A monster was something malformed, afflicted by God’s wrath, and was a warning to the community to examine their moral standards. “Freak,” on the other hand, was a much jauntier word of much less certain origin, thought to have derived from Middle English friken, “to move nimbly or briskly,” from Old English frician, “to dance.” It is a wild move you unexpectedly bust out, a sudden change in tempo, and so a “freak of nature” is more a jaunty deviation from the norm than a sign that God is mad. In other words, I had always looked at Bunny as a freak, a beautiful, exciting, pulsating freak. But now Bunny worried she was a monster. Because on some level she had always seen herself that way.
She was deeply, morbidly ashamed. But her shame never managed to lead her out of herself and toward empathy for others, but instead led her into self-involved circles. Why had she been unjustly made this way? Why had this fate befallen her? She had no agency, it seemed. The question was not: Why had she done this? The question was: Why had God done this to her? Not that she believed in God either.
Perhaps I am being unfair. I think it astonished her that her friendship with Naomi had popped like a soap bubble. Where had it gone? It had seemed so tangible. Those girls had spent hours and hours together, took Spanish together, ate lunch together, went to practice together. And then it was all gone, vanished as if it had never been. Naomi had been straightforward about it too. The very first time Bunny texted her after the fight, Naomi had texted back within minutes: I’m sorry, I can’t be friends anymore. Donezo.
At school, almost especially because she wasn’t there to make them feel awkward, kids spoke about Bunny freely, their disgust bright in the daylight. They had always known there was something wrong with her. She was sick. They hoped she got help, but they also hoped she never came back to school again. And wasn’t it weird she didn’t have any real friends? Besides being a star athlete? Not that that could be helped when you were built like that. Poor Ryan Brassard, everyone agreed. In retrospect, he had been lucky to get only a bite on the ear.
I heard all kinds of things. I heard one girl volunteer that she knew for a fact that Bunny didn’t wrap up her used tampons in toilet paper but put them in the trash at school all bloody and exposed. I heard girls agree together that she had a weird way of scratching her boobs after she took off her sports bra. One girl posted a picture of the volleyball team on Facebook that went viral, in which, because of the perspective of the photo, Bunny, who was closest to the camera, seemed nearly twice the size of her classmates. Overnight, Bunny had gone from being the princess of North Shore—happy, popular, a varsity athlete, and daughter of one of the most influential men in town—to being a disgusting pig everyone agreed they had never liked.
I seethed. I wanted to scream, “Yeah, well, I remember when you went to her fifteenth birthday party and you certainly fucking liked the full-on carnival her dad put on in the backyard, and if I recall you threw up cotton candy right into their pool, so take your corny, basic, lip-kit idiocy right back to the YouTube channel you came from.” But I did not say things like that. When you are seventeen, no one demands moral continuity of social bonds. Everyone was trying on new personalities all the time, weren’t they? Innocent enough, wasn’t it? And this was just another one, a phase that they would remember when they were older: Remember when we were all united during senior year by hating Bunny Lampert?
And why shouldn’t they? Their friend Ann Marie was on a ventilator, in a coma, and her gel manicure was starting to grow out in an upsetting way. (Why was it so upsetting that Ann Marie’s fingernails kept growing? But it was!) Bunny was practically a murderer because Ann Marie could seriously die, and if she didn’t, then that was just luck. Bunny might as well be a murderer. In essence, her peers felt, she already was.
Bunny, who had never cultivated her social standing or even understood that she had any, that the friendlessness she had occasionally experienced before was far