him see me see him see me and keep pouring. I

haven’t seen him since then so much as sensed him in my nape

hair. When we first arrived, Ava felt he must be nearby because

look, the sky just darkened out of nowhere.

This evening, all I have done in terms of socializing is half smile

at the one the Bunnies call Psycho Jonah, my social equivalent

among the poets, who is standing alone by the punch, smiling

beatifically in his own antidepressant-fueled fever dream.

Ava sighs and lights a cigarette with one of the many tea lights

that dot our table. She looks back at the Bunnies, who are now

stroking each other’s arms with their small, small hands. “I miss

you, Bunny,” they say to each other in their fake little girl voices,

even though they are standing right fucking next to each other, and

I can taste the hate in their hearts like iron on my tongue.

“I miss you, Bunny. This summer was so hard without you. I

barely wrote a word, I was so, so sad. Let’s never ever part again,

please?”

Ava laughs out loud at this. Actually laughs. Throws her feathery

head back. Doesn’t bother to cover her mouth with her gloved hand.

It’s a delicious, raucous sound. Ringing in the air like the evening’s

missing music.

“Shhhhh,” I hiss at her. But it’s already done.

The laughter causes the one I call the Duchess to turn her head

of long, silver faery-witch locks in our direction. She looks at us.

First at Ava. Then at me. Then at Ava again. She is surprised,

perhaps, to see that for once I’m not alone, that I have a friend. Ava

meets her look with wide-open eyes the way I do in my dream

stares. Ava’s gaze is formidable and European. She continues to

smoke and sip my champagne without breaking eye contact. She

once told me about a staring contest she had with a gypsy she met

on a metro in Paris. The woman was staring at her, so Ava stared

back—the two of them aiming their gazes at each other like guns—

all the way across the City of Lights. Just looking at each other from

opposite shores of the rattling train. Eventually Ava took off her

earrings, still not taking her eyes off the woman. Why? Because her

assumption at that point, of course, was that the two of them would

fight to the death. But when the train pulled into the last stop on the

line, the woman just stood to exit, and when she did so, she even

held back the sliding doors politely, so Ava could go first.

What’s the lesson here, Smackie?

Don’t jump to conclusions?

Never lower your gaze first.

The Duchess, in turning toward us, causes a ripple effect of

turning among the other Bunnies. First Cupcake looks over. Then

Creepy Doll with her tiger eyes. Then Vignette with her lovely

Victorian skull face, her stoner mouth wide open. They each look at

Ava, then at me, in turn, scanning down from our heads to our feet,

their eyes taking us in like little mouths sipping strange drinks. As

they do, their noses twitch, their eight eyes do not blink, but stare

and stare. Then they look back at the Duchess and lean in to each

other, their lip-glossed mouths forming whispery words.

Ava squeezes my arm, hard.

The Duchess turns and arches an eyebrow at us. She raises a

hand up. Is there an invisible gun in it? No. It’s an empty, open

hand. With which she then waves. At me. With something like a

smile on her face. Hi, her mouth says.

My hand shoots up of its own accord before I can even stop

myself. I’m waving and waving and waving. Hi, I’m saying with my

mouth, even though no sound comes out.

Then the rest of the Bunnies hold up a hand and wave too.

We’re all waving at one another from across the great shores of

the tented green.

Except Ava. She continues to smoke and stare at them like

they’re a four-headed beast. When at last I lower my hand, I turn to

her. She’s looking at me like I’m something worse than a stranger.

he next day, I find the invitation in my school mailbox, expertly

folded into a white origami swan. One of them must have

slipped it in between the experimental poetry journals and the

postcard-size ads for faculty readings, a Romanian documentary,

and a one-woman play about the town being The Body and The

Body being the town. I came here early, in the off-hours, to see if

my monthly stipend check had arrived. No check. I tip the rest of my

mail into the recycling bin, then stare at the swan, upon which one

of them has drawn a rudimentary face with magenta ink. Two

bleeding dots for eyes—one on either side of its very sharp beak,

which, with the help of some dimples and inky lipstick—appear to

be smiling at me. On one of its wings, the words Open Me

Samantha Heather Mackey,

YOU are cordially invited to . . .

SMUT SALON

When: The Blue Hour

Where: You know where

Bring: Yourself, please

I stare at the loopy, shimmering font, the little hearts one of

them (had to be Cupcake, or possibly Creepy Doll?) has drawn

around my name. I feel myself start to sweat though it’s freezing in

this hallway. Mistake. Has to be. No way in hell they would ever

invite me to Smut Salon. That was their own private Bunny thing,

he next day, I find the invitation in my school mailbox, expertly

folded into a white origami swan. One of them must have

slipped it in between the experimental poetry journals and the

postcard-size ads for faculty readings, a Romanian documentary,

and a one-woman play about the town being The Body and The

Body being the town. I came here early, in the off-hours, to see if

my monthly stipend check had arrived. No check. I tip the rest of my

mail into the recycling bin, then stare at the swan, upon which one

of them has drawn a rudimentary face with magenta ink. Two

bleeding dots for eyes—one on either side of its very sharp beak,

which, with the help of some dimples and inky lipstick—appear to

be smiling at me. On one of its wings, the words Open Me

Samantha Heather Mackey,

YOU are cordially invited to . . .

