first place. He’s only five nine. Like, you have to at least give him credit for that.”
“Maybe he got scared by how turned on you made him.”
“Why would that scare him?”
“Maybe he’s secretly gay and he was freaked out because he thought you figured it out.”
“That’s only slightly more believable,” she said. And she took in a deep breath, blew it out, then said, “Wanna go swimming?”
And so we did, and I even let her almost drown me in an effort to buoy her spirits.
As it turned out, it was Ann Marie, Tyler’s girlfriend, who had spread the gossip about Bunny biting Ryan Brassard. Ryan and Tyler and Steve were all on the wrestling team, and Ryan had told them what happened, but the gossip might have been contained to the world of ringworm-infested wrestlers had Ann Marie not been in the car when the story was told. Ann Marie was a special kind of being, small, cute, mean, glossy, what might in more literary terms be called a “nymphet,” but only by a heterosexual male author, for no one who did not want to fuck Ann Marie would be charmed by her. She was extra, ultra, cringe-inducingly saccharine, a creature white-hot with lack of irony. She was not pretty, but somehow she had no inkling of this fact, and she performed prettiness so well that boys felt sure she was. She had brassy golden hair and freckles and blue eyes slightly too wide set and bulging. Even though she was short, she played varsity volleyball with Bunny.
In a town like North Shore, where everyone had known everyone forever, there were many points of connection, and before I relate what happened next that fall of our senior year, I feel the need to enumerate each point of connection we shared with Ann Marie, or else the story simply makes no sense.
Bunny and Ann Marie had known each other since they were two years old because Bunny had attended the Catholic preschool that Ann Marie’s mother ran. (This was, of course, how Ann Marie, my sleazy imp of an informant, became aware that Bunny’s mother had been having an affair with Mr. Brandon.) Ann Marie’s mother, otherwise known to the children as Ms. Harriet, was the principal, and so as a two-, three-, and four-year-old, Bunny was disciplined by Ann Marie’s mother, and Bunny’s memories of her were vivid. What was most interesting and most frightening about Ms. Harriet is that she never said what you were expecting her to, and she was completely unmoved and unfrazzled by tears, fits, tantrums, and violence. She was calm not in a way that was kind, or soft, or in any way jiggly, Bunny said. Hers was a calm made of stone. Ann Marie’s mother loved no one and hated no one and was surprised by no one. She and Ann Marie’s father were divorced and divorced early. Ms. Harriet was well done with bullshit even by the time both girls turned two. Bunny could still remember one comment Ms. Harriet had made, quite calmly, to a boy named Liam, who was prone to hitting. “Do you like to be hit?”
“No,” Liam had said.
“Do you love people who hit you?”
“No,” he had said. How old was he? Three? Maybe not even that.
“So who is going to love you if you keep on hitting? Who is going to love someone like that?”
“No one,” the boy said, tears sliding down his cheeks as he studied the tile floor at his feet.
“That’s right,” Ms. Harriet said. “So you’ve got some thinking to do and some decisions to make. You can hit. Not anybody in this world can really and truly stop you if hitting is how you want to be. But if you do, you’re risking all that love that you could have. Because nobody, nobody, nobody, is going to stand around all day for you to hit just hoping to give you love in return.”
And then she ruffled his hair.
That was the thing about Ms. Harriet, Bunny told me. She was always almost right, but a little bit wrong in a way that was scary.
What must it have been like to be Ms. Harriet, watching her own daughter grow up side by side with Bunny? What did she notice about the two girls? What judgments was Ms. Harriet forced to make about her own daughter after seeing her so clearly among her peers? Most parents wonder, are all children like this? Is my child special