Bunny

A mysterious voice says, “You’re welcome,” and the Bunny continues to refer to herself with the plural “we.” She asks the person who she is but kind of remembers her. She thinks she’s ugly for separating her from Bunnies. The girl calls the Bunny “Smackie” and wants to know why she has been gone for two months and is wearing a dress with kittens in crowns. The girl says they’re in a cult, and the Bunny, in her head, sings a song from a Disney musical. The girl tells the Bunny to look at her, and she wonders why she calls her Smackie. After looking into her face for a while, she realizes the girl is Ava.

At the monster diner, Samantha stops being a plural Bunny and uses the first-person singular pronoun “I” again. Ava tells Samantha about her extensive search for her and how she made friends with the flasher on her fire escape. Ava thought about involving the cops or filing a missing person’s report. She wondered if Samantha had been beheaded or was the victim of a deadly crime. Then she saw Samantha with the Bunnies on the grass. They looked at her and then looked away.

Samantha apologizes and remembers a Draft, Beowulf VII, who looked like the actor and musician Donald Glover. She told him they should do drugs and have sex in the woods. She asked another Draft, Big Rig, to tell her something, and she looked under Lancelot’s gloves, yet another draft. Lancelot bit her, so she had to go to the hospital. One Bunny told Samantha she should have let her die; then they kissed and told each other they were each other’s favorites. The Draft process makes Samantha think of the mechanical animal band at Chuck E. Cheese pizza restaurants.

Back in the diner, Samantha’s phone buzzes, and Ava says she should answer it. What if the Bunnies call the cops on Ava and put her in Bunny prison? Ava then tells Samantha she’s leaving town soon but hasn’t because of Dolores—the diner waitress with a knife in her bra.

Two Bunnies, Kira and Caroline, enter the diner and tell Samantha they were going to call the cops or campus security, but Eleanor told them not to. Ava tells the Bunnies that a wolf boy almost slaughtered Samantha, but Ava saved her. The two Bunnies recognize Ava from the Demitasse and wonder why Samantha never introduced her.

Ava excuses herself, and Victoria enters the scene. She wonders if the wolf boy was hot. Through the window, Samantha sees Eleanor and Ava talking in the parking lot. Samantha and Ava lock eyes, and then Ava leaves. Samantha runs outside and confronts Eleanor, and Eleanor claims she only asked Ava about the pets she had as a kid.

Eleanor and Samantha spot Jonah in the parking lot. Jonah mentions Samantha speaking to rabbits. The Bunnies climb into Eleanor’s SUV and drive away as her golden retriever barks. Rain falls, and Jonah offers Samantha a ride.

Jonah calls his car the Whale. He drives five miles per hour, smokes, listens to avant-garde jazz, and smiles. He drives Samantha to the bus station, Ava’s house, and back to the bus station, but she can’t find Ava. She remembers past conversations with Ava and imagines that Eleanor told Ava that Samantha hates her.

Jonah and Samantha drive around and discuss the Bunnies. He thought she hated them since she called them “Cuntscapades.” Samantha denies it, but when Jonah says the Bunnies seem nice, she says they’re not nice. She considers telling Jonah how they make fun of him, but she doesn’t. She thinks she sees Ava and runs out of the car and into the rain. The person isn’t Ava, and Jonah wonders if Samantha is looking for drugs. Samantha says she lost her favorite book. Jonah offers to take her to a bookstore, but Samantha says it won’t be there.

Jonah confesses to stealing a cat while Samantha remembers a phone call with her dad. It was almost Christmas break, and due to potential legal issues, he couldn’t visit her and it wasn’t safe for her to visit him. Jonah’s dad died of lung cancer when Jonah was 17, and Samantha tells Jonah how her mom died in a car accident.

Jonah invites Samantha over; maybe he has the book she lost. Samantha declines. She gets a text from the Bunnies. They want her to come over.

Outside Eleanor’s home, Samantha imagines the mean things Eleanor says about her before she notices a stag in the now snowy yard. A Draft, Orphic French Welder Who Plays Guitar, opens Eleanor’s front door and invites her in. The stag disappears, and Samantha enters the living room. She tells herself to leave, but she stays and cries. The Bunnies wonder if Samantha thought they’d banish her and remind her that this isn’t high school or a movie: They’re enlightened grownups. Samantha thinks of the Bunnies as one blob with four heads.

The Bunnies think she should lead workshop. They bring out the rabbit, but Samantha can’t make it explode. The Bunnies provide positive feedback—keep it simple, think of a desirable man. Images stream through her head, but the bunny remains. When she thinks of Ava, the bunny hops out of the circle. The Bunnies console Samantha, and Vignette leaves and comes back with news: There’s a boy in the bus shelter across the street.

The Bunnies congratulate Samantha for creating a strange but attractive boy. The Bunnies ask him if he’s seen a bunny or a boy, and the Draft says he saw a bunny hopping down the street until a red wolf gored its throat. The Draft says it was beautiful. The Bunnies tell her Draft their names, and Samantha introduces herself. Cupcake offers him a ride, and Samantha asks him where he’s going. He’s going home. He puts on his headphones and boards the bus.

For the last workshop of the semester, Fosco praises her five students and reminds them that they’re Warren’s first group of all-women fiction writers. The Bunnies get Fosco a ficus, and Samantha remembers what the Bunnies told her last night: They probably shouldn’t have told her Draft their names, but it’s not like he has Facebook. They are also afraid Samantha’s Draft might rape them.