SMUT SALON

When: The Blue Hour

Where: You know where

Bring: Yourself, please

I stare at the loopy, shimmering font, the little hearts one of

them (had to be Cupcake, or possibly Creepy Doll?) has drawn

around my name. I feel myself start to sweat though it’s freezing in

this hallway. Mistake. Has to be. No way in hell they would ever

invite me to Smut Salon. That was their own private Bunny thing,

like Touching Tuesdays or binge-watching The Bachelorette or

making little woodland creatures out of marzipan. Something they’d

talk about in low voices all last year, while we were waiting for

Workshop to begin.

Smut Salon last night was SO crazy oh my god.

I drank WAY too much last night at Smut Salon.

I was thinking that for next Smut Salon we should . . .

And then they’d cup each other’s ears and whisper the rest.

I scan the invitation again. Impossible that it’s for me. But it has

my name on it and everything. Samantha Heather Mackey flanked

by bloated hearts. At the sight of my name rendered in those loops, I

feel a weird and shameful swelling in my heart. I recall them waving

last night. First the Duchess, then the other Bunnies. How I waved

and waved back so adamantly.

It’ll be just us five again in Workshop this semester. Which starts

tomorrow. I’d been dreading it all summer. Just me and them in a

room with no visible escape routes for two hours and twenty

minutes. Every week for thirteen weeks. I imagined it would be

much like last year. Me on one side of the table and them on the

other, sitting in a huglike huddle, becoming one body with four

heads the more I narrowed my eyes. The Duchess reading aloud

from a diamond-etched pane of glass while the Bunnies closed their

eyes as if hearing an actual aria. Holding hands while they praised

each other’s stories. Can I have five thousand more pages of this,

please? Can I just say I loved living in your lines and that’s where I

want to live now forever? Petting each other absently while they

discussed the weekly reading. Suddenly erupting with laughter at an

inside joke, a laughter in which I never participated because I was

never in on the joke, which they never explained because they were

too busy laughing. Sorry, Samantha, they might say between gasps,

you weren’t there. No, I might agree, I wasn’t. It could go on for

several minutes, this laughter. They would shake with it, grow

teary-eyed, grip each other’s wrists and shoulders in the throes of it

while I sat on the other side of the table, watching them or a

nothing space between their heads. Meanwhile, Fosco observed us

all, saying nothing. I started coming to class later and later. And by

the end, I didn’t come at all. Where’s Samantha? I imagined Fosco

asking. We have no idea. Shrugs of their sweatered shoulders.

Helpless smiles.

But maybe they’re actually trying to include me this year? Maybe

this invitation is a gesture of kindness? Or it might be a joke. Of

course it’s a joke. I picture a pair of small-fingered hands folding the

swan at a grand oak desk that looks out onto a view of canopied

trees. A balmy grin biting on itself with small white teeth.

“Bitches,” I say very quietly in the hall.

“Hey, Sam.”

I jump. Jonah. Standing beside me, leafing through his mailbox,

smiling his Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind smile.

“Jonah, you scared me.”

“Sorry, Sam.” He really looks sorry. “Hey, who were you talking

to just now?”

“No one. Just me. I talk to myself sometimes.”

“Me too.” He grins. “All the time.” Soup-bowl haircut. An

unzipped parka that he never takes off. Underneath he’s wearing a

T-shirt featuring a kitten playing keyboards in outer space. Jonah’s

a recovering addict who is so saturated with meds that he speaks as

though his voice is tunneling through sludge. He’s the best poet in

the Program by far. Also the friendliest, the most generous with

cigarettes. I don’t quite know why he’s so reviled by his fellow poets

—apart from a couple of mixed-genre classes, poets and fiction

writers tend to be siloed from one another both academically and

socially. But I’ve seen Jonah trailing behind his cohort on the street,

sitting in the far corner of class in Workshop, smilingly staring into

space while they eviscerate him with their feedback. I know what

this feels like, of course. The difference is, Jonah doesn’t seem to

care. He appears to be more or less content to remain adrift and

immune in his poetry cloud.

“What are you up to, Sam?”

“Oh, just looking for my stipend check.”

“Oh, hey, me too.” He looks ecstatic. “I need it so much. I bought

all these books and records and then I pretty much had to live on

pasta for the rest of the month. Do you ever do that?”

“Yeah.” I don’t do that. I can’t afford to. I stiffen a little.

“Hey, do you think you’ll go to this?” He holds up the play

postcard.

“No,” I snap. Then I feel bad. I add, “I sort of hate plays, Jonah.”

“Oh. Me too, mostly. Hey, I saw you at the party last night. I had

an extra smoke waiting for you in the alley but you never showed.”

“Yeah. I left early.”

