We Love You, Bunny - 1

WE LOVE YOU, BUNNY

a novel

by

Mona Awad

P R O L O G U E

Hi Bunny.

It’s been a little while, hasn’t it?

We missed you, we really did.

So much.

And look at you now, wow . All gothed out again. Back to wearing your scary-bleak clothes and your dark hair still hanging in front of your eye, how funny. You’ve been busy since we last saw you, haven’t you? Very busy, apparently, scribble-scribbling in the dark. Publishing your little novel . About us, so fun. And it’s enjoyed a somewhat moderate success. Good for you! Amazing, really, what people will read nowadays. That’s why we brought you up here, in fact, to Kyra’s attic (remember this attic?) for a little congratulatory toast among old friends. A cozy reunion of sorts with your former MFA cohort, those you’ve left in the literary dust so to speak, hahaha. Not that we’re bitter, Bunny, oh my god, not at all. We’re raising our glasses to you aren’t, we?

What’s that, Bunny? You can’t raise your glass?

Oh because of the restraints, that’s right.

Sorry about those.

Well, we’ll toast for you, how’s that? We could use a bit of a tipple, frankly, under the circumstances. A little Light and Sunny, remember those?

Oh we wouldn’t squirm in that chair so much, Bunny, not if we were you. It’s just going to cause more bruises on those wrists, that neck, so like a swan’s…

But we digress.

Sorry again we had to tie you up a little. But it’s just so very lovely to catch up like this, isn’t it, just the five of us here in the dark? You all cozy in your chair and the four of us standing close and adorable in our rabbit masks, making a semi-circle of such love and understanding all around you, our dresses shining prettily by the light of the Hunter’s moon. It’s a Hunter’s moon tonight, Bunny, oh yes. Look at it full and glowing through the window (on Hallow’s eve no less!), and the night so beautifully full of screaming. Your screaming included. Probably you’ve dreamed of this moment, haven’t you? We have too, trust. And when we saw on the Warren student listserv that our very own former peer was coming back to town, on tour for her debut novel, the first among our cohort to publish, we thought, Why not make those dreams a reality? Why not support our old friend Sam Mackey ? Or Samantha Heather Mackey, as you so very inventively called yourself in your novel (going for autofiction, were you?). We did enjoy that little wink to the 80s film, by the way, that softening touch to a name otherwise so evocative of your own boyish will . Despite the way you left things, Samantha , despite the unpleasantness, we really felt support was the grown-up thing to do. Our therapist even said it might be good for our Healing Journeys. Put the past behind us and such. Be a good literary citizen and such. Buy a copy of her book and read it, very adult-like, not at all screaming bitch , not at all vomiting. Fly back to this New England town, the town of our old alma mater, and attend her reading at the Warren University Bookstore, we all had this idea, it seems! The hive mind is not entirely dead, it seems. Awakened, perhaps, by your betrayal.

So funny, your face, when you saw us in the audience, by the way. How we were applauding you, not with our hands so much, but with our eyes. You sort of froze for a minute didn’t you, at your podium, at the sight of us sitting there in the very back row, each of us in a different color dress so that together we made such a happy rainbow, we embodied the holy elements of earth, air, water and fire. So smiling at you. So supporting. You sort of cried a little when you first made eye contact, didn’t you? We did too, Bunny.

They were joy tears, promise.

Your reading was so amazing, we meant to tell you. And funny! So funny how you made us into axe-wielding monsters. So very hilarious how you divulged our most tender secrets. We laughed until we cried, we really did. What’s that you’re saying, Bunny? We’re having just a little bit of a hard time understanding you through the gag we put in your mouth. Or maybe it’s the drugs making you drool like that. We mixed just a sprinkling into your bookstore wine earlier, which we bought you out of mercy really (you were so nervous!). And though you accepted with some hesitancy, Bunny, you did drink. Drank it all down in fact, didn’t you? Perhaps out of the stress of the situation, which we totally get. Sometimes it’s stressful to see old friends, we agree. Or maybe it’s being back here in the attic, where it all began. Workshop. The bunnies, the boys, the blood, so much blood. The beautiful sacred thing we allowed you to be a part of, out of the kindness of our fucking hearts. The axe is still here too, look at that. Right here in the corner where we last left it, how serendipitous. Even a few flecks of blood on the blade still. Are they fresh flecks? Oh, we don’t know, Bunny. Maybe they are! God knows what we’ve been up to here, right? Only two springs ago but it feels like an eternity now, doesn’t it? Since we all graduated from this hell place and went our separate lonely ways into the cold, wide world?

Feels good in our hands now though, the axe. Feels like old times. We still know how to strike and to grip, it looks like. Like riding a bicycle really.

Funny how it all comes back.

What have we been up to? Oh, busy. Very busy, just like you, Bunny. Reading your book and screaming, hahaha. Dreaming of revenge scenarios, hahaha . Sharing these scenarios during therapy, getting carried away sometimes in the color and wonder of them, until our killjoy therapist says that’s enough for today , hahaha. No but seriously, we really do love our therapist, he’s a wonderfully kind and thoughtful human. How he just sits there in his leather chair on Zoom and stares so compassionately at the squares of us, saying Tell me , tell me . He’s helping us, so much, to reconnect with our creativity. Since you destroyed our souls, we sort of lost our way, sad to say. But we’re working to get it back, working on our own stuff right now actually. It’s going so well. Tonight’s actually a big part of our Creative Journey, believe it or not.

And you, you’re a big part of it too.

Oh don’t cry, Bunny! We’re not going to kill you, don’t be silly! This isn’t your novel , this is reality , remember? We’re not murderers IRL despite the very ick brush with which you chose to paint us. No, no, we’re just going to have a little chat is all, one by one by one by one. Taking turns with you in our telling, doesn’t that sound fun? Sort of like the ultimate Smut Salon. (You remember Smut Salon, don’t you?) As for your novel , well, we have no intention of commenting, don’t worry, k? About all of that: no comment , as they say. Except that you got it wrong. So fucking wrong. About us.

Axe-murderers? Please.

(Oh best not to struggle, Bunny, it will only make the restraints more ouch.)

So what are we going to say? Oh how we’ve thought and thought about this! Our therapist recently put us through something like a writing exercise, remember those? Imagine, he said softly, if you could sit Samantha down and say one thing, what would it be? And he looked at us with his too-blue gaze that eerily recalled all we had made and lost, and we knew exactly. What we would fucking say. Not that you were a liar. Not that you were a treacherous psycho ho’s beast, no no. Fuck talking about you .

Instead we thought we’d tell you the story, the lovely little story, Bunny, of us .

How we came together that first year.

How together, we broke reality and basically reinvented the laws of the natural world.

How we too made something beautiful once, oh yes. More beautiful than anything you could ever dream in your small, small mind. And real too. Before. Long before you ever walked into the picture. When you were nothing, in fact, but a small dark speck in the corner of our minds and eyes.

Oh what’s that you’re trying to say, Bunny? Your publicist is expecting you at your hotel tonight, is she? You have a train to catch in the morning, do you? You have another city, another bookstore to visit on your tour of lies? We don’t know if you’re going to make that train tomorrow, Bunny. Maybe, maybe not. Depends on a lot. We’ll see how you do as an audience, how’s that? Coraline wants to start, don’t you, Bunny? Cupcake , we believe you called her in your telling.

But your telling is over now.

So sit back, relax and listen , k?

Because here tonight in the moon-splashed dark, it really is high time for us to make something beautiful again.

C U P C A K E

Hi there, Bunny. Remember me? So clever of you, truly, to reduce me to a baked good. So funny that you described me as a maniacal hair braider or…what was it again? A child of the corn going to prom ? I’m not going to comment further on your novel (we agreed to not) except to say that when I perused it during a rehearsal break (I’m back in theater now, by the way, oh it’s very lucrative!), I laughed until I cried blood. So funny, how you let your imagination just run away with you like that. How you really don’t know anything at all. About me or us or even like reality, really. I’ll just hang onto the axe while we talk, is that okay with you? I’ll just get a bit closer to you physically also. So you can see my dress up close, the color of dreamy skyscapes tonight. Smell my lemony-sugar smell which I know turns you on a little, Bunny, don’t deny it. In your novel (which I won’t mention again ever), you even said you wanted to eat me when you first saw me, didn’t you? I knew that. Could sense your hunger, both writerly and sexual, from the start. Could see it in your crazy eyes, through your bitchy hair curtain black as night, and it explains so much. It’s why I didn’t take any of your lies about me or your very bad prose personally, not at all. I took it, instead, as a very elaborate, yet ultimately crude fan fiction. Let me get even closer to you now, so we can whisper, just you and I, if need be. So you can look right into my anime eyes while I set some things straight as it were. About how it all started, Bunny. Before the boys and the axe. Before the magic of this attic was made known to us. Before we were even made known to each other. I actually fought to be the first one to tell because believe it or not (and on this point we sometimes disagree) it all began with me actually. Yes, me Caroline. I mean Coraline .

It began with me, Coraline.

What a Herculean effort you made to disguise my real name, by the way.

1

Before we were One we were four, weren’t we? Oh so very long ago. The beginning, really. To go back there, we have to go all the way back to that first year, that first fall, don’t we? A most strange and beautiful fall it was, remember Bunny? Of course you weren’t Bunny then, and neither was I. I was Coraline from Virginia. My very first time in New England. I remember the golden light of September still. How it shone so prettily on that first day, all over this creepy-lovely town named after God and fate. How it shone on the illustrious campus of Warren, most Ivy of schools, which was my campus now. How it shone down on me that late afternoon as I made my way to the Welcome Party for the new MFAs. An exclusive group, I was told. Best of the very fucking best. A smile wavering on my face thinking of how I was one of them now . An honest to God graduate student in one of the most cut throat, hard-to-get-into programs in the country, Bunny. The highly experimental Narrative Arts program, which Mother hissingly called Fiction.

The Welcome Party was in a very white tent on the prettily manicured green among the hundreds-of-years old trees. I went to the party alone, of course. Walked in my sky blue mary janes from my new apartment just blocks away from campus. Even though I had a really lovely car, Mother’s old BMW, I walked. Alone, did I mention that already? Scary. First day of school is what it felt like. Five years old all over again, that’s how it felt. I remember the lone click of my footsteps in the golden evening, among the lengthening shadows. Crows cawing all around me, making the air sound like death. Sure I was afraid despite my smiling.

Don’t be afraid, Mother had laughed when she’d said goodbye earlier. It’s only an art degree, for god’s sake, Button. Just writing stories, isn’t it?

Yes, Mother , I’d said, not wanting to get into it. That it was my actual fucking soul in those stories.

Well, then, Mother had said, what is there to be afraid of?

Nothing , I’d smiled. Nothing at all . And I’d gripped my razor blade, hidden in my dress pocket where I liked to keep it, Bunny. (I still do keep it there in fact.) You’re absolutely right as usual, Mother , I’d said. And Mother had smiled. Don’t disappoint us please.

The party was hell at first, of course it was. So many poets. So many old people, probably professors. All them pale as vampires, wearing gradations of black that hurt my eyes. Talking softly to each other in small clusters, smirking like they thought they were so so smart and probably they were so smart was the awful thing. The frames of their eyeglasses were very conceptual. Everyone’s hair was so intimidatingly feathered and asymmetrical, such artful chaos everywhere you looked, that for the first time in my life, Bunny, I became self-conscious of my perfectly under-tucked bob. And then the conversations all around me, Bunny. About the Process and “death of the author” or whatever and obscure French writers I’d never heard of, and me trying so hard to smile politely at everyone, and everyone looking at me, Bunny, at my oh-so-polite smiling, like I was insane. I suffered. So much social agony. (You’re not the only one who knows social agony, fyi.) Alone, I leaned against a white Doric pillar bedecked with billowing tulle for what felt like forever, clutching the razor in my pocket between my so sweating fingers, and there I almost died a thousand deaths. Yet I was still smiling stupidly.

What do we do with a frown, Button? Mother always said.

We turn it upside down , Mother.

