Bunny (Bunny, #1)

by Mona Awad

I knew he knew there were worlds in me.

Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things? my mother always asked me. I don’t know, I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.

We can’t help but coo and clap our hands at the so-cute things of this world. At the ducks, oh my god, look at the ducks, so cute. At the sky, oh my god, look at the sky, so cute. At the tall buildings reflecting the sun setting, look how shiny shiny they are. Homeless man don’t look, don’t look, don’t look, that causes an owie inside. No, do look, it’s sad. Makes you think, makes you deep.

For a second I think she’s going to stroke my face, but instead she takes off the heart-shaped sunglasses I forgot I was wearing and puts them on. Two hearts over her eyes. The world goes from dark pink to a gray-white hellscape under grimy diner lights. She’s the only beautiful thing in it.

And that’s when I realize that whatever pain I have, whatever true want I have that lives under all this greasy, spineless needing to please isn’t something I want to give them.

He smiles. Light on green leaves. Me looking up at the fast-moving clouds, the damp grass on my back. The smell of wet budding flowers all around me. I’m fifteen.

I feel the immense heaviness of my limbs. How long I have been dragging them. My eyes close and close and close.

I’m just glad you’re home.” “Home,” I repeat, and the word is like the fresh Chinese sweet buns we will eat at her rickety table, the green tea we will drink. It is the table and the chairs and us sitting in them together, smoking and tipping our ashes into the same crumb-crusted plate. “Me too.”

Today was so wonderful. Probably this is heaven. The night is a waterfall of music and lights. The night is a rabbit hole into which we enter, hand in mesh hand. The night is a dark earth I could dig my hands into forever. The night becomes a page of literature that I would, at sixteen, press against my heart.

January, February, March. The winter is a torrent of snow. Falling slow and fat. Falling quick and bright. The sun if it rises at all is a weak white flame.

“You love me?” “What a question. Of course. No one loves you like me.” She smiles at me. She means it. With her whole soul. It is holding itself open like a hand, palm up.

How I left that night. Wondering what the hell just happened. Knowing nothing happened, knowing too that everything had changed. How empty and emptied I felt walking away with all my words still on his floor. Wanting so badly to pick them back up. Take it all back. Wipe away the night, my dumb tears, my endless tumbling out of words.

Something in her voice. A certain music in it. Very specific. Instantly familiar. Do you know the music I mean? Like it’s not just a sound but a place. A place I think I’ve been before. Where I could live forever. There is air and light in it. There are windows and doors. It is inside and it is outside. It’s a hand. Soft. Firm. Open. Have I held it before?

Because we were already running away again, me and my imagination. We were holding hands on the edge of the cliff by the North Sea, we were high, high up in a redwood tree, we were on a train to Paris, we were blue-lipped in the river trying to swim to India.

She was a great girl-shaped forest. She was a thing on fire. Her hand was leaves and smoke and snow and flesh all at once. We were running away together down a curving dirt road, through a dipping valley of grass, by a rushing mud-colored river, into an even greater forest, or we were just running who knows where? No idea. Didn’t care. But I was excited. My life could change. And I wasn’t alone anymore.