“Oh.” He nods in a dreamy, knowing way. I’ve basically gotten to

know Jonah over shared cigarettes in the alleys, corners, and back

porches of the various department parties and functions I’m trying

to dodge. I’ll be sneaking out the door, desperate to escape, and I’ll

find him out there in the dark cold, shivering and smoking by the

dumpster. Hey, Samantha. That’s how I learned that, like me, he’s

the only one in his cohort who didn’t come from a renowned

undergraduate program. That he too applied to what we are

continually told is one of the most exclusive, selective, hard-to-get-

into MFA programs in the country on a lark, thinking No Way in

Hell.

Isn’t it a trip to be here? he said to me on the back porch at one of

the first parties.

Yeah, I slurred, my eyes on the Bunnies, already in the midst of

one of their communal, eyes-shut-tight, boa-constricting embraces,

even though they’d only just met.

It’s sort of like a dream, Jonah continued. I keep thinking when

will I wake up, you know? Like maybe I should ask someone to

punch me.

You mean pinch you?

A pinch wouldn’t wake me up from this. And if it did, I’d be back

in Fairbanks, living in my dad’s basement. Where would you be if I

punched you, Samantha?

Staring at the brick wall of my life from behind a cash register in

the intermountain West, I thought. Writing myself elsewhere in the

evenings.

Mordor, I told Jonah.

We better not punch each other then, I guess, he said, grinning at

me.

“So how’s your writing going, Sam? Did you take advantage of

the summer?” He smiles. He’s making fun of our Mixed-Genre

Workshop leader last spring, Halstrom, who kept telling us we must

not let the summer pass us by. Because this year, the final year, in

which we’re all expected to produce a complete manuscript by April,

would go by oh so quickly, we wouldn’t believe it. Literally in the

blink of an eye, all of this—he gestured with his manicured hand to

the stale classroom air around us, the fake pillars, the unlit

fireplace, the cavelike walls—would be gone. I watched the Bunnies

shiver and give each other a group hug with only their eyes. The

poets brace themselves for imminent, overeducated poverty.

“I pretty much wasted it,” Jonah says. “I mean, I wrote like two

volumes of poems but they’re terrible so I’m back to square one. I’ll

bet you wrote like crazy this summer, though.”

I think of the summer, my days spent gazing at dust motes from

behind the Warren music library information kiosk, my nights on

Ava’s roof, drinking and tangoing ourselves into oblivion.

Sometimes I’d stare at a blank page, a pencil held limply in my

hand. Sometimes I’d draw eyes on the page. Scribble the words what

am I doing here? what am I doing here? over and over. Mostly I just

stared at the wall. The page and the wall were one and the same to

me all summer.

“I don’t know about like crazy. . . .”

“I still remember that piece you brought into Workshop last year.

You know, the one everybody hated?”

“Yeah, Jonah, I remember.” The horrified faces. Heads slightly

bowed.

“I still think about it. I mean, it was pretty hard to forget. It was

so . . .”

“Mean?” I offer. “Willfully twisted? Aggressively dark? I know, I

think that was pretty much the consensus.”

“No! I mean yes, it was mean and twisted and dark and it actually

scared the living shit out of me for weeks. But I loved all that. I love

how mean and twisted and dark it is.” He beams at me. “Who ever

thought going to an aquarium could be so treacherous and

horrifying, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“But if you really think about it, it kind of is.”

“Thanks, Jonah. I liked your piece that everyone hated too.”

“Really? I was going to scrap it but—”

“Don’t do that, that’s what they want.” I say this more intensely,

more bitterly than I intend.

Jonah looks confused. “What?”

“Nothing. I should probably go. Late for class.” I’m not late for

class. There is no class now. But I imagine Ava waiting for me

outside by the bench, giving undergraduates her death stare. Hurry

the fuck up, Smackie.

“Oh, okay. Hey, Sam, can I read more of your stuff sometime? I

kind of dig it. I mean, I really dig it. I was actually kind of jonesing

for it after I read it, you know?”

“Um—I guess so. Sure.”

“Cool. Maybe we could hang out sometime and . . .”

Down the corridor, behind Jonah, I hear the elevator ding and my

stomach flips. Because I know before the doors even open who it

will be. I know even before I see his tall, sleek frame exit the doors,

whistling. Mane a carefully cultivated chaos. Arms inked with

watchful crows. The Lion. Approaching us. Wearing his usual

obscure noise band T-shirt. One of the bands we used to talk about

back when we used to talk. He carries with him the scent of the

green tea he used to brew for us in his office, which he would

ceremoniously stir, then pour into mud-colored, handleless cups.

How’s the writing, Samantha? he might ask in his deep Scottish lilt.

Now I see his leonine face fall slightly at the sight of students

with whom he must fraternize. Ask about their summers. Their

writing. Did they get their stipend checks okay? And then there’s the

fact that I’m one of the students. Makes it much more difficult. But

he smiles. Of course he does. It’s his job.

“Hello, Jonah. Samantha.” Definite voice drop when he said my

name, though he tries to make it sound cool, even-keeled. Small,

subtle nod of his maned head.