I remember I was wearing this sky dress which, as you can see, Bunny, has an actual blue sky on it complete with billowy white clouds. My hair was freshly bobbed into Louise Brooks and dyed what Mother called frigid blonde but I called Grace Kelly. I remember the tulle floating around me, grazing my bare shoulders like it was saying Hi, hi, you’re not alone . I closed my eyes each time it did. I remember the trays of hors d’oeuvres and chilled champagne and how I was holding a flute, drinking the sparkly bubbles far too fast, nearly crushing the glass in my white gloved hand. I remember rabbits hopping on the distant green, in and out of my field of perception, and how I thought nothing at all of it then. What I thought was I hate it here . What I thought was this is all so fucking embarrassing . Not just this party but coming here at all. To New England. To Warren . To be a writer . Not at all what Mother, probably halfway back to Virginia by now, wanted for me. Mother’s dreams for me were much bigger than the Academy. She’d said as much over the moules frites we had at the nearby French bistro earlier that day. The bistro was painted all red inside like maybe it was hell. There was a giant stone rabbit’s head on the wall right beside our table, mouth open like it was roaring. It was backlit by a red light like it was the animal god of the bistro. I was aroused by it slightly, I didn’t know why. But at least it’s ivy league, Coraline, Mother was saying. There is that. And she took a very long sip of her sauvignon blanc, which is the Episcopalian way of thanking God. Mother reminded me that I could always return to theater, be on stage like I wanted, even on screen like I wanted, right alongside Ryan Gosling like I wanted, if only I would throw up more and learn to memorize better. I looked down at my side green salad, its shavings of pecorino and smattering of lardons which I had asked them to take off, please but which they’d put on anyway. Inside, I started to cry. But I said Thank you so much for the feedback Mother, I’ll give that some thought.

Now looking around this tent, at these tables full of writers talking softly to each other, I sort of wished I had. Learned to throw up more. I was ready to leave. To burn my own notebook even though it held my heart’s blood, to fuck my own small dreams. Some people were sort of smirking at my sky dress, I saw, and I started to feel stupid in it. It’s the world that is stupid , Mother always said, and I clutched that idea like I clutched the razor. Thinking how nice the blade would feel against my inner thigh flesh, Bunny. I should go to the bathroom, get in a locked stall, and maybe do that for a little while. Nick at my soft skin. Watch the blood bloom there in the prettiest red dots, like tiny roses. I was about to go looking, when I saw something that made me stay.

Some one , Bunny.

A girl. Standing so petite and alone by a tulle-bedecked pillar like I was, eating a small plate of pastries very quickly. She was wearing a dress patterned with the greenest grass, it was the grass that caught my eye. There were strange-looking flowers growing in that grass, I didn’t know their names. She looked very lost, like maybe she was in a fairy tale wood, at least metaphorically speaking. She kept glancing over her shoulder for the proverbial wolf or the witch, the thing that might gobble her up. It was there, her eyes said, oh yes. It would show up any minute. She had the shiniest red hair and her face was like a small, scared heart. Like a doll , Bunny, yes. One I might have clutched in my own bedroom dark. One that was so pretty I might have hated her a little, even as I loved her so much. But pretty as this girl was, she was also sort of hunched over her pastries like she wanted to disappear. Funny she was wearing gloves too, white like mine. Seeing those gloves and that grass dress, seeing her scared-heart face, made me smile for the first time since I got to this hell place. Yes, Bunny, like you, I thought this town was a hell place too at first. A violence in the air that was almost crackling.

Anyway, I and this doll girl, we were suddenly walking toward each other, weren’t we? Our steps on the twitching grass, echoing each other’s.

“Kyra,” her hot pink mouth said her name was. (Or Kira as you called her. Your creative powers were just on fire, Bunny). Her bright thick lipstick, that’s what I couldn’t take my eyes off. A shade that reminded me, strangely, of some past unpleasantness. Lipstick is for whores , Mother always said.

“I’m Coraline,” I told this girl. My mouth was terribly dry, but my lips were balmy, always, with a rose flavored gloss that I often licked off because it was so delicious, even though Mother told me to stop it, it was sluttish and it was calories and it would ruin their shine. For the first time that day, I felt the shine of them as I spoke. The effect of that shine on this girl, deep in her vertebrae.

“I love your dress,” the girl named Kyra said. She wasn’t looking at it though. She was looking into my eyes. Straight into them which made my skin hum a little. Music played a little somewhere in my mind, a pretty Stereolab song about flowers and nowhere.

“I love yours,” I said. I wasn’t looking at her dress either.

“You’re like the sky to my grass and flowers,” she said, laughing a little. She had a weird high laugh, I thought.

“You’re like the grass to my sky,” I said.

“And look,” she said, holding up her white gloved hand which, yes, matched mine exactly, the hand that was crushing the flute (the other was in my pocket, ever gripping the razor). She looked at our gloved hands like this might be a magic thing. Like we might be a magic thing. A world all our own.

“We match,” we whispered.

Yes, we said it at the same time, with the exact same quality of whisper. Even though we were not One yet. Did a bunny hop by just then? We thought we sensed one dart into a nearby bush, out of the corners of our eyes and minds. Like fate. Like it was telling us.

Like it fucking knew even way back then.

“Are you Fiction?” she said then. It wasn’t really a question. More a confirmation of what she already knew.

“Fiction,” I said. “Yes. I am. First year. Just arrived.”

“Same.” She smiled now. The tiniest whitest teeth. So sharp and shining, like little pearl blades. I felt the golden light of September breaking inside me, breaking through the clouds of my sky dress. She told me things and I didn’t listen, the Stereolab song was playing so loud and pretty in my head now. Something about how she was so glad I was here, so glad we found each other, etc. She hated parties so much. Unless she had someone to talk to, of course.

“I also hate parties,” I whispered. Thinking of Mother’s many parties. How I held the trays of cocktails and canapes, while her friends floated around me and I pictured stabbing them or myself. “Unless I have someone,” I said.

“Well now we have each other maybe,” the doll girl, Kyra, offered shyly.

Do I have you? Do I have you please? asked her lovely eyes. Slightly in love and also slightly afraid of me, I saw. I became Mother then. Felt her cool smile on my balmy lips. I licked them slowly. “Maybe .” Loosening my grip on the razor a little. I looked down at her plate of Alice in Wonderland pastries, each one bitten into by her so small teeth. Suddenly I was hungry, almost wolfishly so. “Delicious,” I whispered. “Wherever did you get those?”

“Oh just there,” and she pointed to a long white table full of easter egg colored treats.

But it wasn’t the table I noticed when I looked over.

It was another girl, slouched by the table’s edge, watching us.

“Who’s that?”

Kyra shrugged, wrinkled her nose. “Who knows? A poet probably .”

“Poet,” I repeated, staring at the girl. She was shoveling pastries into her mouth and grinning like what she was doing was sexually gratifying. She had the most Victorian face. Like she might faint or get tuberculosis any minute. Yet there was a fuck you quality to her eyes. It arrested me, Bunny. She was wearing a gross grunge-y plaid, like her beauty was trying to graffiti itself. Terrible, yet I couldn’t look away. I was mesmerized by her aggressively unbrushed hair that I immediately longed to tie into complex knots I discovered on the internet. She stared at us with her fuck you eyes and smiled. How that smile warmed me strangely. She was alone, I saw. Good. Less scary. As we approached her, for Kyra and I walked over to her just as we had walked to each other, her eyes seemed to shift and soften. No more fuck you there. They appeared now like the prettiest murky grey waters of old.

“Hello,” we said to her at the exactly same time.

She blinked at us, amused, maybe a little alarmed, by our synchronicity. So was I. She took in our gloved hands, our fit-and-flare dresses, her watery gaze lingering on my sky. “Pretty clouds,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said. “I love skies,” I added, stupidly.

“I love them too,” the girl said, very seriously.

“I love them too,” Kyra whispered.

“Has anyone ever told you you look like a mermaid from the nineteenth century?” I blurted at the girl. Then blushed furiously.

She grinned, shook her head. “No.”

“You do,” I said quietly to the grass. “If I braided your hair into a fishtail, you’d see. Very mermaid-y isn’t, she?” I asked Kyra.

“If mermaids wore plaid,” Kyra said coolly, staring at her.

“Are you Fiction?” I asked her, even though I already knew. Sensed it.

“Am I Fiction ?” She smiled slyly like the idea pleased her.

“One of the new incoming Fiction cohort, she means,” Kyra clarified, which annoyed me a little. “One of our highly select group ,” she added, quoting the acceptance letter. “One of the Five.”

The girl was still staring at my clouds in a way that made my cheeks burn, not unpleasantly. “Am I Fiction,” she repeated again slowly, smiling still. “Oh yes. Absolutely.”

“Exciting,” I said. “Now that you’re here, I’m less scared.” I don’t know why I said that, Bunny. Was I less scared? Or was I more?

“So exciting, so much less scared,” Kyra echoed. She definitely looked more scared.

“I’m less scared too,” the girl whispered, looking into our eyes. “Though fear can be hot sometimes.”

Viktoria she said was her name, which was alarmingly perfect. Maybe that’s why you pretty much kept it as is, Samantha (such a heady mix, your prose, of verisimilitude and bald- faced lies). Except you crudely switched out the Russian k for the boring English spelling. But there was one lovely detail about her name you omitted: “I go by Vik,” she said, looking at just me, which, I don’t know Bunny, was somehow more perfect still.

“I love your dress,” I told her. Which was fucking stupid. She wasn’t even wearing a dress at the time. You must stop complimenting people willy-nilly, Button, Mother said. You aren’t fat anymore and it comes off desperate . Sticky and sweaty and slutty. And no one likes that . But when I looked at Vik, I could see it, Bunny. Could see her in a dress as oceanic as her eyes. The braids I would twist into her auburn hair, those medieval knots for which she was always destined.

Vik smiled. “Thanks,” she said. Sort of like a boy might. Her voice caused a shiver in the place where the razor goes. “I love yours too,” she said, still lost in my clouds. I reached out and took her hand and she took mine. Her fingernails, I saw now, were very disgusting. Almost willfully so. Like she had maybe been on her hands and knees in the dirt, clawing mud just before she came here. Still, I didn’t let go. I held her gross hand and it’s very funny to say, Bunny, but something seemed to course through me then. Some kind of energy though Mother would kill me for using such a word. It was energy. Between me and this mermaid girl in plaid with the unbrushed hair. Vik.

Hand in hand in hand we three walked to a table, far away from everyone. There, we found our own heaven complete with orchid centerpiece. There, we demolished Kyra’s Alice pastries, especially Vik. She wolfed them down with her hands in a way I found both boorish and exhilarating. She was so thin, I could see that even through the gross plaid. Where would the pastries even go on her slender body, I wondered. I watched her eat thinking don’t want, don’t want . Knowing exactly, exactly where they would go on my own body.

“Have you met anyone else yet?” I asked, to make conversation. Couldn’t help it, Bunny, I’d gone to Smith, breeder of daffodils and future First Ladies.

“I’m not here to meet, just to make ,” Vik whispered.

Kyra and I looked at each other. Make?

“ Make what?” Kyra whispered back.

Vik looked at us coolly, her lips glossy from all that buttery pastry she’d inhaled. “Whatever turns me on.”

“You mean stories ,” Kyra said, which spoiled something. I looked at Vik who made a snorting sound.

“If that’s what you want to call them. I’m interested in other techniques. Other forms.”

“Other forms?” I whispered. I wondered if she’d gone to Oberlin. She looked at me and grinned, almost like she knew my writing sample had included, among a few tender prose pieces, a photo of my inner thighs, freshly etched.

“Such as?” Kyra said. The grass on her dress seemed suddenly pricklier, primmer to my eyes. Could I name those flowers on her dress after all?

Vik looked at us both. Her mouth was half open even though she had no words just yet. Her hair took on a golden quality then, the sun glowing right above her head. Almost prophet-like. “Hybridity,” Vik whispered.

“Hybridity,” I repeated, entranced. “Huh.” For I’d never heard such a word, Bunny. But it sounded magical.

“Like experimental stuff?” Kyra said. “What I might read in an obscure literary journal?”

Vik just smiled.

