a period?”
“No,” I said. “I do not.”
“When you take a shit and you wipe, it looks like peanut butter and jelly.”
“And we wonder why you don’t have a boyfriend,” I said, stealing a gummy worm from the bag in her lap.
“Ugh. I know exactly why I don’t have a boyfriend,” she said. “Because I’m fucking eight feet tall. I’m a monster.”
“You’re not a monster. You have charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent, and you know it.”
“I’m never going to have a boyfriend. I’ll probably be, like, a forty-year-old virgin, all wrinkled from too much sun, and I’ll get stocky and thick, and everyone will just assume I’m a lesbian.”
“That’s pretty insulting to lesbians,” I said.
“I wish I were a lesbian,” she said.
“It’s never too late! Are you attracted to girls?”
She seemed to think about this, chewing thoughtfully on a gummy worm. “I think they are so, so pretty. I like to look at them. I think they look pretty naked. Is that enough?”
I wasn’t sure. “Does looking at them make you hungry, like, I want that, I want to squeeze that, I want to shove my face in that?”
She laughed. “No.”
“Then you are probably not fit to be a lesbian.”
“Do you feel that way about guys?”
“No comment,” I said.
“Can I tell you something?”
“Obviously you can.”
“Penises kind of freak me out.”
“In what way?”
“Like, they look like they don’t have enough skin. They look like naked mole rats, have you ever seen those? And they are all vulnerable and pink and everything, but then, like, hard and long and pokey? Sometimes just looking at a dick, like, if it’s alone, actually kind of makes me sick to my stomach, like one of those videos where they pop a big zit?”
Her honesty gave me the giggles. “If it’s alone?” I gasped.
“Yeah, I mean, like, not in the context of a porno, but like, just a dick pic, like just, wham, right there, erect penis, no context. That doesn’t gross you out at all?”
“Not really,” I said. But it had once. I could remember getting queasy when I first started cruising Craigslist. I had known enough to expect, even at thirteen, that I would see penises. But there were so many kinds, and sometimes they had weird veiny knots in them, or oversize heads on tiny staffs, or they were too pink, or so black I didn’t know they could be that black and shiny, slick purple, almost eggplant. But it had been the pictures of anuses that had been most alarming to me. Some of them were so well bleached and manicured that they looked like doll parts, but some of them were dark brown and hairy and scary looking. But I still felt very compelled to look at them, and gradually they had become less and less frightening to look at, but the fear and the excitement went together, were almost one thing.
“I wonder why sex is so terrifying,” Bunny mused. “Like, why is it this great big thing and so full of pleasure, but also, like, very, very frightening?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I was so embarrassed sitting on that bench, it was like I couldn’t even look up. I couldn’t look at anyone, or I would start crying, you know? It was like a public shaming or something. What were those things called? Where they would lock your hands and head in a piece of wood in the town square?”
“A pillory.”
“Yeah, it was like I was pilloried.”
“I’m sure nobody but you thought of it that way,” I said.
“Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Michael. I’m taller than all the students, but I always kind of was, or at least the second tallest. But I’m”—she sat up, leaned in, almost whispered—“I mean, Michael, I’m taller than the teachers. I’m taller than my dad.” Her eyes begged me to understand the unnaturalness of this, the constant pain of it. And I knew. I knew she had to lean down to hear her friends talk. I knew that if we went anywhere besides North Shore, where they were used to her, she would have to answer endless questions: How tall are you? Are your parents tall? Do you ever wear high heels? Do you have a boyfriend? People would ask her that, just, like, at the mall.
“I don’t know, Bunny,” I said.
“I mean, do you think there is something genetically, biologically wrong with me that I’m this tall?”
“Do you think there is something genetically, biologically wrong with