I watch him busy himself at his own cubby, which is full to

exploding with letters and books. Humming a little. Taking his time.

“Samantha, are you okay?” Jonah says.

I should just walk over there like I’ve imagined doing how many

times, tap him on the shoulder and say, Look, can we just talk? He’ll

look surprised, perhaps. Caught off guard. Talk? he’ll say, his gaze

sliding from side to side, assessing routes of escape. As if it’s a

highly suspicious activity I’m proposing. Illicit. I’m afraid I can’t

talk now, Samantha. But perhaps you could come by during my

office hours?

Or perhaps he’ll play dumb. Look at me with a chillingly neutral

expression, revealing nothing. Sure, Samantha. What’s up? Meeting

my eyes like go ahead, absolutely, please, talk.

“Samantha?”

And then what? And then I could just cut to the chase and say, I

don’t understand what happened between us exactly, but can it just

not be weird anymore? But my fear is that he’ll look at me like I’m

insane. Weird? Happened? Between us? Samantha, I’m sorry but I

really have no idea what you’re talking about, I’m afraid. And he

won’t look afraid at all.

But now when I see him standing there, humming, checking his

own mail slowly, smiling to himself, my body goes rigid with—I

really don’t know what, but I have to go.

“Samantha, wait—” Jonah says.

“I’m really late for class now.”

The Lion looks up from his mail. He probably knows that I am

not late for anything. That there is no class right now. That I’m

running from him like a scared little bitch. What’s the prey of a lion

again?

“Oh, okay. Have a good class, Samantha.” And then Jonah waves

and waves and waves at me and I’m reminded of myself, last night,

waving, my hand high over my head

their way home one night from a student bar. Or else beaten with

crowbars by the roving gangs that stalk the campus and its

surrounding area. Because the violence of this place, existing as it

does in the fragile heart of seething poverty, doesn’t exactly feature

in the script of the Warren campus tour, which is always led by

some undergraduate tool in designer sportswear who is quite expert

at shouting cozy factoids about statue erection and chandeliers

while walking backward. Hence Ava’s pointed disruption.

Warren was founded in 1775 and over here—

Blah, blah, BLAH, finishes Ava on the bench beside me. What

he’s not telling you is that there are people right here on campus

who will chop your head off, she shouts to the mothers, who look at

her, appalled. That’s right. With an ax! Like this. And then she’ll

stand up and take a step toward them with an invisible ax over her

shoulder and one or some or all of them will scream.

Though I’m horrified, I laugh until I cry every time.

Now that bench has actually become our unofficial meeting

place. It’s where she should be sitting at this moment, glaring at the

passing students, drawing what she calls the monstrous truth in her

sketchbook, as is her wont.

At the sight of the empty bench, I panic. All my lonely days last

year swell up in my heart and my vision goes swimmy. Then I feel

my right arm being grabbed and I am blindsided by a waft of

familiar scent. Two hands swathed in fishnet mesh cover my eyes.

“Boo!” she whispers into my ear.

Though I know who it is, I act surprised. Gasp.

Raucous laughter. She claps her hands. “Jesus Christ, you’re

easy,” she says.

“I know. Where did you go?” I ask.

“Two idiots were having a discussion about Virginia Woolf with

such orchestrated earnestness, I had to move. What the hell took

you so long, anyway? You were gone for like five years.”

I remember the invitation in my pocket, the swan beak poking

my stomach flesh as we speak. “I talked to Jonah for a bit.”

“The dreamy poet boy who wants to fuck you?”

“He does not.”

“It’s ridiculous how much he does.”

“He called me dark, twisted, and mean.”

“How sweet. He’s in love.”

“Can we not talk about this?”

She looks at me. “Something else happened. Tell me.”

“Nothing. Just. I had a run-in. Near run-in. With . . . you know.”

Ava nods. She knows, of course. “Did you talk?”

“I couldn’t. You know. Face him. After, you know, everything . . .”

I trail off because she’s staring at me intently. I can’t tell if she’s

disappointed in me or angry at him.

“You should really consider setting his office on fire,” she says at

last, and smiles. “For a second I thought you got kidnapped by those

bonobos.”

“Bunnies,” I say, feeling myself flush. Recalling those smiley

faces on the invitation. All those hand-drawn hearts.

“Whatever. I was worried.”

She shivers at the view of the grand trees, as if they’re not trees

at all but something truly vile, like all the rosy-blond light that

seems to forever bathe the campus is about to punch her in the face

like a terrible fist of rich. She looks at it all with disgust—the tall old

buildings, the ornately spiked gates, the endless stretch of carefully

manicured perfumed green teeming with bright-eyed squirrels and

rabbits, the students walking here and there, discussing Derrida and

their nose jobs, their hair kissed by a September light so golden and

perfect it’s as though they’d paid the sun to beam down on them in

just that way. I am not immune to the beauty. All year last year I

took lots of pictures of campus—click, click, click with my cracked,

ancient phone during every season, at different times of the day, in

all kinds of light—that I don’t look at anymore and which I sent to

no one. A placarded bench between two weeping trees. A two-

hundred-year-old bell tower. A fireplace you could stand up in like

the one in Citizen Kane. There’s a selfie of me I took in that

fireplace. There’s one Ava and I took by the fireplace together,

temple to temple, not smiling, as is our way. Her arm is around me,

swathed in holey lace. There’s one of just Ava. Because of the way

she’s standing before the flames, she looks like a witch being

burned at the stake.