“Hybridity,” Kyra repeated. “Funny, I always thought that was just a term for when you don’t know what you’re doing, am I wrong? Like when you can’t write an actual story or something.” And she laughed her high weird laugh. It didn’t sound so much like music then. Her pedigree was Yale or Princeton probably. One of Warren’s more boring Ivy sisters. I could see the gargoyled library in which she’d likely wiled away her days, writing Jane Eyre fan fic.

“I always thought stories were for tight asses,” Vik said. “People who are afraid of getting their hands dirty in the space that begs us to get dirty.”

We looked down at our white gloves then, Kyra and I, didn’t we, Bunny? Simultaneously we slipped our hands under the table. And Vik smiled, didn’t you, Vik? Bunnies hopped behind her on the green. White tails once more darting in and out of our perception. She seemed like our queen already, our queen of filth and mystery. Then her expression shifted. She looked out into the middle distance almost like she saw something divine break open in the sky.

“Look,” she said, a little wonder in her voice. And I was suddenly very jealous, terribly so. Why was she not looking at me anymore?

Then we saw. One of the Fiction faculty was now in our line of sight. The only faculty who mattered to me: Ursula Radcliffe, as you called her in your little novel. Fosco , too, wasn’t it, after the gothic villain in The Woman in White ? Oh we know, all too well, how you feel about Ursula, Bunny. I’ll call her Ursula too so as not to confuse you, given your precarious mental state at the moment, even though this really isn’t about you, Bunny. It’s about us, about me. And for me, back then, Ursula was my Word Witch. Ursula made the word flesh and the flesh word. She was the conjuror of Life in the novel. The reason I came to Warren at all. Also she had the best author photo. How I loved loved the way her long white blonde hair flew all around her head, almost like she was being cosmically electrocuted. True, she wore lipstick, an iridescent porny pink, but I forgave her because of her eyes, the color of dog violets. The way she stared into me, Bunny, as if she could actually see me lying there in my princess bed with the celestial patterned sheets, dreaming myself into her erotic story spaces. She was the author of my very favorites. Arias of the Solar Plexus. Lamentations: A Bestiary . And of course, her most seminal work, To Catch a Crystal Thief of the Heart .

I noticed then that Vik had the Crystal Thief tattooed on her forearm, beneath the rolled sleeve of her gross plaid. His dark, leporine eyes and leaf-shaped ears gleaming on her soft white flesh. I looked back at Ursula. She was talking to a young woman with long silver hair now. The young woman was very pale and thin, as thin as Mother’s dream for me. She was so terribly beautiful I felt physically wounded by her face. The girl was wearing casual nude linens, I could feel the rich of them from here. She looked like a yoga retreat. A girl for whom the word summer was both a noun and a verb. Her silver hair was spiky with birds of paradise and when she looked at me, her eyes were like the very coldest blue jewels. Burning my retina like when you stare directly into the sun. Who fucking was she? Was she Fiction too? Why was she talking with Ursula, her mouth so close to Ursula’s? I was curious, maybe jealous, and I didn’t even know of who anymore, Bunny. To Vik, I no longer even existed. Ursula and this other girl had her eyes.

“Should we go up and say hi?” I asked. Gripping the razor tight again.

“They seem like they’re having a really intense conversation,” Vik said. “Like they’re communing.”

“ Communing ?” Kyra repeated, sort of with a laugh in her voice, echoing my very thought. She wanted me to laugh along with her but I didn’t, Bunny. Between you and me, she already sort of felt like a littlest sister. The grass to my endless sky.

“What about?” I whispered to Vik, my eyes on Ursula and the silver-haired girl.

“Maybe they’re talking about hybridity ,” Kyra said. Underneath the table she was holding my hand (the one not holding the razor) tight. Probably we were already beginning to fuse. Vik was still hovering on the edge. I stared at Ursula. Look at me , I thought, I’m the one . And that is very important to remember, Bunny. That at this point, I still had my own singular mind.

Then Ursula saw me at last. My soul, Bunny, it caught a kind of blue fire then. And both she and the jewel-eyed girl smiled wide. Smiles of knowing.

Of Just you wait .

2

After the party, it was dark. The town had no more golden light at all and it truly looked like a hell place. Even though my apartment building was only blocks away and I had a rape whistle in my cloud purse, and a can of mace Mother bought me off the internet (also in my cloud purse), I felt afraid. Not in Kansas anymore, Bunny. Fucking literally. I had the razor too, of course I did. I never really let go of that, not even as I stood there in the dark with Kyra, gloved hand in gloved hand. I could hold the razor in one hand and Kyra’s in another. I quite liked this combination in fact.

Vik took off, disappeared into the dark, her plaid shirt and her wild hair mingling so easily with the shadows. She was there and then she was gone like a Cheshire cat. Only her voice remaining.

See you in Workshop tomorrow , she said.

Tomorrow , I whispered. That’s right. There was class tomorrow. Workshop. Our first. Scary , Kyra agreed. And then I remembered Ursula would be our teacher. That made me smile. Ursula who’d smiled at me just now like she knew I had a razor in my pocket. She knew of the sweat on my finger pads, of my urge to desecrate my own thigh flesh. She knew how only minutes ago, I’d been dreaming of a bathroom stall in which to do this. Perhaps to carve a short and terrible word there or maybe to draw something pretty. She knew and it was all going to be part of my Creative Journey, she was going to show me how to turn it into something else, something beautiful and powerful and transcendent, Bunny. But then she’d turned away. And when she did, it was like a darkness suddenly fell over the proceedings, over the party, over myself. The sun went behind a cloud. The tent seemed to empty of its poets and its old people faculty and suddenly the admin people were clearing the tables and chairs. The rabbits seemed to have taken over the field. I watched them nibbling at the grass all around us.

“Careful in that grass dress,” I told Kyra, “they might eat you up.”

“That wouldn’t be such a bad death,” Kyra said, echoing my thoughts exactly. Which frightened me, Bunny, even as it calmed me so.

“Girl,” Kyra whispered beside me, what felt like seconds later. “I think the party’s over.”

And so it was. Just the two of us suddenly. Standing there in the dark empty tent. The white tulle billowing all around us like so many ghosts , she said, echoing my own thoughts again. And again, I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Like so many ghosts , that’s a line from your novel, Bunny, a phrase you no doubt stole from us, by the way, among so many other things. I was still holding hands with her, this girl in the grass dress who also smelled, so eerily, like fresh cut grass. “I’ll walk you home,” she said.

“I’ll walk you home,” I said.

And then we did just that.

First Kyra walked me home. Then I walked her home. And then she walked me home again and when she did, I said, “You might as well stay the night. Only if you want to, of course,” I said. “Don’t if you don’t.” We were standing in the very large and ornate doorway of my apartment building. She was looking up at me like such a lost soul, a beautiful ghost girl come to haunt me. For a moment, I almost felt like I’d dreamed her there, Bunny, this grass to my sky. Fiction , she’d said she was after all. But no, that was silly. She was real. A new friend. I wouldn’t have dreamed the cherry lipstick, which she’d applied so thickly to her very full lips.

Truth? And let me whisper this, Bunny: I didn’t know if I wanted her to stay the night. Part of me did. Even though I had an amazing apartment with tall windows and the prettiest new pastel furniture for thinking and writing on, I was a little afraid of being alone there. How small I might suddenly feel sitting beneath these so high ceilings. How my sky notebook might taunt me. How I might spiral darkly among the wing chairs and ottomans, despite the bright flower arrangements Mother had put in every room—tulips and irises and freesia and all manner of roses, in such lovely tall vases for me. Not to mention my many movie posters which she’d hung on the walls, all of them like old friends. Marilyn Monroe fake reading. Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire , frowning with arms folded, being such a scary-hot prick. A dreamy James Dean as Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause , which was my very favorite movie, Bunny, in fact many people said that I quite looked like a blond Natalie Wood circa 1956.

Maybe I’d be fine alone after all, I thought, recalling these posters. I was about to say so, that maybe we should say goodnight after all, go our own separate ways, when—

“I’d love to spend the night,” Kyra whispered and her pretty doll eyes were sort of wet with tears almost. Of gratitude, I guessed. “And then we can walk to class together in the morning,” she said. “Won’t that be fun?”

“So fun,” I agreed. And it was funny how when I said that, I suddenly regretted asking her in the first place, Bunny. Suddenly I felt like my soul was no longer my own.

I walked her back to her place one more time and she picked up a foresty dress for the next day and also some other things for overnight. Her apartment wasn’t quite as nice as mine but I said it was so amazing anyway. Of course I did, Bunny, I’m very well bred. Wow , I said of the one bedroom with galley kitchen, filled with her red and black middle-of-the-road furniture, “what an incredible place. It has such energy ,” I said, relishing being able to use the word openly, without Mother there to disapprove.

“You really think so?” Kyra said.

“Oh yes,” I lied. “Absolutely.”

It did not really. Have any energy, Bunny. It was a boring arty girl’s apartment, quite like mine in fact, but much lesser. Books on the shelves that were also on my shelves: Jane Eyre. The Bell Jar. The Waves. The Bloody Chamber, of course. All of Ursula’s books, of course, of course. Their spines severely cracked like mine, like she’d perused them about a thousand times, as I had, which enraged me inexplicably. She seemed to have more fairy tale and mythology collections than I did, more Victorian novels, more Murakami and Ogawa (she was a quarter Japanese, she said), but no Parker or Mitford or Austen like I did (that was a strange relief). The Invention of Morel , it was cool that she had that one but also annoying to me, Bunny. I thought I was the only one who loved that book, held it close. There were posters on her walls too. Mostly prints of fairies and frolicking nymphs and Pre-Raphaelite ladies holding crystal balls or else combing their very long dark hair while staring mythically into space. There was one of a giant wolf and a little girl in bed together, Little Red Riding Hood probably, and the wolf was grinning widely and Little Red’s mouth was a huge o of fake surprise like Oh my, what are you doing here, sir ? There was another of a wide-eyed girl in a dark forest clutching a leering black fox for dear life. Why was she holding on to him like that, I wondered, even though she was so obviously afraid?

“Because that’s what obsession is like,” Kyra said in her ghostly voice, hearing my thoughts. “I enjoy non-human, entity-centric eroticism,” she whispered, staring wistfully at the print. “What about you?”

“Me?” And I laughed. Trying to frighten me, to get under my skin. She was already there was the truth. I murmured noncommittally, gazing at her walls. My eyes fell on a print of a very hot young man being dragged into a pool full of pale naked ladies with long dark hair and haunted eyes. I knew this print of course. Waterhouse. Hylas and the Nymphs . “I also have this,” I said, touching it softly.

“Oh,” she said, touching it also. “Isn’t it just so great?”

“It is. I love it so much,” I said. “It’s my favorite.”

“It’s my favorite,” she said. We were both petting the edges of the frame now. Petting it, Bunny, like it was our actual pet. Staring into each other’s eyes, she had such terribly lovely eyes. It made me begin to worry, Bunny, did we overlap perhaps too much in our sensibilities? There were differences, of course. She had typewriters everywhere ( they’re my thing , she whispered) and I said how lovely even though I did not think typewriters were lovely at all, Bunny, the clicking drove me literally fucking crazy. A few witchy accessories Mother would have never allowed in our home. Crystals in so many pale shades and strange shapes.

“What’s this?” I asked, holding up a tied bundle of dried grey leaves and flowers sitting in an iridescent shell. The bundle looked scorched on one end.

“Sage,” Kyra said. “I burn it to purify the space.”

“Oh cool,” I lied. It didn’t smell purified to me at all. It smelled muddy and smoky and cheap.

“My friend who’s this incredible witch back in New Hampshire, she made it for me.”

“How lovely,” I lied again.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Kyra whispered. Her face now very close to my face. Her lipstick so thick, Bunny, did I mention that? Cherries in Winter I would find out was its whorish name.

“What?” I whispered. Even though I didn’t really want to know. Felt my soul slipping from me with her face so close to mine like this.

“I think this place is super haunted,” she whispered even more softly, her cherry lips grazing my peach fuzzy earlobe, the pinprick of diamond that lived there. “There are demons here or something. Spirits. A ghost for sure.”

