That year, her team made it to the state playoffs, and Coach Creely benched Bunny for the entire game, though the team lost anyway. Sitting on that bench had shamed Bunny more deeply than going stag to every school dance had done. She had also happened to be on her period, and Bunny’s periods were horrific, tidal affairs that she was prone to discussing in the goriest language she could conjure. After the playoff game, she had texted me that she was depressed and could I come over, her father was not home. Aunt Deedee was working late that night—she had recently been fired from the Target Starbucks and was working nights at a bar in Culver City, which meant more money but even fewer hours of sleep. I had never seen her so gray and flattened, and sometimes I worried she would just drop dead. I told Jason where I was going, and he farted at me, and I went next door, where I found Bunny still in her uniform, purple short-sleeve jersey, “buns” (the adorable name for the black panties they pretended were shorts), kneepads down around her ankles, a heating pad on her stomach, eating gummy worms.

“Dude,” she said, “you want to know the grossest thing about having a period?”

“No,” I said. “I do not.”

“When you take a shit and you wipe, it looks like peanut butter and jelly.”

“And we wonder why you don’t have a boyfriend,” I said, stealing a gummy worm from the bag in her lap.

“Ugh. I know exactly why I don’t have a boyfriend,” she said. “Because I’m fucking eight feet tall. I’m a monster.”

“You’re not a monster. You have charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent, and you know it.”

“I’m never going to have a boyfriend. I’ll probably be, like, a forty-year-old virgin, all wrinkled from too much sun, and I’ll get stocky and thick, and everyone will just assume I’m a lesbian.”

“That’s pretty insulting to lesbians,” I said.

“I wish I were a lesbian,” she said.

“It’s never too late! Are you attracted to girls?”

She seemed to think about this, chewing thoughtfully on a gummy worm. “I think they are so, so pretty. I like to look at them. I think they look pretty naked. Is that enough?”

I wasn’t sure. “Does looking at them make you hungry, like, I want that, I want to squeeze that, I want to shove my face in that?”

She laughed. “No.”

“Then you are probably not fit to be a lesbian.”

“Do you feel that way about guys?”

“No comment,” I said.

“Can I tell you something?”

“Obviously you can.”

“Penises kind of freak me out.”

“In what way?”

“Like, they look like they don’t have enough skin. They look like naked mole rats, have you ever seen those? And they are all vulnerable and pink and everything, but then, like, hard and long and pokey? Sometimes just looking at a dick, like, if it’s alone, actually kind of makes me sick to my stomach, like one of those videos where they pop a big zit?”

Her honesty gave me the giggles. “If it’s alone?” I gasped.

“Yeah, I mean, like, not in the context of a porno, but like, just a dick pic, like just, wham, right there, erect penis, no context. That doesn’t gross you out at all?”

“Not really,” I said. But it had once. I could remember getting queasy when I first started cruising Craigslist. I had known enough to expect, even at thirteen, that I would see penises. But there were so many kinds, and sometimes they had weird veiny knots in them, or oversize heads on tiny staffs, or they were too pink, or so black I didn’t know they could be that black and shiny, slick purple, almost eggplant. But it had been the pictures of anuses that had been most alarming to me. Some of them were so well bleached and manicured that they looked like doll parts, but some of them were dark brown and hairy and scary looking. But I still felt very compelled to look at them, and gradually they had become less and less frightening to look at, but the fear and the excitement went together, were almost one thing.

“I wonder why sex is so terrifying,” Bunny mused. “Like, why is it this great big thing and so full of pleasure, but also, like, very, very frightening?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I was so embarrassed sitting on that bench, it was like I couldn’t even look up. I couldn’t look at anyone, or I would start crying, you know? It was like a public shaming or something. What were those things called? Where they would lock your hands and head in a piece of wood in the town square?”

“A pillory.”

“Yeah, it was like I was pilloried.”

“I’m sure nobody but you thought of it that way,” I said.

“Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Michael. I’m taller than all the students, but I always kind of was, or at least the second tallest. But I’m”—she sat up, leaned in, almost whispered—“I mean, Michael, I’m taller than the teachers. I’m taller than my dad.” Her eyes begged me to understand the unnaturalness of this, the constant pain of it. And I knew. I knew she had to lean down to hear her friends talk. I knew that if we went anywhere besides North Shore, where they were used to her, she would have to answer endless questions: How tall are you? Are your parents tall? Do you ever wear high heels? Do you have a boyfriend? People would ask her that, just, like, at the mall.

“I don’t know, Bunny,” I said.

“I mean, do you think there is something genetically, biologically wrong with me that I’m this tall?”

“Do you think there is something genetically, biologically wrong with me that I’m this gay?” I said, keeping her gaze, even though the more I looked at them, the weirder her eyes seemed to me, too large and shiny, the dark brown of her irises glossy and slick as melted chocolate.

She burst out laughing, belting out hee-haws so improbable that at first I thought she was faking it.

 

* * *

 

—

That winter, Bunny didn’t join the swim team as she usually did. She didn’t do anything. Ray had finally taken her to the doctor, and he wrote a note exempting her from even regular P.E. She was still growing too fast.

 

* * *

 

—

While Bunny had never been good at school, there was no sign she had the developmental delays one would expect with DNMT3A overgrowth syndrome, and a DNA test confirmed this.The concern was that there might be a tumor in her pituitary gland causing an excess production of growth hormone. Her hands had grown so much that the joints ached, and her jaw had become heavier, more manly. While these changes filled Bunny with despair and self-loathing, there was now an androgyny to her looks that I found fascinating. I had an impulse to grab her long, thick throat and push my fingers into that jaw and turn her head this way and that. She was beautiful.