Now, she puts a hand on my cheek, gives me a small smile. “Can

we get the hell out of here, please? You know I only come here for

you.”

—

I DON’T SAY ANYTHING TO AVA ABOUT THE BUNNY INVITATION ALL DAY. INSTEAD,

we celebrate what she continually called my final day of freedom by

going to the monster diner where she draws and I write.

Supposedly. I just sat there with my notebook open, watching her

draw. Then the zoo to say hello to the Moon Bear in his pit. Then

out for Vietnamese iced coffees at the sketchy place we like

downtown, where I almost got shot.

“You did not almost get shot, Smackie. Jesus Christ. That was a

car backing up or something,” she said when I brought it up.

“Yes, I did.”

“You need to get out more.”

“I get out. I’m out with you, aren’t I?”

Now we’re back at her place drinking the sangria she made that’s

so strong I’m pretty sure it’s poison. It’s that time of evening she

calls the hour between the dog and the wolf. A time that actually

makes this sorry swath of New England beautiful, the sky ablaze

with a sunset the color of flamingos. We’re on her sagging roof,

listening to Argentine tango music to drown out the roaring

Mexican music next door. We’re practicing tango, like we did all

summer, taking turns being Diego for each other. Diego is an

imaginary panther-footed man we dream will one day come into our

lives and whisk us off our very large feet. He has the smoldery,

dangerously mesmeric looks of Rudolph Valentino but with the

trustworthy eye crinkle of Paul Newman, the smiling insanity and

very long torso of Lux Interior of The Cramps, but with the swoon-

inducing earnestness of Jacques Brel. Diego wears white suits or

black Cuban shirts patterned with orange flames. He bakes bread

for us in the morning. He cuts fresh flowers and leaves them in jars

all over our apartment. He does not write poetry, but he reads it for

fun. He has a pied-à-terre in Paris, a mansion in Buenos Aires. Most

importantly, he tangos like a dream. I’m Diego right now for Ava,

which means I’m leading and she can close her eyes.

The Bunny invitation is still ticking in my pocket like a little

bomb.

R u coming tonite? one of them texted earlier this afternoon.

“I can’t dream that you’re Diego if you keep dancing like an

engineering nerd, Smackie. Panther-footed grace, remember?”

“Sorry.”

“What’s with you tonight?”

“Nothing.”

“You seem distracted.”

I should just text Sorry, sick and be done with it. Because I

shouldn’t go. Because even being in their vicinity, hearing their

childish voices from the other side of the room, hurts my teeth. And

yet the sun has set. And I have yet to say no. Probably they don’t

want me to come anyway. Probably they did it just to be nice. Nice?

No. Not nice, exactly. So they can say, Well at least we tried. She’s

the one who didn’t show.

See, Bunny? I told you she wouldn’t come. This is how she wants

it. She wants it like this.

Why, though? Creepy Doll will ask. She’ll be wearing the cat ears

they stuck on her head last Halloween that she has yet to take off.

I told you, Cupcake will say, petting her. She’s a freak.

Oh, you’re so funny, Bunny. I love you.

I love you, Bunny.

“Okay,” Ava says, “let’s stop.”

“Why?”

“You’re obviously not into this tonight.”

“No, no, I am,” I lie. “I am.”

“What’s going on with you?”

It’s now 6:30. I have to decide. I shouldn’t go. I just won’t go.

“I might have to go out tonight,” I say.

She raises an eyebrow. Understandably. In all the days that have

passed since we first met last spring, I’ve never had other plans.

“This thing at school,” I say.

“Didn’t we just go to one the other day?”

“This is another one.”

She looks at me. “You’re not sick of me, are you?”

“No. Never.” I say it fervently because it’s true.

“You can tell me, you know. I’m not going to cry or anything.”

I pull the invitation out of my pocket and hand it to her.

She doesn’t touch it, just looks at it.

“It’s probably from Caroline,” I say. “Cupcake?” I clarify, realizing

I’ve never shared their actual names with her.

She blinks at me, expressionless.

“The blond one with the perfectly undertucked bob and the pearls

and the blue orchid corsage on her wrist? You said she looked like a

Twinkie. Or a child of the corn going to prom?”

“They all look like Twinkies to me, Smackie: fake-sweet, squidgy,

unsurprising packaging. I’ll bet the ink on this thing is scratch-and-

sniff,” she says, snatching the invitation from me, scratching at the

cordially, and holding it up to her nose. “When did you get this

thing anyway?”

“It was in my school mailbox this morning.”

“So that’s why you’ve been weird all day.”

“I just don’t know how to respond. I feel like if I don’t . . .”