“Is that so?” I said, being oh so polite. I could already see the novella she was starting to write about this in her mind. Her golden eyes shiny with potential plot lines. Herself at the center. Communing with this ghost. Possibly having supernatural sex with it as was her wont apparently. Annoying. I found her terribly annoying in this moment, Bunny. But I murmured how cool it was, of course.

“In fact, can I show you something?”

No , I thought. I want to go home now, alone, to my much better apartment. I want my soul back please. I want to think my own thoughts, away from this girl who might truly be just a witchier, poorer version of myself. But then I thought of how she’d held my hand in the tent earlier, the soft press of her white gloved flesh. I thought of how my skin hummed when we’d first locked eyes, whenever we locked eyes. I looked at her pretty doll face, the bright smile like a wide open door.

“Show me,” I said.

And that’s when she took me up to see the attic. This very attic we’re sitting in right now in fact, Bunny. Where we eventually would make such magic, such Beauty, with this very axe.

“Follow me,” Kyra said, her gloved hand holding mine all the way up these really steep and rickety stairs that were very creepy and gross. There was something about this walk up there to her dark attic. It was erotic maybe. Felt somehow like entering Sex. Kyra let go of my hand and walked to the middle of the room, while I hovered by the railing. She could let go of me so easily. It distressed me even on this first day of knowing her, even though I didn’t know, did I want to be held like this? Now I stared at her pretty silhouette turning circles in the dark room.

“It has an energy, don’t you think? For making ,” she said, using Vik’s word. “And look, a steepled ceiling. Almost like a church. Or a temple.”

Like a Satan church , I thought quietly. Was she slightly Satanic? She suddenly seemed a little satanic. It was the red cloak she’d slipped over her shoulders, maybe. Like little red riding hood , she’d insisted, but when I looked at her hooded figure I thought of degenerate French novels and Black Masses. I could feel her grinning in the dark. The tap tap of her red mary janes on the wooden floorboards. The way the moon shone behind her in the inverted triangle window.

“Here is where I’m going to create,” she said. “Here’s where I’m going to make .”

“What?” I asked.

“ Whatever turns me on ,” she said, once more quoting Vik. “I’ll put my desk here. You could put yours here too. Maybe we could make together.”

“Okay,” I lied. “I’d love that.”

Of course we never did that, did we, Bunny? Put our desks up there. But we didn’t know that then. We actually still thought, back then, if you can believe it, Bunny, that we were going to write things. Short fucking stories. Novelettes. About who knows what? Ghosts who were also lovers. Erotic sentient mists. Being alive in all its perils. Click, click. Type, type. Scratch, scratch with a little Japanese pencil. These were the sounds of our future, we thought. Sweating all alone as our minds dreamed us elsewhere. As we conjured that elsewhere with careful adjectives and just so words. We were totally fucking wrong about that.

Which is funny.

Because it was right after that, on that last walk back to my place, that we saw him. Darting right into our path and just stopping there, so that we ourselves stopped on the sidewalk, still holding gloved hands.

“Look,” I said.

Yes, it was me who said look . Skipping, we’d been skipping together on this dark night, our shoes clicking in eerie synchronicity, the trees making their shhh sounds and there was the sound too of screaming homeless and drunken frat boy. And then this creature suddenly in our path, in our midst. White and glowing in the dark just like we were in our elemental dresses of air and earth. Like a little furry moon in the black. Staring at us with his so shining eyes. Like hi.

“Hi, Bunny,” I think I even said.

“What?” Kyra said, like I’d called to her and not the creature.

“Bunny,” I repeated, pointing.

“Bunny,” she whispered. “Yes.”

And the creature seemed to smile at us almost, in the dark. Yes. Then he hopped away. We watched him go, holding hands so very hard Bunny, that we found we had bruises the next day, didn’t we?

We don’t remember getting home that night. Or how we ended up in my sky bed together. Tangled into each other, my toy horse, Pinkie Pie, between us. So funny, but I remember nothing after seeing that bunny, Bunny. It was like time stopped or something, stood still like in a stupid love song or film, except this was no love song or film, it was Reality. We blinked and it was somehow the next morning. I woke up in Kyra’s grass dress and she was in my sky dress, how funny. When in the night did we switch? I stared at this beautiful doll girl with the wild red curls lying beside me, this girl who yesterday was a stranger. The whole thing made me very uncomfortable, Bunny. To see her in my bed first of all. Second that she looked so very pretty first thing in the morning, so fucking lovely even in slumber. Third, that our hands were still held, quite fiercely, and I had the dreamiest smile playing on my face. When I caught sight of it in my dresser mirror, I immediately let go of her hand and she opened her eyes. Smiled sleepily. Didn’t look at all surprised or horrified to see me lying so close beside her, wearing her grass dress. Or that she was wearing my sky dress. Or that I’d apparently braided her hair into many a medieval knot at some point in the night. (Funny I didn’t remember doing that, Bunny, though admittedly it was my wont to do such things, an itch deep in my fingers that nothing can scratch.) She just patted her braids and yawned like all was as it should be. Stared at my Rebel Without a Cause poster.

“Did anyone ever tell you you look like Natalie Wood?”

“No,” I lied.

She smiled at me. “Workshop today. Our first.”

“Yes.”

“So excited. Are you?”

I felt nothing, except the fact that her grass dress was a little tight on me, Bunny. A little suffocating everywhere but in the boob area, where it gaped disconcertingly.

“Excited,” I lied. “So.”

“That your desk?” she whispered, looking over at it, just beneath the window.

“Yes,” I said, and I suddenly felt sick.

“So pretty,” Kyra sighed. “You’ll write such great things there probably.”

“Maybe.” But I didn’t know anymore , Bunny. I’d sat there just the other day, looking at the so pretty light through my so pretty window. Stared down at my open notebook, whose cover had the most beautiful skyscape. Tapped the blank page with my periwinkle LePen. Tapped and fucking tapped. Harp music played all around me, Bunny, for ambiance, for dreaming purposes, but it began to grate. I stared down at the pale blue page, misty with cloud illustrations. Finally I drew a tulip. It was hideous. The petals so obscene, like lips swollen, almost vaginal. What Coraline needs more than anything , Mother told her drunk book club friends once, is to get fucked . Go fuck the gardener, sweetie. Mother’s already done it . She gives him an A ++.

Do they even have A++in school? one of her friends asked.

At the school of fucking, they do , Mother said. And all her friends laughed. That’s where you oughtta go, Coraline. Forget about writing. The school of fucking, that’s what you need. Ivy League , Mother smiled. And I’d fake smiled, the rose balm cracking on my lips. I’d thought we were going to talk about the book club book but apparently we were not going to. All the women in Mother’s book club had their books face down on their capri laps. I stared at the author photo on the book jacket. Blonde like Mother, like all of us, and wearing the crispest white shirt. She looked a little like a realtor, her blue eyes haunted and corporate. She had written what the jacket copy said was an unputdownable tour de force about having it all . But no one, including Mother who’d chosen the book, seemed to want to talk about it. What they wanted was to hear Mother talk more about the school of fucking. They wanted to hear about the gardener. They wanted more cold wine in their very large fishbowl glasses which I was forced to pour for them. And as I did so, I swore to myself, right then and there on that July afternoon under the bluest of Virginia skies, that I’d write a book that Mother would read over wanting to fuck the gardener and mocking me openly about my love life. She wouldn’t be able to tear her eyes away from my words, I vowed.

“Bunny, are you okay?”

And I was back in my bedroom again, Kyra looking at me worriedly, for tears were stinging my eyes. “Fine,” I lied.

“We’d better get going,” she said. “Don’t want to be late for the first day, do we?”

Dread is what felt. But I shook my head. Smiled. “Of course not.”

Hand in hand we walked toward campus, our shoes still clicking in time. Hand in hand, even after we’d spotted the bruises, Bunny. Even after I said, We better give our hands a break, we better let go, we did not let go. I held hers and she held mine, almost tighter, all the way to Narrative Arts, it was like we couldn’t not hold. We were still wearing each other’s dresses so that now she was the sky to my earth and I was the earth to her sky. I gave her one of my jewel colored cardigans to match out of the great kindness of my heart. I was like that, Bunny, so very generous with my possessions, something you didn’t see fit to mention in your telling but never mind.

I still remember first seeing the Narrative Arts Building, Bunny. How it looked, to my eye, like nothing more than a weird old pointy house.

“ This is it?” I whispered.

“What do you think?” Kyra said.

I stared at the blackened brick, its many round windows like lidless eyes. Its sharp gothic spires stabbing the pretty sky. Hate it , I thought. Run , I thought. Jesus fucking Christ New England , I thought. Is this your idea of beautiful? But then I remembered Ursula. She was in there somewhere, in her shimmery caftan. All her narrative magic. All her fairy dust. Waiting for me.

“It’s pretty,” Kyra said, sounding scared.

“It is,” I agreed. “So pretty.”

“I love it so much.”

“Me too,” I lied. “So much.”

“You look nervous,” Kyra said.

“Not at all,” I lied again. “Dying to go in. Meet Ursula. My idol.”

“My idol too. I’m dying to meet her too.”

Which enraged me, Bunny.

“Oh my god, look there he is again!” she cried.

And indeed there he was again, sitting by a cluster of rose bushes. The bunny. The same bunny from last night? Perhaps. Oh how he was staring at us! Nose twitching almost… knowingly . Was he looking at me or was he looking at Kyra? Kyra will say both of course. And at the time I said yes, both . But between you and me, Samantha? And now that I have the floor (for once) and I’m allowed to speak unfettered (for once) while others are forced to be silent (for once) thanks to our pact, which, more on that later: I really felt like it was staring at just me. Not just at me, but fucking into me, my very soul. Staring so hard with its large, dark rabbit eyes which seemed afraid but also not afraid. Good luck , perhaps it was telling me.

“Thank you, Bunny,” I whispered.

So funny to think of that first Workshop. How fucking scared I was as we entered the so-called Cave. Like you, I’d pictured a literal cave, Bunny. Ancient oozing walls. A primal womblike darkness. Maybe Ursula standing there, backlit and in bell sleeves, like in a Stevie Nicks video. But it was just a boring black box theater, remember? In the middle of the space: a hollow square of tables with chairs around all sides. The table was lit from above by a single spotlight, like this was a theater and we were the central act. Something comforting about that. I knew that world of course, Bunny, all too well, from my stage/throw up days. Vik was already there, wearing another shirt of another gross plaid. She hadn’t brushed her wavy auburn hair in what looked like two years. She had no pen in front of her, nor paper, no laptop, not even a phone. Instead, she was sitting on a backwards facing chair like she was fucking it. Chest pressed into the backrest, legs manspreading sexily, talking in French to the girl with the silver hair, who turned to look at us—our shoes made such echoing clicks. The silver-haired girl smiled. Hi, she said with her mouth but not her voice. I was certain she’d gone to some illustrious overseas academy, like in Switzerland maybe, a school so elite I hadn’t even heard of it, Bunny, a castle nestled in snow-capped mountains and mirror lakes.

“Hi,” Kyra and I both mouthed, awe-struck.

Quickly we took seats beside them.

There was another girl there too of course, Bunny. You. Remember? Sitting there with your head down, your long dark hair like a curtain drawn over half your face. Wearing some sort of sad girl t shirt. A wolf barking winsomely at a moon or something. A black cardigan to drown in. We could see your one eye peeking out of the hair curtain and that was all. You stared at us so darkly and then you looked back down at the table and that’s where you kept your eye. We could not say hello to you or even smile at you because you were hiding in your hair, Bunny, like Cousin Itt. Please remember that the next time you call me a bitch in your mind (or in print). That you didn’t make it easy for us, socially, from the very beginning.

