not make these fantasies end and would find myself hyperventilating and nauseated. Ann Marie was dead, and Bunny had killed her. That was a fact.
But Ann Marie’s corpse also felt like some kind of puzzle I was trying to solve. What did the inside of a person have to do with the outside? And were we all the same inside? Were our interior psychic organs all identical in the same way we each possessed a stomach and a heart and a spleen? Psychology seemed to be predicated on this assumption, that the psychology of one person would be comparable to the psychology of another. But what if it wasn’t? What if there were no organs of the mind at all? And what if, in our rush to think of the inside of a person as a corollary to the body, we misnamed ourselves? And what if in that misnaming, we turned ourselves into something unspoken and unspeakable?
All the things you couldn’t say! It seemed to me there were so many. And how were you supposed to get anything sorted if you couldn’t talk about it? Wasn’t language our best hope and our last stop before murder?
Bunny came sometime that night. I didn’t know the time, but it was definitely dark outside my window and Scottie was asleep and snoring sweetly.
“You look so much better!” Bunny cooed as she sat down, scooting the chair up closer to my bed.
“Oh, thank you, darling,” I said. “Being beaten almost to death does wonders for the skin.” I fanned my face so she could examine my pores.
“Oh, oh, oh, you are back! You are fucking back!” she cried, a little too loudly.
“Don’t wake Scottie,” I said, “he’s had a very long day. First, a Golden Girls marathon, and then a Designing Women marathon. We are exhausted, honey.”
“Has the hospital made you gayer?” Bunny asked.
“Perhaps! Perhaps! Maybe I’m just less inhibited because of the vvvvunderful drrrrugssss.”
“Whatever it is, I like it.”
“They say I could be released as soon as Thursday,” I said.
“That’s great.”
“But I can’t go home. Where the fuck am I gonna go?”
“Why can’t you go home?”
“Ugh, because Jason.”
“The farting?”
“No. He’s much more hostile these days.”
“He is?”
And suddenly I was crying. I covered my eyes with my hands, trying to wipe away the tears, but I could tell I was not going to recover and this was going to become a serious crying jag. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
“Oh, Mikey,” Bunny said, and climbed up into my bed. I had to scoot over painfully to make room for her, but her body was so big and warm and safe.
“Tell Auntie Bunny,” she said, and kissed my ear, my cheek, my hair.
“Well, you know how it happened?” I asked.
“No, I mean, I know you were beat up, but when I asked you before you said you couldn’t remember it.”
“Oh, I can remember it,” I said.
“Who was it?” Bunny asked, her voice so cold and serious I worried she would go out and murder whoever I said.
“Ann Marie’s boyfriend, Tyler, and Jonah Anderson, and Riley Masterson, do you know him?”
She nodded. She knew them all.
“And then, well, I think Jason was there.”
“You think?”
“I don’t have a clear visual memory of his face, only his voice and his laugh, and he only came halfway through and by then I was really out of it. But they were debating whether or not to pee on me, and—”
“To pee on you?” Her voice was rippling with hate.
“They didn’t, though,” I said. “They decided not to.” I tried to rearrange my hands on my stomach in a way that was more comfortable for my IV, and I felt like a prim old woman.
“Who else?” she asked.
“Bunny, you can’t tell anyone,” I said. “You can’t go out and beat them up. You have to promise. I’m telling this only to you. This information exists only within the sacred oasis of our friendship. I didn’t even tell the cops.”
“Why on earth would you not tell the police?”
I sighed. “I probably will if they ever come back; I just hadn’t decided what to tell them about Jason. I can’t—I can’t guarantee he was there. I can’t promise that my brain, during the horror of it all, didn’t just insert him.”
“So tell them that—tell them you’re not sure, but you think you remember him.”
I don’t know why that wasn’t the answer I wanted. “I don’t like police,” I said. “I don’t like lawyers and courtrooms. I don’t want those boys to