Bunny (Bunny, #1)

by Mona Awad

I watched the Bunnies shiver and give each other a group hug with only their eyes. The poets brace themselves for imminent, overeducated poverty.

Now she works in the basement of the nature lab down the hill, shelving dead bugs. Every single dead bug gets its own tiny glass drawer. It’s kind of nice. And infinitely better for her spiritual and creative well-being than hanging around the fake poor and fashionably deranged, aka the art school student body.

She looks at it all with disgust—the tall old buildings, the ornately spiked gates, the endless stretch of carefully manicured perfumed green teeming with bright-eyed squirrels and rabbits, the students walking here and there, discussing Derrida and their nose jobs, their hair kissed by a September light so golden and perfect it’s as though they’d paid the sun to beam down on them in just that way.

“They all look like Twinkies to me, Smackie: fake-sweet, squidgy, unsurprising packaging.

look at her through my bangs, which she has encouraged me to grow over my eyes. Makes you look punk, she says. I look at her different-colored eyes, her bleached and feathery hair that is the antithesis of Bunny hair, cut asymmetrically and shaved in places, her fishnet veil that she wears like a threshold to be crossed only if you dare.

Because she looks like a cupcake. Dresses like a cupcake. Gives off a scent of baked lemony sugar. Pretty in a way that reminds you of frosting flourishes. Not the forest green and electric blue horrors in the supermarket, but the pastel kind that is used at weddings or tasteful Easter gatherings. She looks so much like a cupcake that when I first met her at orientation, I had a very real desire to eat her. Bite deeply into her white shoulder. Dig a fork in her cheek.

But tonight, Cupcake smiles at me. Her pink-and-white face lights up. “Samantha, hi!” As if she’s actually delighted to see me. I’m a jewel-colored cardigan. I’m a first edition of The Bell Jar. I’m a marzipan squirrel. I’m a hairdresser who knows exactly, exactly, how to handle her carefully undertucked bob of golden hair.

look into the amber eyes of the one I call Creepy Doll. Because she reminds me of the creepy dolls I used to want when I was little, with their saucer eyes and their velvet dresses, their Shirley Temple curls of blood-red hair and their Cupid’s-bow lips molded into little pink oh!’s of wonder at the world. Writes fairy tales about girl demons, wolf princes, the cozy phantasmagoria of her native New Hampshire. Collects antique typewriters, each of which she claims has its own unique “ghost energy” that she channels into her stories as she types, head tilted back, eyes closed. She is the literal doll-pet of the other Bunnies. Sits curled in their skirted laps like a cat. Purrs when they pet her, makes hissing sounds when they stop. Her voice is the feathery baby voice of children in horror films. I have heard that same voice go down about five octaves when she thinks she is alone, become deep as a well.

They’re graduate students, I argue back. Exactly. Hiding from life in the most coddling, insular, and self-aggrandizing way.