Now the chair beside you was empty, and that chair was just a little bit bigger than the other chairs. So we assumed, of course we assumed, that this was the teacher chair. Soon to be filled with the one and only Ursula. In fact, I could hear, in the dark just now, a clicking like footsteps. As you know, Bunny, when you’re in the Circle (which yes, I know is literally a square, but metaphorically it is a Circle, just like the classroom is metaphorically a Cave), you can’t see beyond it at all. The circumference of spotlight does not extend beyond the circle, suggesting the process of Creation, how we are always mostly in the dark, in a state of either un or half-knowing. So at the sound of the footsteps, I filled with such excitement. I made a small sound of glee, like a hiccup. The silver-haired girl smiled at me again, her jewel eyes burning brightly. I was expecting Ursula to appear out of the black at any moment. To point at me and smile. To say, Hello, Coraline. You are exceptional. You will write the book club book to end all book clubs and I will help you find this book inside yourself and I will help you birth it from your mind’s vagina. From your soul’s vagina, rather. Into a living entity of double-spaced pages beautifully screaming .

I was expecting to smell her, Bunny. Her author photo suggested a very specific incense. Myrrh laced with fir trees. I expected her iridescence, her brilliance, to blind me a little. I was nearly crying in anticipation as the footsteps inched ever closer.

And then?

We saw it was someone else. Not Ursula at all.

A fucking man.

Very tall, with sleeve tattoos of birds and trees. He had wild, leonine hair and he was wearing a black t-shirt advertising some sort of Swedish metal band like my older brother and his friends sometimes wore. Um. Who the fuck was this, please?

I glanced at Kyra whose face looked as confused and afraid as I felt.

The man half-smiled at us. He told us hello, his name was Allan.

Allan????

“I’ll be your workshop leader this fall,” this Allan man said. He was very excited to be here with us, he added. He did not look at all excited, Bunny. He had a Scottish accent. It reminded me of crags and spiked flowers. Impenetrable cloudy skies. I’d heard of Allan of course. Alan , as you called him, Bunny, for your imaginative genius clearly knows no bounds (is he suing you, by the way?). Or the Lion . (Of course you remember the Lion , Bunny). He was the semi-famous literary horror writer who wrote experimental novellas about women being murdered in the highlands by very philosophically minded psychopaths. He did not look magical in his author photo. He looked to me, in fact, like he might have committed these very crimes. And in person, even more so. The way he was standing and gripping the back of his own chair with his big hands, each knuckle of which was tattooed with some kind of rune. He’d placed a mug of steaming tea on the table. The mug had Japanese characters on it, which I felt was very appropriative. The scent wafted toward us, bitter and green. The strange girl beside him (You, Bunny) suddenly looked terribly happy. What sliver of your face I could see was smiling now.

A nightmare. This was a fucking nightmare, that simple. I never woke up from my celestial bed this morning where I’d slept curled into Kyra like she was my cat. I was still dreaming on my sun pillow. I was still clutching Pinkie Pie close to my body. There were tears in my closed eyes from this shitty dream. Any minute I’d wake up. For now, I raised my hand. “Excuse me, hi ?”

The man looked at me. I felt him take me in from golden bob to pearls to grass dress. Did he imagine just then beheading me with a hunting knife?

“Yes,” he said in his crag voice. So softly. Too softly.

“I’m sorry but I thought Ursula was supposed to be our workshop leader?” It was a question that was also a statement, Bunny.

The man frowned. Mumbled something about a fellowship. Ursula received one to pursue her own research this fall so they had to do a last minute change. “She’ll be teaching you in spring,” he said. “And I have the happy job of teaching you this fall.” And again, he did not look at all like it was a happy job.

I looked at Kyra. Clearly, she felt the same horror but she was trying to smile. Vik was picking at her dirty fingernails, oblivious. The silver-haired girl, who I found out later was called Elsinore was just smiling sadly at us. ( Eleanor was the lazy perversion in your novel, Bunny. Or, what was it again, the Duchess ? You’ll have your moment with her later, don’t worry.) Probably she’d already known about Ursula. Probably Ursula herself had told her at the Welcome Party yesterday. How terribly alone I felt in this moment, Bunny. How left out.

The Cousin Itt girl was beaming now. You, Bunny, you were beaming now. I could see that sliver of your face watching Allan with such naked and open admiration, it was embarrassing. Sort of sticky and sweaty and slutty of you, I thought.

Allan smiled at all of us. Was it a smile or was it a smirk? So very hard to say. He had one of those cryptic, too-cool faces. His crow tattoos gleamed beneath the spotlight. In my pocket, I ran the tip of my finger over the razor.

“Well,” he said, “why don’t we dive right in? Take a look at the pieces you were all asked to submit a couple of weeks ago. Offer some feedback. So we can get a sense of each other.”

Inside, I died a little. Feedback? On the first day?

And then he distributed copies of my very own two page story into which I’d poured my heart’s blood, Bunny. Which I’d submitted for Ursula. I’d even written for Ursula on the top of the page.

“Let’s start with you,” this man from my nightmares said. Suddenly looking right at me, Bunny.

“ Me ?”

“Why don’t you go ahead and read your piece aloud? And then we’ll all chime in with our thoughts, okay?” Read? Aloud? My heart’s blood?

But what choice did I have, Bunny? This man, our alleged teacher, was smiling murderously at me. Waiting. So I read my little piece. Of which I was unspeakably ashamed but also fiercely proud. Existential baking instructions addressed to an unfeeling yet strangely charismatic oven. It was a beautiful story which made me cry to write, the emotional truth of it.

Did my voice shake as I read? It did ever so slightly, yes. My cheeks burned, I was suddenly so hot. Patches of sweat bloomed under my pits, on the small of my back. It felt like it took four fucking years to read two pages. When I finally finished, I looked up, breathless. Everyone was sort of smiling at me, including Allan. But not like he was oh so blown away. Not like I had cast a word spell, no no. Like he was sorry. Very sorry for what he was about to say.

And then, Bunny? He proceeded to give his ‘feedback.’ I didn’t hear his words exactly, I felt them. Like daggers to my wrists. I remember Vik and Elsinore staring at me with such immutable faces as Allan went on and on about why exactly I was terrible and my story was terrible. He took out his copy of my piece, covered in his “line notes” aka stab wounds. It appeared he’d underlined and circled and even scratched out practically every fucking word with a red pen. I was horrified by all that red, Bunny. Thinking of this man drawing lines through my carefully chosen adjectives, probably with an erection. Sipping his hot green tea in its Orientalist cup. Thinking he knew so much. About craft. About narrative. I thought, fuck this man . Hearing him speak about me, I felt I was going to die right there in my grass dress.

“Coraline, you’re bleeding,” someone said. Kyra.

“Am I?”

And I looked down and saw that yes, I was in fact bleeding. My dress pocket was all bloody. My index finger had pressed deep into the razor’s edge. Funny how I didn’t even feel the pain over the breaking of my heart.

This man, Allan, my alleged teacher, he looked at this blood. Saw it spotting my grassy pocket in dark red drops like poppies among the blades. Blood shed by his own cruel tongue. Did he smile then? I swore I saw him smile softly, perhaps even smugly, at my pain. Take a small sip of bitter tea from his handle-less cup.

“Thoughts,” he whispered. Looking at all five of us, like we were his harem, really.

“I think it’s so brilliant,” Kyra said. “I mean it’s dreamy but it’s also kind of terrifying. In the best way. Like Plath meets Poe or something.” She smiled at me. Even though I was close to crying at her kindness, her words meant really nothing. Did not take away the sting.

“Creepy cute,” Vik offered. Still manspreading under the table in her ripped denim and dirty boots. “Sort of like Derrida does Emily Post. Hot in a strange, stifled way. I’d fuck it if I could,” she whispered. And she looked at me like she was sort of fucking me with her opium eyes.

“Interesting,” Allan said, coughing. “What about you Elsinore?”

The silver-haired girl said nothing. She looked at the blood staining my pocket then into my eyes. I heard her soul say to my soul, I see you . You will have your revenge on this man who I agree is a man of nightmares. A tear escaped my eye then and she smiled warmly at its falling.

“Everything okay?” Allan said then. Fucking monster that he was.

“Fine,” I said. “Allergies,” I said. To you , I thought.

“Sam,” Allan said, turning to the Cousin Itt girl sitting beside him (you, Bunny). You had a brooch on your cardigan with a deer’s head on it, I noticed now. The deer stared at me darkly. You meanwhile, kept your eye (the one not hidden in your hair) on the table.

“I agree with your notes, Allan,” you said to the table, while the brooch deer sneered. You did feel my piece was a bit on the nose, actually, you said. A bit too cute, you said, for its own good. Perhaps I could loosen it up a bit more, structurally. Perhaps I could be more organic too with my language choices, less trying so hard . More authentic. Just, you know, let it flow .

I looked at your sneering deer brooch, your hair curtain. So fucking shiny and black like a ground beetle. I hated you then, Bunny. I really did.

Allan handed me my story, covered in his many slashes. His letter in red pen on the back of the last page which I did not read, would never fucking read. Everyone else handed in their copies with their own notes they’d made while Allan was talking. Kyra’s just had a smiley face. Vik had written Have you tried anal? Elsinore had written a quote from Julia Kristeva about the abject. And you Bunny, handed your copy to me with a sad smile. Like sorry-not-sorry. You’d written a note quite like Allan’s. I saw the word tidy. I saw the word contrived . I saw the word pacing and I saw the word structure and I knew you’d gone to a state school. I felt the blood seeping darkly from my finger. I saw red, the color. And then suddenly it was just Kyra and I in the Cave, wasn’t it? And she was saying over and over, her lips very close to my ear, buzzing with my sense of failure, Come on, Bunny, let’s go.

3

After workshop, I had what I’ll call a moment in the nearby rose garden. You never mentioned the rose garden in your telling and I wonder why. It was such a lovely place, right behind the Narrative Arts Center, remember? A Flying Hare Statue was erected there in 17 something and the roses were always so bright and bloomy. A good place to go after you’ve been psychologically devastated, when you’re seething. And I was seething, Bunny. Unspeakably so. Because I didn’t come here, all the way to New fucking England, to be…fucking humiliated. Especially not by some Nightmare Man. A trigger-happy European male writer. I came here to create my own soul arias. I came here for mind space away from Mother, didn’t I? To escape the tumble-weedy terrain of my humdrum life. To be famous maybe. Experience the ecstasy of creation that Ursula had talked about in her seminal hybrids. And I’d thought, in my two page story about the unfeeling oven, that I had shown a bit of that in potentia . And what had Allan done? Jizzed all over it, my potentia , with his prickish red pen.

“I hate him,” I told Kyra. “So fucking much.” I cried into my white gloved hands, which were blood stained now, Bunny, and my own pearls felt cold on my throat.

Kyra said, “Please don’t cry, Bunny.” She said I was so brilliant it was fucking crazy, and Allan was fucking crazy not to see it too. She went on and on in this vein and I didn’t really hear her, so loud was the white noise of my own rage. There was though, I noticed, a disconcerting smile on her face as she spoke these words of comfort. She was biting on this smile to keep it from coming in full. Cherries in Winter , her lipstick was called, except that there are no cherries in winter, Bunny, it’s a fake concept. Was she actually happy that I’d been humiliated? No. Impossible. Brilliant so brilliant she said with those trying-not-to-smile fake cherry lips.

“Thank you, Bunny,” I said. But I did wonder. Was she lying to me? Maybe she loved me so much in this moment because she thought I was bad at writing now. Because now I was no threat at all. Meanwhile Bunny, you’d walked out of the classroom with our Man of Nightmares. Kyra and I saw you both cutting across the green, walking to the campus pub together. We saw you looking up at him with your so shiny face like he was God or something. You were clutching your books to your chest, beaming obscenely. I sensed that for many years you had probably been something of a social loser. And I should know. Because I carried my books, beaming, exactly like that once, not so very long ago. We saw him hold open the bar’s double doors for you and we saw you smile in a sick way and walk through and we saw him walk in after you. I was horrified by you in that moment, Bunny, I can’t deny.

“What a teacher’s pet,” Kyra hissed in my ear, still buzzing wildly with my own rage and shame. “She’s probably going to fuck him. Do you think she will?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “Probably.”

“What a slut,” Kyra said, looking at me hopefully. Waiting for me to say thank you maybe. I didn’t. I really didn’t want this to turn into something about you, Bunny.

The sky, that afternoon, was such a terrible golden yellow. The clouds such strange shapes, the shapes of my horror. All I could see in my head was Allan’s smug face. His cruel smile at my pain.