“Here,” she says, and pulls out her Zippo and holds it at the

corner of the shimmery invite.

“Wait,” I say. “What are you doing?”

“You’re not actually thinking of going to this party for dorks, are

you?”

“No.”

“So,” she holds the lighter up to the invitation again, this time

even closer, and looks at me. It starts to crackle.

“Wait, wait, wait.”

“What?”

“It’s just. Well, Workshop starts tomorrow.”

“So?”

“So it’s just going to be me and them again in class this semester.

Just us five.”

“And?”

“I’m just thinking of how not to be rude. When I say no. I mean,

I’m going to say no, obviously. It’s just . . . you know, these are the

women in my department, my . . . you know . . . peers.”

“Whom you call Cuntscapades.”

“I just have to figure out the right wording. So they don’t think I

hate them.”

She stares at me. “But Smackie, you do hate them.”

I look at her through my bangs, which she has encouraged me to

grow over my eyes. Makes you look punk, she says. I look at her

different-colored eyes, her bleached and feathery hair that is the

antithesis of Bunny hair, cut asymmetrically and shaved in places,

her fishnet veil that she wears like a threshold to be crossed only if

you dare. And here’s what I realize: she would never wear mittens

shaped like kittens or a dress with a Peter Pan collar. She would

never say, Love your dress, if she fucking hated your dress. She

would never say, How are you? if she didn’t care how you were. She

would never eat a lavender cupcake that tasted like perfume or wear

a perfume that made her smell like a cupcake. She would never

wear lip balm for cosmetic purposes. She would never wear it unless

her lips were seriously, seriously cracked. And even if they were,

she’d still put Lady Danger on them, which is the name of her

lipstick, this bright blue-red that looks surreally beautiful on her but

when I tried it on once made me look insane. Her perfume smells

like rain and smoke and her eye makeup scares small children and

she wears pumps even though she’s at least two inches taller than I

am and I’m a freak. Why? Because life is shorter than we are, she

says, so why beat around the bush?

“I do hate them,” I say quietly. “So I should just say no. I

mean . . . what do you think I should do?”

A faint smell of garbage rises up with the heat of the end of the

day. I stare at her for a while, but her face is absolutely deadpan.

She lights a cigarette. I gaze down at my legs in their bland, black

jeans.

After what feels like an unbearably long time, in which a wind

swooshes through her sycamore, a gusty wind that takes my breath

away briefly, that reminds me that we’re near the ocean even

though I’ve never seen it—but the Bunnies have, of course, because

one of them has a Mercedes SUV and they drive there on the

weekends and take pictures of themselves in Esther Williams–style

swimsuits, laughingly wading together into the white crashing

waves with arms linked—Ava says, “You should go if you want to

go.”

“What? I don’t want to go.”

“But you also don’t want to be rude, right? These are the women

in your department.”

She stares at me until I lower my eyes.

“Look, you don’t know what it’s like to be in class with them. To

be in Workshop with them. Maybe they’re trying to make an effort

this year. You know, to be nice or something.”

She snorts.

“I’m serious. And if I snub them, they’ll . . .”

“What? Tell me what they can possibly do.”

I think about last year. How they would look down at each story I

submitted like it was a baby that just gave them the finger, and then

side-eye each other for a long time.

It’s very . . . angry, they’d say at last.

Yes. Abrasive. For my taste?

Exactly. Sort of in love with its own outsiderness? Its own

narrative of grittiness? Of course, that could just be me. (Small

smile of deference.) Still. I do wish it would open itself up a bit

more.

“Look, I’ll go for like an hour,” I say. “Tops. Just to make an

appearance.”

“Whatever.”

“I’ll text you pictures of their apartment so you can see how

hideously twee it is.”

She nods. “Sure.”

“You could come along if you want,” I offer lamely.

“Don’t sweat it, Smackie. You couldn’t pay me all the money in

the world to attend that little soiree. Speaking of which, you

oughtn’t dally. Better hop along.”

“I’ll be back soon. Like later tonight even. Anyway, I’ll text you.”

She says nothing, just frowns into the book she’s cracked open,

like the book made a face at her, stuck out its tongue.

“Hey,” I think I hear her say as I’m starting to climb down the

ladder from her roof, but when I look up, she isn’t looking at me.

She’s still staring at her book. The wind picks up again, stirring the

pages, turning them this way and that, but she keeps reading like

she hasn’t lost her place at all.

he too had read Dante’s Inferno by candlelight, I was certain. Even

though I knew he knew there were worlds in me. One time, he pity-

danced with me to “Slave to Love” at the cast party. But that was it.

He was in love with Alyssa Fisher, who played Véronique, his

French mistress. He took her to prom. Waved at me from the dance

floor. Hey, Samantha.

But who wants to hear that story?

I look at these women now, their skins glowing a little in the

dark, gazing at me with such dreamy expectation, and even—is it

admiration? All but the Duchess. For a brief moment, I think she

can see me moping on the outskirts of the dance floor in my

regrettable Goodwill dress with the fire-breathing dragon on it,

watching Rob and Alyssa slow dance to some song I told myself I

hated anyway, wishing for a Carrie-like catastrophe to mitigate my

broken heart, my teenage scorn.

