Bunny,” Ann Marie said with a laugh, “they should have named you Monkey!”
When the break came, it was quick and tawdry. Ann Marie and the other girls had a sleepover to which Bunny was not invited, and the mother of the girl whose house it was drove them all to Bunny’s house—she said it had to be the house of a friend, someone who would know they weren’t doing it to be mean—and she let them TP the entire front of Bunny’s house.
Ray Lampert was furious. He didn’t care what PC cant that mother had been spouting, Ray Lampert knew that you TPed the loser kid’s house, and this TP on his front lawn meant that Bunny, and himself by extension, were losers. Bunny was never to see Ann Marie again, Ann Marie was not to come to their house, she was to be entirely blacklisted. (Everyone had agreed on the fact that it was Ann Marie who had come up with the idea of TPing someone’s house and also the one who suggested they do it to Bunny Lampert.)
Bunny felt two ways about all of this. On the one hand, she was righteously angry. Ann Marie had made her father angry, and to Bunny there was no greater transgression. She took off her half of the best friend necklace and never put it on again. But she was also somewhat relieved. She had disliked Ann Marie for years but had suppressed this knowledge, and now she found great joy in not spending hours and hours being criticized and bossed around. (Ann Marie was the kind of kid constantly instructing other kids: “No, color it like this. Use this marker. No, you’re doing it wrong, it’s not supposed to be like that.”) Bunny decided at that point that girls were simply too complicated to be friends with, and she began playing basketball with the boys, who accepted and adored her immediately. After school she went skateboarding with them. They liked to travel in herds, buying candy and going from one of their houses to the next depending on which video game they wanted to play. It was heaven.
But by sixth grade, coincidentally the year I moved to North Shore, the other girls had figured out that Bunny had cornered the boy market, and these girls wanted the boys to be their boyfriends, and so they started playing basketball too. Bunny argued that they shouldn’t be allowed to play. They were girls. “But you’re a girl,” the boys replied, confused. They knew the girls would ruin the basketball game, but they were now more interested in the girls than they were in the basketball. And so Bunny’s paradise was ruined. Dates, which were nothing more than a group of boys and girls going to the mall together, began to be arranged. She would sometimes go on these, paired off with a boy who made it very clear to her that he was not really asking her on a date but wanted to include her out of friendship. She watched as Keith Moore spent money to buy sunglasses for Michelle, and this spending of money worked everyone into a froth, because it meant that Keith Moore maybe even loved Michelle, or else it meant that he had bought Michelle and now Michelle would have to kiss him or do whatever he wanted and be his slave.
As it would happen, Bunny began volleyball at around the same time, and so it was easy to let go of one world and dive into the next. Practice was a better place for her to be than at the movies platonically holding hands with a boy who told her about his crush on someone else. All of those girls, who had once been her best friends, and all of those boys, who had once been her best friends, were no longer her friends at all. And she entered high school mysteriously friends with nobody at all, despite the fact that she was well liked by everybody, and considered popular by dint of her father’s omnipresent quasi-celebrity.
In high school, Ann Marie found true ascendancy. All of the things that had made other children dislike her, the overly high spirits, the bossiness, the meanness, suddenly made her attractive to both boys and girls. Her preening, always fussing over her hair, her clothes. When she complained that her mother had bought her the wrong socks and these ones looked cheap, every girl around her looked down at