“I hate him I hate him,” I whispered to the roses and to the damp grass at my feet. The squirrels and swallows seemed to regard me with such pity. Not ashamed to say I wept right there in the garden before the flying hare statue. Sobbed, maybe a little uncontrollably. Barely conscious of Kyra’s little white gloved hand rubbing my back. Kyra, the sky to my grass and I was the grass to her sky. Her balmy mouth continuing to speak useless words of consolation while I looked into the animal eyes of the hare statue. Deep, deep into the shiny slanted blanks. “I could kill him. I could fucking kill him,” I whispered.

“Kill, Bunny?” Kyra laughed. “Surely not kill.”

“Kill,” I said, and it was a word before thought, my mouth moving all by itself.

“Bunny, you’re still bleeding,” Kyra said to me.

“What?” I looked down. So I was. But who cared about blood from a finger, Bunny, when I’d already lost my heart’s blood?

“Maybe we should go to Health Services or something,” Kyra offered.

But I didn’t want to go to Health Services. I only wanted to go home. I only wanted to hold my pony, Pinkie Pie, as tightly as fucking possible. Do you really need a toy with you at this age, Button ? Mother asked. No Mother , I’d lied, of course not . And I’d pretended to take it out of the packing box. I only wanted to eat a number of forbidden foods in the dark and then maybe throw them up after or maybe even not. Maybe just let it all congeal in my body. My phone was ringing and ringing in my non-bloody pocket. Mother calling of course. Wanting to know how my first day went. I let it ring as tears filled my eyes afresh. Making the whole world, this awful place that didn’t understand me, blur into a hazy pool of sunset colors.

“Want me to kill him for you?” Kyra whispered. Petting my forearm now. She said it like a joke, of course. Just a joke, Bunny. She was a very hot girl, I was realizing now. Probably she’d always had her pick of whoever she wanted to fuck. Probably she only had to look at whatever human she was horny for and say, fuck ? And they would die right then and there of lust. Not like me, with my dyed blonde hair and my tight smile that ticked with so many disorders. Smiling primly beside my slutty mother who thought I was the slutty one even as she mocked me for being prim. But then why was Kyra looking at me like I was powerful? Like I was her sun or something.

“Yes,” I said. “Except I want to kill him with you.”

“Okay,” she smiled. “We’ll do it together then.”

I nodded. My skin hummed again. I was joking, surely I was joking. “We’ll kill fucking Allan,” I said. Something in my voice or was it my eyes?

“Very funny, Bunny,” Kyra said.

“I’m serious,” I repeated. Maybe just to scare her. Maybe because I enjoyed that kind of power more than I cared to admit. Or maybe because I was serious in that moment. Very. Kyra just looked at me. Laughed that weird high laugh of hers. Mumbled again how I was so funny, Bunny . She said it to the grass now, not looking at my eyes.

So I said, yes, I was so funny. Kill Allan, I said . Ha ha.

And then we saw him.

Standing in the tall grass, right in front of the bronze hare statue. Floppy eared, his fur white as snow. The bunny we’d seen last night and then again on our way to class, I was sure it was the same one now. Staring at us with his large dark eyes.

“Bunny,” we both whispered.

Back in Virginia, whenever I saw a bunny it always felt like magic, and I’d blush if we made eye contact, and then of course it would dart away, breaking my heart. But this bunny—and it brings actual tears to my eyes even now to say it— approached . It began to walk toward me— hop toward me?—and I began to walk shyly toward it. It was…how else can I describe it? Like a sort of love story moment, a movie scene where the two lovers walk toward each other from opposite ends of the screen, their eyes locked. I could feel the leaves falling gently all around me like they too wanted in on this moment of deep connection, of cosmic understanding.

And then suddenly it was in my arms. Incredible, the soft feel of its fur. The heavy magic of its life in my bloody hands. I gasped with glee.

“Oh Bunny,” I whispered. My bunny. And the beautiful animal, it looked at me, I recall this so clearly. It looked right fucking at me. And in my mind, I heard a voice. I swore I did.

It said, I’m yours, Coraline. I’m yours .

Tears escaped my eyes and dripped onto the bunny. Blood from my finger pooled onto its white fur, leaving a dark red mark there, but it didn’t seem to mind at all. It looked at me even more tenderly. And I held it. So tightly, Bunny.

And the bunny’s dark eyes, full of my own eyes’ tears, suddenly brightened. Yes. Right before me I saw them change color while staying entirely locked with mine. Shift into blue the way the black night breaks into blue morning. The palest blue of my sky dress, which, at the moment, was on Kyra’s body. And the strangest thing? Was that I wasn’t shocked at all. I felt like I knew it would happen. Energy coursing from my hands into its furry body had made it so. My tears falling into its eyes, my finger’s blood on its scruff, had made it so. I had made this moment of Bunny’s eyes miraculously changing.

“My god,” I whispered. I saw a whole sky in Bunny’s eye reflected back at me. A whole world that made my own world fall away. I forgot the rose garden and I forgot Kyra and I forgot my razor and I even forgot about that man-demon, Allan. I forgot everything except Bunny, smiling at me with his sweet little rabbit mouth. Covered in my blood and tears like a newborn.

Suddenly, I felt a swell of arms around me. The fact of human skin unnerved me just then, Bunny. Who was bothering me in my magical moment with Bunny? Kyra of course. Rubbing my back, trying to squirm inside my magic. And then two pairs of arms joining Kyra’s and encircling me, suffocating me it felt like. Vik, I knew by the dirty fingernails. And then Elsinore’s hand too, her fingernails pearlescent pointed ovals.

“There, there,” their glossy mouths whispered into my ears. “We’re here for you, Bunny.”

“Bunny,” they called me so that I did not know if they were referring to me or to the animal or perhaps to us both, so fused we were in this moment.

“We’re here and we saw,” they whispered into my neck. “What he fucking did. You must be so humiliated, Bunny. We would have died if he’d said that to us. You must be so ashamed. But don’t worry. We hate him with you. And we will have our revenge. Kill Allan ,” they said. “Metaphorically speaking of course.”

And all of me shuddering at these words while I clutched Bunny’s bloodied fur. I felt so much love in this moment. For Bunny. My Bunny. With his new blue eyes that I made.

Me.

Coraline.

And can I tell you, I was so—

C R E E P Y D O L L

Um, hi! That’s all very well and good, but I think it’s time for me to seriously cut in and take over, okay, Bunny? Not that I don’t think Coraline’s amazing and that her story telling is amazing (omg so good). It’s just unfortunate for you, Bunny (for all of us), that on this night of Absolute Truth, in the midst of our Healing Journeys, she also decided to be just a little bit of a fucking liar apparently. I didn’t realize one could be such an unreliable narrator of nonfiction, but perhaps we all can be at times? When we’re desperate and delusional, especially, Bunny, which I know you can totally relate to.

Sadly I couldn’t quite catch all of her half-whispered story but it’s now clear that (as usual, Bunny!), I’m going to have to take the axe and do some serious labor to get us back on track. Because we really do need to move it along here, k? I mean, given the circumstances, especially. Of you being tied up and all, Bunny. Of us having kidnapped you, which, just so you know, I totally didn’t agree with. At least, not at first. I mean part of me was like yes, let’s do it, Samantha’s a fucking asshole, and I do want her to fucking die, but then I thought: why give her better book sales? Why go to jail for her when I so don’t even love orange, Bunny? Also, despite my talents with the axe, which you’ve witnessed firsthand and which you may witness again tonight (we’ll see how things go, Bunny!), I’m actually a really good person inside. Thoughtful , unlike some. Always thinking of the greater good. Which is why, in those early days, I used to reach out to you, remember? Texted you so many times to come and join us for bento boxes or whatever, remember? Because I was fucking nice. It’s so funny, Bunny, how in your novel (which oh yes, I read) you turned my invitations into a mean girl thing. Reflective of a sadistic streak that you imagined, in your well-documented insanity, to live in my own heart. Funny how you got me so wrong. How you saw darkness where there was really only ever light and goodwill. Anyway, I did vote no on the kidnapping, just fyi. But what can I say? Sadly, I was in the minority there. Sadly, I was swayed. Convinced by certain arguments, by the greater good. I often am, my fatal flaw, as you’ll hear in my own story. That said, I don’t want to keep you any longer than we have to, Bunny, I really don’t. Certainly I don’t want to kill you, hahaha. I mean I totally fucking do, but not at this precise moment in time. For now I just want to talk, k? Bend your ear, even though I know you’re so very busy and important these days! That’s a joke, Bunny. I checked your phone while Coraline was talking (how adorable that you have bunny wallpaper!) and it doesn’t seem like anyone has tried to reach you at all. Except for one unknown number that’s probably spam or something, Bunny. One text that’s just a question mark, how sad. Who’s that from, I wonder. Your one nonverbal friend maybe? Lonely at the top perhaps (more like midlist really, right?). Oh well. At least you can breathe a sigh of relief for now, yes? Relax and reminisce with me, Creepy Doll. When I first read that name in your novel and realized you meant me, I laughed and laughed. Didn’t cry cunt until I lost my voice at all. Let me just take that axe from you now, Coraline, k? Since it’s my turn to sit by Samantha, my turn to tell. And who knows, we might need it, right, Bunny? I actually haven’t been back up here since our Workshop days. Haven’t even washed the blood off the walls, hahaha. Remember the blood, Bunny?

Such great times we had, totally.

I still live here, oh yes. Same apartment, same attic where we once made such magic. Where now there’s nothing but ghosts. What do I do these days? Since you took my creativity away and destroyed me in print, you mean? Oh, lots. Make incense and meditate mostly. Listen to Stevie Nicks and remind myself of how karma works, which is mysteriously . Think about where I’ve been and where I wish to go next, creatively and otherwise.

Now let me get back to our story. Take over the narrative from my darling Coraline, because between you and me, she really went off the rails in her telling. Adding such indulgent flourishes that were, well, just a little fucking distracting really, not to mention wildly inaccurate. Also pacing, hello? Tick tick goes the clock and we each need our turn, k? Friendly reminder that we did agree to take turns, Bunny, and to not interrupt one another ever (our own gag rule!) even though it can be very hard to do that when one of us decides to lie and betray and slander so flagrantly. In fact, I’ll have to back up just a bit so that you know the actual truth. About the beauty we made. And how we all had roles to play.

Especially me, Bunny.

4

So after Allan critiqued/destroyed Coraline’s piece in the Cave, she was kind of a mess, so sad to say. I know because I was sitting right beside her in workshop at the time. Under the table, I’d even given her my hand to hold, let her crush it and she did, she nearly broke my fingers, Bunny. At the time, though, I so didn’t even notice. That first fall, something was happening to me, Bunny, to my body and mind and soul. It was all becoming less solid or something, you know? I was becoming less solid. I looked over at Coraline and sometimes I didn’t know where she ended and I began. Even on that first day. I saw the tears she shed and that she’d cut her own finger with something in her pocket. I even cried along with her. On the inside, obvi, Bunny. I bled there with her too. I already loved her so fucking much, you see, quite in spite of myself. We’d slept together the night before, as you know, though, sorry, it didn’t happen quite like she said, Bunny, not at all.

The truth?