So instead I tell them how, on the last night that we died

together, just after the curtain came down but before the lights went

up, he held out his hand in the darkness and led me to the woodlot

behind the school. There, among the bare-branched quivering

aspens, Rob Valencia ravaged me like a wolf. I describe the

crunching of the many-colored leaves beneath us. How I stared up

at the gray sky while he performed miracles with his mouth. How I

sank my hands into the muddy earth as I orgasmed. How it was so

intense, the mind-body-spirit connection we experienced in that

woodlot as a result of dying together all those months, that, well, we

never spoke to each other again. When we were dying it was like we

were fucking. But when we fucked it was like we were dying. For

real. And after that . . .

“After that, what?” Cupcake prompts, breathless.

“After that, we were simply past language,” I say.

Silence.

“Hot,” Vignette says at last, raising a glass.

“So hot,” Cupcake says.

“So,” Creepy Doll adds.

I smile. Yes. It was hot, wasn’t it? I feel a small surge of shameful

pride. They liked my story. I like that they liked my story. I blush

and take another sip of Me, which is not bitter at all anymore. It’s

perfect.

“But also quite . . . sad, Samantha,” the Duchess says, looking at

me with her cocked head, her probing Zen face, a sudden warmth

and concern spreading over her features like a rash. “He broke your

heart, didn’t he?”

I nod. My lip quivers. Begins to twitch violently again.

They’re looking at me with such kindness. “It’s okay, Samantha.”

Tears fill my eyes. Real ones.

The Duchess puts her hand on mine and squeezes. “Let’s get you

another drink.”

wake up with my face mashed into my sagging mattress, still in

my clothes from the night before. There’s a red cloak on my

shoulders, a smell of cinnamon, baked lemony sugar, all the twee

things of this world rising from my own flesh, hovering in the stale

air around me.

How I got back here I do not remember. I recall headlights. A

twitching pink nose. Long gray-brown ears. The black gleaming bead

of an animal eye. A sky-colored cocktail the size of my head being

refilled and refilled by a girl with a rabbit face. A cocktail just for

you, Samantha, said the rabbit girl, pouring. Thank you, I said.

Thank you all. And I drank and drank of the cup. And I told them—

what did I tell them? All I remember is them nodding. Smiling. Yes.

Tell us, Samantha.

How much did I invent in the end? Probably a lot.

Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things?

my mother always asked me.

I don’t know, I always said. But I did know. It was very simple.

Because it was a better story.

I stare up at my cracked ceiling. The water stains that look like

jaw-baring beasts seem to have spread since the last time I was

here. The yellow light fixture has filled with more moth carcasses,

so now there is more moth than light. The towers of books stacked

against the walls are all in various stages of collapse, and the walls

themselves, thin and piss colored, which are all that separate me

from a perverted giant on one side and a sallow-faced girl on the

other, appear to have crept even closer together. The black vinyl

curtains, which came with the apartment and which a previous

tenant seems to have stabbed multiple times, are open, revealing a

view of chipped brick.

I haven’t been back home since I met Ava. Don’t live here, she

said, standing in my single room which she was much too tall for,

which she made seem impossibly sad and small with her height. I

don’t want to think of you living here.

It’s not so bad, I told her. Far better than my first apartment in

town, a tiny blue room in the cat-piss-infused basement of a sadly

unhinged Dutchman who claimed to teach at Warren, but who I

quickly found out was just a self-appointed, slightly horny

philosopher in desperate search of a pliant pupil. Better too than my

car, where I was forced to live briefly when the Dutchman wouldn’t

give my deposit back after I proved to be so “unteachable,” and our

stipends didn’t kick in until October. Or the undergraduate dorm I

squatted in for a short time after a faculty member caught me

sleeping in my car. When I locked eyes with him through my bug-

streaked windshield, I cursed myself for parking on such a leafy,

luxurious street, where even the dogs in the yards glowed with

money. It only took a few weeks of living among the truly, absurdly

rich in their incongruous prison dorms for me to decide to sell my

car, and that’s when I found this place. A single room on the west

side, which I really thought was just fine even though it didn’t quite

pass my suicide visualization test. Could I picture shooting myself

here? Definitely I could. Hanging myself? Sure. Some nights, I

could even see the noose swinging from the light fixture on the

ceiling. But I figured with a few well-placed posters, I might mute

the sound of my own future death cry that would sometimes flood

my ears upon entering this single room with galley kitchen. Perhaps

even write my masterpiece. Or at the very least, Think Great

Thoughts, Dream Big Dreams like full worlds you could wander. I

did none of these things here. What I did here was seethe about

petty things. Count the moth deaths. Think of money.

It’s really not so bad, I told Ava. Anyway, this is the only place I

can afford to live in without roommates. I can’t get work done with

roommates, I told you.

But she was already packing my things. You’re coming home with

me.

