been stunned, but not surprised, by the first man who hurt me while we were having sex, and I learned quickly to hurt others. Ever since, against my will, images of a more sadistic nature had been appealing to me, and sometimes I could click and click and click until I was watching things that gave me nightmares afterward.
And so I told her what maybe I should not have told her, which is that it would be older men who wanted her, men who were more confident, less cowed by her physical strength and size. That to a man even in his twenties, her youth itself would be enough to flood his mouth with saliva.
“Like how old?” she asked excitedly.
“No,” I said, “this is not an endorsement of you trying to find perverts to fuck you.”
“But like how old?”
“When you’re in college,” I said. “Boys then won’t be so scared. Someone will be lucky to date you.”
“Do you think a college guy would date me now?” she asked.
“Bunny, you could be a fucking camgirl if you wanted, it’s not about that, it’s about finding someone to have a real relationship with. Who will value you. Who will understand how insanely incredible you are.”
She let it drop, but I knew she wasn’t satisfied.
* * *
—
One of the terms we stole from RuPaul’s Drag Race was the concept of “realness.” They would say, “Carmen is serving some working girl realness right now,” and a lot of the time it just meant passing, that you were passing for the real thing, or that’s maybe what the word began as. But there were all different kinds of realness. In Paris Is Burning, which we must have watched a hundred times, a documentary about New York City drag ball culture, there were drag competitions with categories like Businessman or Soldier. Realness wasn’t just about passing as a woman, it was about passing as a man, passing as a suburban mom, passing as a queen, passing as a whore. It was about being able to put your finger on all the tiny details that added up to an accurate impression, but it was also about finding within yourself the essence of that thing. It was about finding your inner woman and letting her vibrate through you. It was about finding a deeper authenticity through artifice, and in that sense it was paradoxical and therefore intoxicating to me. To tell the truth by lying. That was at the heart of realness, at least to me.
I made Bunny play realness games with me all the time. I tried on her clothes. She tried on mine. We wore the same size shoes, as it happened. We practiced walking like boys, we practiced walking like girls. We did impressions of specific people. I was particularly good at imitating Ann Marie, a girl on Bunny’s volleyball team, but I could also do a convincing Principal Cardenas.
The thing about these games is that Bunny was absurdly bad at them. She couldn’t do it. She always seemed like a child overacting. When she tried to act feminine, she careened into strange Blanche DuBois territory. When she tried to act masculine it was all mid-’90s LL Cool J lip-licking weirdness. All her accents quickly devolved into Australian. And the thing about these games was that I was great at them in a way that scared us even as it made us laugh.
“Do my dad,” she said one day, “ooh, do my dad!”
I turned to her, finding almost immediately the way Ray held his mouth, the lips a little pooched, the way he raised one eyebrow higher than the other, the way his cheeks were a little flabby so they made his consonants too plosive, his vowels a bit sticky. “Bunny Rabbit,” I said, and I was prepared to go on, to say something like “And I’m not a racist, I love black people, but—”
Bunny screamed and leapt up to stand on top of the bed and began bouncing. “That was too good, that was too weird, oh my god, that was so weird.”
I laughed and said, “Really?”
“No, it was scary good.”
I tried to stop smiling, closed my eyes, and found him again in my mind. “Bunny, goddamnit, Coach Creely called because you’re failing trig, is that true?”
Bunny was jumping on the bed, squealing, “Oh my god! Oh my god, put on his clothes!”
“What? No,” I said, though I was fascinated by the idea, and it was not long before we had entered