I was happy to go home alone after that Welcome Party, I totally was. But she practically begged me to stay the night is the thing. Come home with me , she said, squeezing my hand tight. She was scared, apparently, of her huge new apartment with its fancy floral arrangements which did cast some very strange and pointy shadows on the wall. So I stayed, Bunny, of course I did. I’m really nice, like I said. She made me a cup of hibiscus and rose tea with one of her many pretty kettles and she watched me eat mini cupcakes with a sort of murderous intensity. It was lovely. That night, I shared so much of my own soul with her. About my first sexual experiences with various humans in college and then, more importantly, with various entities. And she listened to my stories of that. How I’d fucked ghosts, felt them descend upon me in the night, invited them brazenly into my bed. She told me too about her various stilted all too human experiences. With first a boy and then with a girl and then with a girl who later transitioned into a boy, and he was her favorite, she whispered. It was like the best of both. But nothing ever worked out, she said. Romantically. Always with everyone something felt like it was… missing or not enough . Or just too much, you know ? Too much reality . Yes , I said, for I did know. Perhaps because I’m an artist , she mused, placing another cupcake of her choice on my plate, watching me eat, her mouth chewing a little in time with mine. I watched her pour more tea into my rose-patterned cup, carefully so as not to spill any drops, though her gloved hand was shaking like crazy, Bunny. Perhaps also because you like to control , I thought. Because you can’t abide someone else’s needs or free will. But I said, “Totally it’s because you’re an artist.” “I feel the same way, Bunny,” I said, recalling the bunny we’d seen in the dark. I told her how I saw spirits from a very young age and how typewriters had spirits too and all I had to do was type and the ghost in the machine would speak to me, speak through me, and how this was a sort of sex with the cosmos, with unseen forces. I wasn’t terribly interested in fucking humans when there were such entities out there, I told her. This was why I’d applied to Warren in the first place. I knew they would embrace my entity sex approach, the ghostly fictions that resulted. This was also why I loved fairy tales and myths so much , because they understood these things were in the air.

Even demons? she whispered.

I said, of course demons, Bunny. (I was fucking with her maybe.)

I remember she looked afraid, which was so adorable. And when she invited me into her celestial bed ( she invited me , Bunny), we lay there side by side, stared at each other sort of smiling until our eyes closed at the very same time. Each of us holding a hoof of Pinkie Pie, her small plastic animal companion. “Have you ever heard of Bronies?” I asked her. And she said, “What’s that?” “Never mind,” I said. A happy tear shed from her so blue eye. She stroked my cheek and I let her. In fact, I stroked hers at the same time, breaking my nonhuman rule for intimacy. Her skin was so peach fuzzy and warm it was crazy. It was lovely. That night, I’m not ashamed to say I dreamed of her, Bunny. Of her sky dress and her eyes full of such violent longing. For what exactly, I had no words to articulate, but I knew. I knew its shape and shadows.

Because it was in my eyes too.

The next morning, we seemed to awaken at the very same time, the same quality of light rousing us from our dreams. But I woke to find her staring at me coldly, Bunny. No longer smiling at all. Looking, in fact, in the stark light of day, like she couldn’t believe I was there. Every answer to my every question strange and clipped. What the fuck , I wondered. It threw me off, I have to say. Destabilized me more than any unseen force. But also, and here is the not so great thing, it intrigued me (this is my own social damage coming out perhaps). I grew warmer, pathetically so, hoping to melt her back into that smiling, desperate shape I’d experienced last night in the dark. But all morning she remained withdrawn and mysterious, sadly bitchy. Sadly irresistible. And yes, I know she’s here with us now in the attic, and that she’s hearing my words and being forced (for once) to listen. And good.

While we’re mostly here to tell you, Bunny, we’re also here, perhaps, to tell each other finally. As part of our Healing Journeys. Finding our Creative Way, you know?

Speaking of which, let’s jump ahead to just after our first Workshop.

Suffice it to say that Allan’s words that were hurting her, were also hurting me. I was so angry on her behalf. Outraged even. After everyone left the Cave, she just sort of sat there in a daze in my grass dress, stroking her own pearls, didn’t you, Bunny? Her other hand was bleeding in her pocket, (my pocket really, because it was my dress) and I thought about how now the dress would have to be dry cleaned. But that was okay. I totally forgave her. Didn’t even mention the dry cleaning. Instead, I helped her get out of her chair in which she was so sadly slumped. I led her by the hand out of the dark classroom and she shuffled behind me, crying her many silent tears of shame. I gave her my heart-framed sunglasses to shield her eyes from the cruelty of the bright day, from people’s staring. Because she’d already felt exposed enough for one afternoon, hadn’t you, Bunny? I agreed with her when she cursed New England, even though I was from New England, in the neighboring state of New Hampshire in fact, set most of my stories here. Yes, I agreed, this is a hell place, a terrible place, you’re so right , even though I quite liked everything about it. I cursed the yellowing sky along with her and inside I said a silent prayer for it to please ignore the curse. I led her to the rose garden behind the Narrative Arts building, and I said look at the pretty flowers! And she said fuck the flowers , Bunny , she was so very upset. Really child-like in this moment, letting out great honking cries like a kind of goose. I sat her down on a bench and there she wept like the child she’d become, and I rubbed her back while she did. She tried to shake my hand off like I was some kind of fly. Which fucking hurt me so I dropped my hand. Put it back in my own lap, the lap of her sky dress, which I had not bloodied with my grief and anger and inconsiderateness. I gazed at its many sinuous clouds, clouds I suspected she loved to live in instead of here on this earth.

I whispered, “What does he know, Bunny? What does he fucking know? This Man of Nightmares?”

I whispered, “You’re so amazing and your story was amazing.”

I whispered that we would have our revenge.

She wasn’t really listening to me at all. She was actually kind of ignoring me, being a bit of a dreamy bitch. More fresh blood seeped so redly from her grassy pocket (my pocket), and I really felt she was being seriously thoughtless, Bunny, about the stain she was making. But I said nothing. I looked up, thinking what else to say, even though it was a wasted effort, she was so lost, and I realized I barely knew her really, had just met the day before, and I did sort of think her oven story needed work actually. I mean come on, Bunny, isn’t that what we were here for, this was like a serious MFA, k? Hardcore, why I applied. Finally I said, “Want me to kill him for you?” I said it to make her smile, Bunny. To make her laugh. But she turned to me, looked so fucking serious it scared me. Her mascara was running down her face in long jagged blue lines.

“Yes. Let’s fucking kill him,” she said. “Together.”

“Together?” I said. And she took my hand.

And I’ll admit, Bunny, I felt a warmth prickling through me at her touch. I saw a flash of an axe coming down on a body. My small hands gripping the handle. I saw all of this in her eyes, how they were staring at me. I fell a little in love with her again then, her murder-y way, it’s true. But I wasn’t serious, Bunny. Not like she was. I was totally just saying it to make her feel better about being eviscerated. But it’s also true that just when I said it, we saw him.

That bunny.

From the night before and earlier this morning.

And here is where her narrative really begins to forget. Maybe she just forgot because of the trauma of this day, which I don’t at all mean to minimize, but I’m the one who actually saw the bunny first, Bunny. Sitting there in the grass, among the very red roses full of thorns. Snow white fur. Large dark eyes. Ears like little furry antennae. It was staring at me, Kyra. And I’m the one who walked over to it. We walked toward each other, the bunny and I, while Coraline just sat there oblivious. Still staring murder at the sky, lost in her melodrama clouds. Meanwhile, I bent down and scooped up the animal. I didn’t really have to scoop. It actually hopped into my arms like a fucking fairy tale. Like literal magic. And it was like all my previous experiences with entities had prepared me for this moment. I was able to hold the bunny. I was able to walk over to Coraline with the so-soft creature in my arms. And in my great generosity, in a haze of trust and friendship, I fucking gave it to her. To cheer her up about her bad story. I put it in her bloody lap. Here you go, Bunny.

But she just ignored him. Kept staring like nothing magical was happening on her thickish thighs.

So I said, “Bunny, look.”

She finally looked and that’s when she squealed a little bit like a pig. Miraculously the bunny did not hop away. Instead, it just sat there like a gift. That’s when she held it. And I held it with her. We held it together. She got her blood and tears all over it, yes, but I was crying too, so my tears were on there too, hello?

And that’s when its eyes changed color, Bunny. When we were both holding the bunny, okay? Turned the sky blue of the dress I was wearing. Yes, her dress, but who was wearing it that day, hello?

Me. Kyra. I was. Hi.

Vik and Elsinore came running up to us then and said, Omg, so sorry, are you okay, what an awful man! Then, yes, we all hugged. And then, yes, they saw the bunny we were holding, saw its crazy-colored eyes, which did, yes, seem even more vivid in their blue thanks to them joining us. Thanks to the four of us holding each other and this bunny together. Yes, it was amazing. Yes, we were all totally amazed too. But much as I love you, Coraline, you cannot go taking credit for something that I was predominantly responsible for, okay, Bunny? But again, like I said, you were sort of a fucking mess that day, weren’t you? What with your story being critiqued in a Fiction workshop and all. Because you were, like a graduate student in an MFA program. Such a crazy hard day for you omg.

Sorry, Bunny, where was I? Oh yes. After the bunny’s eyes changed color, that definitely changed the mood of the afternoon. There was no going back after that, really, even though right after this happened, we sort of gasped-sighed and someone dropped the animal and then it ran away from us. Hopped away. We called after it of course. Come back, Bunny! Come back!

It did not come back.

Perhaps it was too scared.

I often wonder what would have happened if had just been me with Bunny. If it would have stayed for a while. We all watched it hop away, covered in Coraline’s blood and all of our tears. Hop into the thorny roses. We looked at each other and we knew, even then, that we had done Something. That it was the start. Of what?

Well, that was the part we didn’t know.

Evening suddenly. The air grew crisp and cold and more murder-y the way it does in this town after a certain hour. The blue began to deepen all around us, making our four shadows stretch and stretch on the rose garden grass. The cool wind was in our faces, blowing our many shining hairs back. All of our pale eyes, wet with wonder tears, even cynical Vik’s, were semi-dried now. We found ourselves walking the few streets back to my place. Not talking. All of us holding hands, step by step. If people were in our way, well, they moved. Walked around us like we were one very wide body with many legs and arms. It was like we were one body, Bunny. Like three more hearts were beating inside me. Three more minds had melded to my own. I saw the sun with my eight eyes as it sank bloodily before us. Rabbits hopped on the sidewalk, in and out of our path, sort of smiling at us, I saw. We did not remark upon just how many of these creatures were pretty much everywhere we looked now, Bunny. Perhaps we were not ready for words yet. I looked, all of us looked, for the bloody one. The tear stained one. The newly blue-eyed one, but he was nowhere now. He had disappeared into the roses and beyond.

At my apartment, for this is where we found ourselves, where we had unconsciously wandered, I welcomed everyone into the living room, to sit upon my very red furniture. Right away though Vik opened the door to the attic and she and Elsinore just went on up there. Right up the dark rickety stairs like they’d been up there before. I followed them with a bottle of absinthe and a tray of jewel-colored glasses. I sensed the silver-haired girl, Elsinore, was clearly the leader of us all. It was something in the way she sat cross-legged beneath my triangle window like she was Queen of the floorboards. So silent. So thinking. I couldn’t read her cryptic expression, which was like the many shining sides of a crystal. Vik meanwhile stretched out in a sort of daze. I did not know what to make of her lovely veiny-bony face, its unblinking fuck you eyes and its full, half-open mouth that seemed to be neither smiling nor frowning. What thoughts were swimming inside that sharply cut skull of hers like little silver fish, equally unblinking? Coraline, meanwhile, was sort of hyperventilating. The minute we got in the door, she whisper-asked if I had any baked goods. I did, in fact, have muffin loaf and told her I’d get her some but she said, never mind, never mind , she would find it on her own, thanks, and I didn’t need to come into the kitchen with her or anything, thanks .

Okay.

So I sat cross-legged like Elsinore, beside Elsinore, and I said, because no one was fucking saying anything, “Holy fuck.”

Elsinore’s eyes opened. She smiled at me like, what?

“Did you guys see?”

“See?” Vik said.

“The bunny’s eyes changing color like that? Wasn’t it so incredible?”

And it was funny, Bunny. But I suddenly felt kind of dirty and crude being so direct. Elsinore closed her eyes again, saying nothing. Vik sort of smirked at the ceiling, also saying nothing. So, we were not acknowledging?

“Um, did you guys not see ?”

“Of course we saw , Bunny,” Vik whispered.

“Well, what do you think it means?” I asked.

“Means? ” Vik repeated. Like I ruined something just by asking. Like it was the most boring question in the world when to me it was really the only question. Yes, bitch. What does it mean? That we just turned a bunny’s eyes blue, hello?

“Who cares what it fucking means ? It was hot.” She looked dreamily at my ceiling like she suddenly saw stars there.