Now the place is pretty much empty, apart from some books and

a pine desk I found on the street, which I never worked at anyway.

And the mattress, of course, upon which I now lie, the weight of the

red cloak heavy on my shoulders. There’s a spiky flower in my fist.

Here, I remember the Duchess saying as she pulled it from her

silver hair. For you, Samantha. Their coos of sympathy are still in

my ears. Their finger pads still wiping tears from my cheeks.

Because I did cry. Why did I cry again? What did I tell them? Their

little hands patting my knees, shoulders, hands. Tell us another

story, Samantha. Another. How erotic. How gritty. How brilliant.

That’s when I see it perched on the outside sill of my window.

Looking in, looking right at me, or so it seems. Twitching its nose.

Slitty eyes black and shiny and peering right at me through the

smudged glass. Floppy ears hanging on either side of its face like

little-girl braids.

I scream until the sallow girl next door thumps the wall with her

fist.

Everything from the night before comes back to me. How I told

them about Rob Valencia. How we drank some more. At which point

the room began to sway like it was dancing, the pastel furniture

began to change shape. Their shadows on the wall seemed to

stretch. Their hair grew shinier and longer, their eyes red, and I did

not know which small hand belonged to which pink-and-white body,

which coo came from which glossy mouth, which fingers were

getting tangled in my hair. And then a voice like warm fur, her

balmy lips very close to my ear.

Go outside and bring us a bunny, Samantha.

I remember looking at them all, sitting equidistant from me,

mouths closed like purse clasps.

What?

You heard us, the Duchess said.

It’s actually really easy, Samantha.

Super easy.

There are like a ton of them on campus, haven’t you noticed?

Why? I asked.

It’s a dare, Vignette said.

How we round off every Smut Salon, Cupcake added.

I couldn’t tell if they were joking. Were they joking?

We never joke about bunnies, Bunny.

Bunny, did they just call me Bunny?

Yes, Bunny.

I dimly recall protesting a little about the darkness, about the

lateness of the hour, about the danger of going out at this time of

night in the streets. I slurringly cited the recent, horrific news—the

girl getting raped on her way back to the dorm, the boy who got

clubbed on his way home from the lab just the other night. And

then those rumors of actual decapitation, had they heard those

rumors?

We’re not asking you to go to the lab, Samantha. Just right

outside.

Never mind, Samantha, the Duchess cut in. It’s fine. It is getting

late. You’re right, you should probably be getting home.

No, wait, I said.

Me in Creepy Doll’s red-riding-hood cloak, drunkenly circling the

damp front lawn outside while they watched from an upstairs

window for I don’t know how long.

I still don’t remember how I got home. Did I walk? Take the bus?

Flashes come back to me. Waiting for the bus on her fancy street,

staring at the glittering sidewalks. Thinking every sound was a

machete-wielding maniac. Readying myself to tell him, I am not

rich. I am not one of Them. Do not judge a woman by her red cloak

soft as tiger pelt. There is nothing in these pockets but lint.

That’s when I heard the rustle. The sound of definitely disturbed

leaves. Crunched on. A shadow getting longer. Two shadows. Three.

Four. Seven. Emerging from the bushes.

I closed my eyes. Waited for the inevitable to fall upon me.

Waited for the blade to strike my neck. Please be quick. I said hi to

my mother in heaven, who I’d be joining soon. She shook her head

at me: You’re an idiot for going out after dark to hang out with

these cunts. You deserve your fate, she said. But yes, see you soon.

It’s nice here. There are all manner of purple flowers, there is the

shade of great weeping trees, there are golden-green leaves rustling

in the breeze and a late August light falls over everything. Not in

her voice, but Ava’s. Then it was Ava’s face I saw. Then nothing. No

club to my skull. No blade at my throat. On my neck nothing but a

fall breeze, very much of this world. And then into my lap,

something leapt. Small. Heavy. Soft. I looked down to find it gazing

up at me with its shiny black eyes.

See? hissed a voice from an upstairs window.

I lifted my gaze just in time to see a light go on then off. When I

looked back down, my lap was empty.

Is that what happened? Is that what I saw? There is simply no

way that is what happened. There is simply no way that is what I

saw or heard. No, I tell the bunny now sitting on my sill. There is no

way.

Now, I watch it leap off, leaving my barred window empty, the

view of a brick wall and New England sky in all the bleakness of

midmorning. The mist in my brain clears. Ava. I check my phone to

see if she texted.

Nothing but a troll emoji from Creepy Doll, followed by a tulip

and an open-armed ghost. And then, from an unknown number: Did

you make it home okay, girl? And then from another unknown number: See

you in class tomorrow

Class. Our first Workshop. I’ll go to the diner on my way there.

Where Ava and I always go in the morning. Where she drinks her

spiked gunpowder tea and draws the world as a series of zombies.

Her sky is full of lightning. Her sun has teeth. She gives all the

spoiled Warren girls gills, fangs, wings. She sets the frat boys on

fire. While she does this, I stare at New England. Sometimes I write.

Sometimes I just stare