I have a vision of a Top Gun–era Tom Cruise with a harelip. His beautiful head exploding. The hail of bone, the shower of blood, the terrible brain rain from which I no longer bothered to take cover thanks to the magic Tic Tacs. And then his lovely eyeball landing in my kitten lap, blue-green as my dream of the sea, winking at me like a hard-won cat’s-eye.

Our mothers always said to look hard at the things of this world that are owies on the eyes because they will put more colors in your inner rainbow.

Bunny, you’re disgusting, we say. You’re so disgusting oh my god. But we love you anyway, Bunny, like you’re our very own sick, alienlike little baby who looks just like a gross old man the way babies can sometimes look to everyone but their mother.

We all watch him chew contentedly. Then swallow. Then chew again. If we could watch him digest, we would.

“Your beauty is nuanced and labyrinthine like a sentence by Proust."

I love you, Bunny. And then they hug each other so hard I think their chests are going to implode. I would even secretly hope for it from where I sat, stood, leaned, in the opposite corner of the lecture hall, department lounge, auditorium, bearing witness to four grown women—my academic peers—cooingly strangle each other hello.

They each look at Ava, then at me, in turn, scanning down from our heads to our feet, their eyes taking us in like little mouths sipping strange drinks. As they do, their noses twitch, their eight eyes do not blink, but stare and stare. Then they look back at the Duchess and lean in to each other, their lip-glossed mouths forming whispery words. Ava squeezes my arm, hard. The Duchess turns and arches an eyebrow at us. She raises a hand up. Is there an invisible gun in it? No. It’s an empty, open hand. With which she then waves. At me. With something like a smile on her face. Hi, her mouth says. My hand shoots up of its own accord before I can even stop myself. I’m waving and waving and waving. Hi, I’m saying with my mouth, even though no sound comes out. Then the rest of the Bunnies hold up a hand and wave too.

Or is it our amazingly empathic hive mind that we make by hugging so that we become one of those animals with a brain and heart in each tentacle that connects to a bigger, cosmic heart-brain that is like a shared, all-seeing third eye? Who knows? Who cares?

Like we could hug and hug and hug until our ribs crack and our hearts burst and our lungs collapse and our arms break off and still. We’d still be hugging air. No body.

We huddle-hug on the velvety green among the cherry blossom trees. We link arms. We close our eyes the better to feel each other's bodies. We form a hot little circle of love and understanding. We press our faces into our faces, our cheeks against our cheeks, our eyelashes tickling our skins like little hummingbird wings, like Bunny nose twitches.

Samantha Heather Mackey thinks her stories are so fucking great! Samantha Heather Mackey doesn't say it but she thinks she's too good for the whole fucking world! Samantha Heather Mackey acts poor but why then does she behave like a princess? Samantha Heather Mackey slept with her professor! Sucked him off! For preferential treatment! There is no way in hell that Samantha Heather Mackey can be that tall, she wears stilts! Samantha Heather wears stilts so she can look down on us! Oh, ho, ho, ho she loves fucking second of that!! Samantha Heather Mackey thinks we have everything under the sun, that we sleep on a bed of gold, and meanwhile she sleeps on a bed of dirt. That she has nothing, nothing, and she thinks this makes her deep. It doesn't make you deep, Samantha Heather Mackey, it just makes you rumpled and it makes you smell of old potatoes. Samantha Heather Mackey thinks she understands everything, but she fails to understand the depths of the human heart. She fails to understand the depths of our heart. Our hearts our heart our heart! We've read Jane Eyre too, you cunt, and we've read The Waves, and when we read it, you know, we wept for minutes.

Their cheeks are plump and pink and shining like they’ve been eating too much sugar, but actually it’s Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus.

Walking, I know exactly where, to exactly which lacquered front door. His destination is in my blood. His intention is in my heart.

The world goes from dark pink to a gray-white hellscape under grimy diner lights. She's the only beautiful thing in it.

They glare at me. Or try to. It's hard for them. Very hard with all the Tic Tac painkillers taking away their edges. Leaving them suspended and floating, possibly forever, in the mist, in the rainbow sky.

Perfect flakes falling on her perfect house, its towers, actual towers, shining white and pointy as teeth under a perfect moon.

I gaze up at its long, pink plastic body in the center of the stand. Emblazoned with hearts. Frozen in midprance. Its large, ever-smiling eyes full of sparkles. "Pinkie Pie," I whisper.

When he looks at me, I feel my rib cage open like a pair of French doors. Everything that keeps me alive suddenly bared and there for the taking.

The way she says alone makes it sound like a cave. Like some hideous, dark cave whose oozing walls are teeming with all the unpleasant things of this world, and I am crawling willingly, brazenly, into this awful space of my own free will. Shoveling the vermin I find scuttling across the floor into my mouth for sustenance.

But know what, exactly? What is there to really know? Sometimes when I tell myself or Ava the story, it grows teeth and it's something. Definitely something. Other times, it comes apart in my hands like air. But if I remember all the right details. If I tell them in the right order. If I pause in the right places, trail off in the right places…

When he looks at me, I feel my rib cage open like a pair of French doors. Everything that keeps me alive suddenly bared and there for the taking. 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.

You're too crushed and obsessed about being poor to have always been poor