“I know what it meansh,” Coraline whispered, mouth full of my muffin loaf. Taking each bite like a breathy kiss, it was kind of a turn on to watch, Bunny. Especially after seeing her refuse solids for two days. She stood by the staircase like she’d done the night before, like she was afraid to come in.

“What?”

“Maybe we’re magic,” Coraline panted.

I , I thought. Not we. If anyone’s magic it’s me. I’m magic and I shared my magic with you.

But I said “Yes. Maybe we are. Haha.” I didn’t want to be disagreeable to my peers. Which was maybe a mistake. A side effect of my fatal flaw.

Vik and Elsinore smiled. And then it was dropped, the subject. Cast aside. Made light of. Made fun of even. Probably just someone doing experiments, Vik offered and then we all agreed. Warren was such an experimental school, cutting edge that way. There was that artist, Vik said— what was his name?— the one who was fucking with bunny DNA in order to change the color of their fur? And he did change it, injected it with some jellyfish protein. Produced a magenta bunny and a lime green bunny and even a sky-colored one, remember? He even tried to keep one of them as a pet but then it died? So sad. So maybe we stumbled into something like that going on here, she surmised.

“Definitely,” they all agreed again. Yes, experiments, that’s all we’re dealing with. We’d just stumbled into someone else’s arty science project.

“Where do you think he is now? The bunny,” I pressed. My bunny, I thought.

“Our bunny,” Vik corrected.

Elsinore opened her eyes. Looked at us, at me actually. “This attic,” she whispered. “Has such great energy, Kyra. Is it Kyra?”

“Yes. Thank you.” Elsinore complimenting me felt good. Like anointment from a white witch.

“Coraline,” she said, turning to Coraline. “You must be so devastated and humiliated.”

Coraline nodded, still sort of making out with my muffin, those soft kissy bites. I envied it. She looked like she was about to cry again, probably thinking of her oven story.

“Of course you are. We all are, aren’t we?” Elsinore said. “Terribly disappointed by this turn of events. I’d planned on having Ursula as a mentor.”

Vik grunted, her eyes were suddenly swimmy with some kind of emotion. The crystal thief tattoo shone on her forearm.

“Should we confront Allan?” Coraline said. “Complain about his way of speaking to us?”

Not to us , I thought. To you, Bunny .

“Because I don’t know that we should accept it. It’s like he was applying his man-rules to my creativity. His dickish notion of time and space and fucking plot . His dick, really! All over my story, that’s how it felt.”

“It was an assault,” Elsinore offered, with a certitude that made me shiver. Her voice had the intonation of an otherworldly bell. “You were violated.”

“An assault,” Coraline repeated, entranced. “Yes. Absolutely. I was violated.”

“We were right there with you, Bunny,” Elsinore said. “We saw it all. You have witnesses, remember? We saw him squash your creative voice, strangle it with his tattooed man hands, his patriarchal adjectives, his lack of understanding that was fucking willful . Because he wanted you to be ashamed. He gets off on your humiliation. Probably he went home and whacked off thinking about your blood and tears, how small he made you feel.”

“And how untalented,” Vik offered.

“How whimsical,” Elsinore added. “How too cute for words.”

“How prissy.” Vik smiled.

“She gets the point,” I cut in before I could think. I was protective of her, I couldn’t help it, Bunny, and I didn’t think she needed this kind of recap. But Coraline didn’t even look at me. She’d finished with my muffin (probably she’d throw it up soon), and looked impeccably blonde and above all appetites again.

“He saw my bloody pocket!” she chimed in. “He saw it and he fucking smiled.”

“Of course he did.”

“What a monster.”

“We hate him.”

“So much.”

“What hurts one of us, hurts all of us after all.”

Coraline smiled, so comforted. “Thank you,” she said to them. And cried into Elsinore’s bony shoulder. I watched this. Elsinore embracing Coraline in her bloody grass dress ( my grass dress). Vik walking over and putting her plaid arms around them both. Consolingly patting Coraline’s side boob. I watched, turning a glass of absinthe round and round in my small hands quite like I’m turning the handle of the axe right now, Bunny. I thought of how I’d said almost the exact same words of comfort to Coraline on the bench just an hour ago and how she’d ignored me. Just stared at the sky, even though I’d rubbed her humped back like I’d been trying to start a fucking fire. And I took internal note of this, like I had done at countless other tender social moments in my life. Moments where my words, though I was the first to speak them, were not heard at all by the collective. Almost as if a ghost, instead of a human person, had spoken. Perhaps this was why I’d always cleaved, socially and sexually, to the spirit world. I understood so much, so implicitly, about the unseen, the unheard.

Eventually, it was decided that we would go talk to Ursula together. After all, this really concerned all of us, did it not? If Allan had assaulted Coraline, it was only a matter of time before he assaulted the rest of us, right? Weren’t we all slated to be workshopped in the coming weeks? Each one of our souls (aka short fictions) to be impaled by his terrible, penile red pen?

“ Exactly ,” Coraline said.

“Wait, should we ask that other girl to join us?” I asked. “Sam, I think that’s her name. Since she’s also in our class?” (See how I was trying to include you, Bunny? Even then.)

But they all just stared at me like I was fucking insane.

“Um, didn’t you hear that Sam agreed with him? I mean, she basically assaulted me too.”

“Also, didn’t you see the two of them walking out together after class? To that bar?”

“She’s probably sucking him off right now.”

“I hate her,” Coraline seethed. “Almost more than him.”

“We all do, Bunny,” Elsinore patted her shoulder. “Certainly she isn’t to be trusted. No, Kyra, I think it’s best it’s just us four. The four of us should be really more than enough.”

“Besides, we’re magic, aren’t we?” Vik added, grinning.

And Coraline and Elsinore smiled. Still embracing so tightly it hurt my eyes to see.

“Yes,” they said as one soft voice. “Exactly.”

5

Ursula didn’t respond to our group email right away. We checked our inboxes about five million times an hour after we collectively hit send and fucking nothing. Then the first day passed and the next day passed. A week went by and we really started to wonder, Bunny, if we would ever hear back, please. We knew she was on leave and all, but still, what the fuck, k? Weeks went by, four, in which we all grew closer, disturbingly so (more on that in a bit). In which we all had to go up for Workshop with Allan. And yeah, it was pretty bad, Bunny, and that drew us closer still, for we had a common enemy now, in the form of Allan. It was a shit show for all of us, except you maybe. He fucking loved you and your stories, which infuriated some of us. Made some of us hate you, it did, we can’t lie. I didn’t hate you nearly as much as the rest of us did though, Bunny, just fyi. Because between us, as I’m sure you know (and let me whisper this now in your ear): Allan sort of loved my work too. Said my engagement with the entity was actually pretty promising. He enjoyed my demonic girls and wolfmen, my prose fornications with ghosts. He especially appreciated my fairy tale violences, my surprisingly hard turns. I had an edge you didn’t see coming, he said. And I tried very hard not to smile when he said that, Bunny. Kept my face a dead face as I felt everyone’s side eyes on me in the Cave. After, I downplayed his love by playing up the one thing he did critique which was my formatting. How I cried and cried in the rose garden, performatively I’ll confess, about his formatting comments. Acted totally inconsolable. How dare he suggest, I wailed, that I change the shape of my story, that I break up my paragraphs further, it’s like he’s insisting I change the shape of me or something, you know? They all comforted me, what choice did they have, I was so upset. But Coraline, patting my shoulder, had a bit of Fucking really? in her eyes, even as she said, There, there.

One by one by one, all of us had our moment in the rose garden about Allan.

He thought Elsinore was, what was it again, Bunny? Oh right: a fucking fraud.

And that Vik was style over substance, provocation over punch. Vik didn’t cry, did you, Bunny? But she did go red in the face, oh yes. I’ll show you punch, fucker . And Elsinore, well, she just smiled coldly. Thanked him so much for his feedback. Said she’d give it some thought. But her eyes were brimming with I will kill you . We could hear the words roaring in her mind, for they roared in all of our heads too, our hearts beating ragefully in time.

I will kill, I will kill, I will kill, she screeched in the rose garden after, pacing its periphery like a cat. Sort of forgetting we were all there, Bunny. I could never have imagined her losing it like that, and it was kind of frightening, kind of hot. She looked incredibly thin when she was rageful, Coraline whispered to me later. With her fists curled and her neck tendons quivering and her forehead veins throbbing and her pale lips pressed really tight together.

I remember it was as she was screaming that the blue-eyed Bunny came back to say hello. Yes, yes. Standing in the grass, watching her scream. Eating grass or dandelions or clover, or was it a rose petal? Ears twitching, almost like he was listening really. Like yes. I know. I so know exactly. It quieted Elsinore. He still had Coraline’s blood on him, we saw, in a heart-shaped stain. Kill, she whispered again. And he hopped closer, didn’t he, a leaf in his mouth. Just then our phones all buzzed. There was Ursula’s name on our screens. She’d finally fucking replied. Yes, she’d love to meet, she said. How was five o’clock tonight at her place?

And just like that, the bunny ran off.

So it was that we found ourselves on Ursula’s white front porch among her many spiky flowers and climbing vines. It was the first week of October and I remember the sweet-crisp chill, Bunny, I remember the rabbity bite in the air. It was dreamy. Arousing, almost. Autumn leaves the color of fire rustling all around us and a dog barking like mad in the garden. Ursula’s dog, as it turned out. I remember thinking what the fuck are we doing here? What are we even going to say to her? But I didn’t ask. Just stood there with the rest of them, my cohort, from whom I suddenly felt strangely estranged.

“I’ve dreamed of this moment,” Coraline whispered as we stood on her porch.

“ I’ve dreamed of this moment,” Vik said.

“So dreamed of it,” I lied. I’d been doing this a lot lately, I noticed, Bunny. Echoing. Seconding. Couldn’t seem to stop myself, even when I disagreed, even when I thought That’s fucking stupid , what I said was, Oh my god, totally.

“We all have,” Elsinore said, sort of coldly magnanimous. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a shed in the back garden. A small white house covered in creeper, one dark round window like an eye.

“Let’s go,” I whispered to Coraline, tugging on her hand.

“Go?” she hissed back. “What, are you fucking crazy? Why? ”

And that wounded me, Bunny. I don’t know why , I wanted to tell her. The barking dog. That shed. The crackling leaves. How I’m fucking losing you. “I just have this…feeling,” I whispered at last. But suddenly the front door was open, and we were walking into Ursula’s house, right into her living room, weren’t we?

Surreal, Bunny. To be in Ursula’s living room, the late afternoon light burning into all of our eyes. Surrounded by her vaguely vaginal paintings, her flower arrangements shaped like balls. Remember it, Bunny? Of course you do, you made such fun of it in your little novel. Yes, the so white walls and the black African masks. Yes, the scent of desert sage on fire. You weren’t wrong Bunny, it was a little boomer meets please think I’m a witch . Crystals shone from her every bookcase full of rare books and her furniture looked like it had been antiqued across many global marketplaces. Fusion appetizers on a scandi coffee table and a heavy black kettle full of stewing herbs. And we, seated on her pastel couch of the softest suede, staring at her like she was the fucking sun, like she could make all our writerly dreams come true. And maybe she could. She sat in a lavender wing chair, smiling cryptically at all of us. Her silver-golden hair billowing as though in a breeze that blew just around her person. A giant amethyst loomed on a shelf behind her. She offered us tea and we took it, thank you so much oh my god, we hope we’re not disturbing you . And she smiled, pouring. Like yes. We were fucking disturbing her. And yet here we were, weren’t we? The tea was terribly strong, Bunny, putrid, primal tasting, and her smile so pink and inscrutable above the steam.

“And to what do I owe this surprise visit,” she said at last in a voice fit for operas.

We were silent at first. Staring. All having a moment, I guess. Of fan girl. The fact of Ursula, the Ursula, in front of us. Ursula the Word Witch speaking actual words to us. She who wrote To Catch a Crystal Thief of the Heart. Wearing some sort of caftan-meets-smock that shone iridescently like the crystal behind her. I was about to respond when beside me, I heard Elsinore’s soft voice chime in. “Professor Radcliffe—”

“Ursula,” Ursula said. “Please.”

“Ursula ,” we all repeated and her name in our mouths felt exhilarating.

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