with his napkin. “Thank god!”
“What’s it about, then?”
“Capital!” he cried, his face joyful, even resplendent. He sucked on his Diet Coke, and I saw the brown liquid come up through the straw and for a flashing moment I saw him as an ape. “Money is a more tangible thing than the Good, the Beautiful, or the True, right? I mean, I mean, money is about value, right? Whatever you value. Used to be, when you killed someone you just paid their family a lump sum, Beowulf and all that, right? A wergild. Man price. I don’t know, don’t worry too hard, Michael, everything’s made up!” He giggled again. “It’s all just made up!”
His phone buzzed. “All right,” he said, “she’s out.”
* * *
—
On the car ride home from the jail, I felt so elated to see Bunny again, to have her in the car, that it was like being in love. We sat in the back of her father’s car together, and held hands, and I remembered that first ride to Manhattan Beach together because Bamboo Forest’s egg drop soup was too watery, and the way Ray had gotten drunk and rammed the light pole, and the way we had walked home through the salt air, bathed by the whooshing noise of cars and the ancient churning of the Pacific. How light our bodies were as we walked, how easy it was to begin to love her, how nimbly my tongue managed to tell her the truth. It seemed to me that it had been much easier then to know what the truth even was.
“Are you okay? Was it terrible?”
“Not terrible,” she said. “I mean, I cried at night, which was embarrassing. But it wasn’t like the movies, no one tried to beat me up or anything.”
She knew, I presumed Ray had told her, that she was only temporarily free, that she would be remanded at her sentencing hearing. But it seemed indecent to speak of this, and we were all pretending that all of the bad part was over now, that she would never be parted from us again, that the two nights she had spent away were an aberration and that Ray and Swanson had saved the day.
I looked at her pink cheek as she watched the passing buildings through the window, and I wanted to gobble her up. I wanted to consume her. I wanted to tell her that I loved her and hold her tight. I wanted to smell her skin and close my eyes and beg God to let me keep her.
“Can we eat something?” she said. “The food in there was terrible.”
* * *
—
That night I startled awake, certain that someone was trying to break into my room through the window. I fell off the bed, and for just a moment my kidneys and liver flared, every nerve lit up in agony, and I was certain I had exploded them within my body. It had been weeks since I had felt anything more than mild soreness, and the pain evacuated the air from my lungs.
“Are you okay?” Bunny asked, and she was kneeling over me. She was wearing red lipstick and she stank of perfume as sweet and synthetic as new plastic.
“Why are you in here?” I asked. I had never seen Bunny in red lipstick before, and somehow in the dim moonlight it made her unrecognizable to me. Like this was a dream and her face was trying to turn into someone else’s face.
“I was going out the window,” she said.
“Why?” I asked. I already halfway knew, but I wanted to make her say it. Somehow, fury had opened inside me like a parachute, when I had been previously unaware of harboring any rage at all.
“Eric’s waiting,” she said, pointing at the window.
“Don’t go,” I said. “Don’t go fuck that shitbag.”
She shook her head, like she didn’t know what to say, tugged on her ponytail and turned away from me toward the window. I scrambled to my feet and put myself in front of her.
“Seriously. Don’t. Bunny, don’t go.”
“I’m just gonna go for an hour,” she said. “I’m coming back.”
“It’s not that I think you’re running away—it’s that you are not his two a.m. booty call. He can’t just text and then come get you and get a blow job and then let you go to fucking prison!”
“I. Want,” she said, saying the words slowly, with dramatic space in between each one, “To. See. Him.”
“It’s a bad idea,” I spit back