I was jealous, too, that there was something so healthy in her, so vital and pure, that she saw those images and knew not to like them. I had been stunned, but not surprised, by the first man who hurt me while we were having sex, and I learned quickly to hurt others. Ever since, against my will, images of a more sadistic nature had been appealing to me, and sometimes I could click and click and click until I was watching things that gave me nightmares afterward.

And so I told her what maybe I should not have told her, which is that it would be older men who wanted her, men who were more confident, less cowed by her physical strength and size. That to a man even in his twenties, her youth itself would be enough to flood his mouth with saliva.

“Like how old?” she asked excitedly.

“No,” I said, “this is not an endorsement of you trying to find perverts to fuck you.”

“But like how old?”

“When you’re in college,” I said. “Boys then won’t be so scared. Someone will be lucky to date you.”

“Do you think a college guy would date me now?” she asked.

“Bunny, you could be a fucking camgirl if you wanted, it’s not about that, it’s about finding someone to have a real relationship with. Who will value you. Who will understand how insanely incredible you are.”

She let it drop, but I knew she wasn’t satisfied.

* * *

—

One of the terms we stole from RuPaul’s Drag Race was the concept of “realness.” They would say, “Carmen is serving some working girl realness right now,” and a lot of the time it just meant passing, that you were passing for the real thing, or that’s maybe what the word began as. But there were all different kinds of realness. In Paris Is Burning, which we must have watched a hundred times, a documentary about New York City drag ball culture, there were drag competitions with categories like Businessman or Soldier. Realness wasn’t just about passing as a woman, it was about passing as a man, passing as a suburban mom, passing as a queen, passing as a whore. It was about being able to put your finger on all the tiny details that added up to an accurate impression, but it was also about finding within yourself the essence of that thing. It was about finding your inner woman and letting her vibrate through you. It was about finding a deeper authenticity through artifice, and in that sense it was paradoxical and therefore intoxicating to me. To tell the truth by lying. That was at the heart of realness, at least to me.

I made Bunny play realness games with me all the time. I tried on her clothes. She tried on mine. We wore the same size shoes, as it happened. We practiced walking like boys, we practiced walking like girls. We did impressions of specific people. I was particularly good at imitating Ann Marie, a girl on Bunny’s volleyball team, but I could also do a convincing Principal Cardenas.

The thing about these games is that Bunny was absurdly bad at them. She couldn’t do it. She always seemed like a child overacting. When she tried to act feminine, she careened into strange Blanche DuBois territory. When she tried to act masculine it was all mid-’90s LL Cool J lip-licking weirdness. All her accents quickly devolved into Australian. And the thing about these games was that I was great at them in a way that scared us even as it made us laugh.

“Do my dad,” she said one day, “ooh, do my dad!”

I turned to her, finding almost immediately the way Ray held his mouth, the lips a little pooched, the way he raised one eyebrow higher than the other, the way his cheeks were a little flabby so they made his consonants too plosive, his vowels a bit sticky. “Bunny Rabbit,” I said, and I was prepared to go on, to say something like “And I’m not a racist, I love black people, but—”

Bunny screamed and leapt up to stand on top of the bed and began bouncing. “That was too good, that was too weird, oh my god, that was so weird.”

I laughed and said, “Really?”

“No, it was scary good.”

I tried to stop smiling, closed my eyes, and found him again in my mind. “Bunny, goddamnit, Coach Creely called because you’re failing trig, is that true?”

Bunny was jumping on the bed, squealing, “Oh my god! Oh my god, put on his clothes!”

“What? No,” I said, though I was fascinated by the idea, and it was not long before we had entered her father’s bedroom and dressed me in one of his shirts, unbuttoned too far, and with a small pillow from the couch as a paunch. I put on one of his ratty baseball caps, and we drew purple bags under my eyes with a plum lipstick Bunny had bought but never been able to pull off. We examined me in the mirror of the black Madame Butterfly death-suite bathroom.

“It’s perfect,” she said. “Now the hands.”

“What, this?” I asked, as I crossed my arms up high over my fake belly so that it looked like I was fondling my own armpits.

“Oh my god,” Bunny said. “Oh fuck. How do you do that?”

“Do what?” I asked, and then I did his laugh and she screamed.

I lost it and we both laughed with our real voices as we watched ourselves in the bathroom mirror. Who were we? I wondered.

Who was anyone?

* * *

—

I often wondered who Bunny would be without volleyball, it so dominated every aspect of her life. And while the dream had been set for her by her father—Ray who had seen her height and her strength and decreed her a star, Ray who plotted her course to Olympic fame (it was always, always assumed by her father that the Olympics were the goal)—volleyball was also something Bunny genuinely loved. She had done basketball too, when she was younger, and she had liked it, but the decision to focus on volleyball had in large part come from her, even if her attachment to her female coach seemed to me obviously psychologically unhealthy.

Coach Creely was cold and mean, her approval hard to get and stingy when it came, and to watch Bunny slave and slaver, seeking comfort and love from this false mother figure, was at times a bit much for me. Overall, the psychodynamics of the entire situation were undesirable, and yet the game itself was the one good thing in Bunny’s life. She was happiest on the court, where all her instincts were the right instincts, where she didn’t have to second-guess anything, where she and her body were fused and single. She was, quite literally, an animal on the court, and I sometimes marveled at the easy violence of her playing.

She made varsity in tenth grade and had a stellar year, but the summer before junior year, she began to grow. At first she was excited. She was already tall for her age, but there was no “too tall” for volleyball. But then she kept growing. By Christmas she had grown five inches, which hurt her, her legs in particular ached constantly, but which also disorganized her coordination. I only ever occasionally attended her games, both for scheduling reasons and because I found most sporting events boring, even if I knew someone personally involved. But she reported them all to me at excruciating length, and I was aware of every missed dig, every embarrassing fall. In fact, she fell just walking around the house. She was constantly hitting her head getting into cars, misjudging curbs, suddenly stumbling over her feet. It was comical at first, and then less so. “I think we should take you to the doctor,” Ray finally said, but he put off scheduling it.