In the Cave/workshop, Samantha asks what time it is, and the Bunnies express how much they like not knowing the time. Eleanor suggests a brief exercise to mark their last day, and Kira proposes writing about home. Samantha screams that she doesn’t want to share what she wrote (all she has written is “I’ll never tell you” repeatedly).

At the end-of-semester cookie party, Benjamin, the department administrator, asks Samantha if she’s leaving already. He had a barbeque near the end of the first year, but Samantha didn’t go due to the Bunnies’ sexual email thread about the barbeque. Samantha thinks Benjamin likes the Bunnies and not her due to the barbecue incident. He notes Eleanor’s gingerbread cookies, then the Lion asks to speak to Samantha in his office.

The Lion wears an industrial German rock band T-shirt featuring a monster strangling a voluptuous woman. Samantha imagines someone asking her about the possible inappropriate sexual things he tried to do with her, but Samantha answers no to each charge.

In his office, he says she can talk to him if something’s bothering her. He’s worried about her and her writing. He wanted Samantha at Warren due to her inventive, imaginative voice, but if she doesn’t show him work by the end of winter break, they’ll have a solemn talk. Samantha understands and lies, saying she has to catch a plane.

Samantha hopes to see Ava outside her apartment door, but all she sees are the flasher’s Crocs and Walmart bags. In bed, she imagines the Bunnies saying goodbye to one another and thinks about how Ava would say, “Fuck them.”

In bed, the days and nights blend. Samantha thinks of more unflattering names for the city—ZombieCity, Jailville—as she watches the weatherman make end-of-the-world gestures due to the snow and ice. The crime doesn’t stop: sexual assault in the morning, beheadings in the afternoon, and a shooting in the evening.

She dreams of someone bringing her cold medicine and a glass of water but can’t figure out who it should be—Ava, her dad, Jonah, a Bunny, or the Lion. Samantha vows not to look at the Bunnies’ social media, but she does. She thinks about home, gets out of bed, and goes outside. She roams the city for what feels like hours, days, or weeks, but she can’t find Ava. She returns home and to bed. She drafts texts to Ava but doesn’t send them. She thinks Ava comes back and is by her bed, but Ava turns into air.

On Christmas Eve morning, Samantha shops at Cheapo’s, a depressing store. She hears Ava’s critical voice and goes to the nicer Forestier’s—though Ava hates Forestier’s more than Cheapo’s. Samantha gazes at the pricey cocoa and deluxe pasta sauce. She gets lost and doesn’t put any items in her basket. She hears lyrics from a pop song and then sees her Draft in a trench coat stealing goat cheese, pickled fish, smoked salmon, and more.

Fosco appears and invites Samantha over for Christmas. Samantha doesn’t want to go but agrees to show up anyway. Over Fosco’s shoulder, Samantha sees the Draft steal crystallized ginger and dried mango. He stares at her and smiles.

At Fosco’s house, world music comes from covert speakers. There are paintings of a clitoris looking like a flower or flame. Samantha imagines what Ava would say: run.

Jonah is in the living room, and Samantha hears her mom’s voice: Why can’t she be happy? Samantha says hi to Jonah and smiles at Silky, a predatory professor in the poetry program and Fosco’s husband. Also present is their angular and moody teen daughter, Persephone. Samantha recalls a phone conversation with her dad where he told her she used to be afraid of the wind in the grass.

Jonah says if he wasn’t at Warren, he might be passed out somewhere or dead. Silky asks Samantha where she’d be, and she says just wants to focus on her writing. Jonah says he’s writing a lot and working on a long poem about Alaska—his home state.

Fosco asks Samantha about Workshop, and she thinks of the Bunnies’ Workshop and exploding heads before answering, “Great.” Fosco is glad Samantha liked workshop. She knows Samantha had issues with the other women. Samantha remembers last winter when she begged Fosco to let her drop workshop. Samantha tells her she worked out the problems with the Bunnies and is now dabbling in several mediums.

Samantha spots one of the caterers—he’s a Draft—and Fosco tells Samantha about the importance of cohorts and community. She thinks of the workshop in Creepy Doll’s gory attic and starts laughing. Jonah laughs, and the bunny boy laughs too.

Ava’s absence seizes Samantha, and her laughs turn to tears. Jonah offers her pills to calm her and asks if she ever found the book she lost. Samantha leaves even though everyone thinks she should stay for supper.

Samantha pays for a bus ride with change and not her Warren card. She doesn’t want to make herself a target. She hears Ava in her head: What does “target” mean? On the bus, an older woman who looks like Samantha’s dead grandma reads a wrinkled poster about schizophrenia.

The Draft whispers into Samantha’s neck: Did she ever find the bunny? Samantha reminds him that he said the bunny died. He asks about her friends—the Bunnies—and Samantha says they’re not her friends: She hates them. The Draft says he’s high on love and heading home.

Samantha follows the Draft, and she thinks he’s letting her tail him. They cross a woodlot, a parking lot, people’s gardens, the bad parts of the town, and the town’s nice areas. He steals flowers from a greenhouse and stops outside Ava’s home. Samantha can’t see the Draft, and the darkness outside tells her to give up and be a Bunny. She stays, and Ava appears and calls her a loser. She asks why she is standing outside when she gave her a key.