Rabbit Heart
The older boys in the neighborhood have started to notice Bianca and me when we walk down the street. It began last Saturday. We had just finished a play in Nina’s backyard and trudged home in heavy costume gowns the color of our father’s coffee teeth. I’d felt their eyes following us but I couldn’t find who they belonged to—I thought the bobcats were up in the birch trees watching us again, but I smelled no musk of ammonia. Only Bianca’s usual scent of gardenias floated around our crowned skulls.
The leaves were still on the trees lining the dusk-quiet street. Late August’s heat was thick enough to jar. Like frightened rabbits we froze and listened. We could hear only garden sounds—snakes crossing ivy, apples falling to earth. I held my breath so the thumping of my heart would slow down. Eventually we gathered up the thick tulle of our gowns and took off running for Bianca’s. Only after we stopped a few houses down the road did we hear their laughter trailing after us.
*
Faster than an apple can rot in the summer sun, they noticed us before we even noticed ourselves. What do they see?
I look up. Bianca’s head is turned towards the woods where we can see their houses if we squint hard enough. A hand is raised sheepishly to her mouth. Beside her in the grass is a green apple with a bite taken out of it. The flesh is speckled with blood.
You’re pretty and know how to walk like you’re not thinking about it, I say. When you open your mouth people turn, ready to listen.
Bianca looks at me. I’m pretty like a roadside flower, fleeting and forgettable, she says. You’re like one of O’Keefe’s. My face grows hot. She laughs and her big dress shakes wildly in the grass, the sound of it like thrashing leaves.
*
We’re still afraid, but excited too, knowing it’s the boys watching us. Bianca says their eyes have transformed us into a new species of girl.
Today they’re clustered on the lawn and take turns wrestling in the grass. Bianca and I walk down the street in her sister’s old skirts, iridescent and fluttering around us like the wings of birds. Bianca laughs at everything—the sky, her shoes, my face. It’s how she gets their attention. The wind takes a wedge of her laughter and drops it into their yard swiftly. Nina walks towards us then, grinning, dressed in medieval armor and wielding a stock of bamboo. My new sword for the play, she says.
Bianca’s mouth twists up. She looks over Nina’s shoulder as the wrestlers spill out into the street. I feel the rabbit inside me nosing into the walls of my stomach. Nina follows her eyes and turns back to us, her face contorted in disgust. She stomps off thrashing the bamboo through the air.
The boys retreat to the shadows of the garage. We linger for a moment under the apple tree, fruit darkening above our heads, but they don’t notice us. Bianca’s mom drives by waving and blowing kisses in her waitress uniform. We start to walk home in defeat. The dusk wind whirs inside our hollowed bodies like a muffled screech. We say, when they don’t see us it’s like we’ve wasted a whole day existing. We’re almost to Bianca’s driveway when we finally hear them calling after us.
*
My body has been left up for interpretation, like a painting or poem, I think. I look into Bianca’s long dance mirror and don’t know what I’m supposed to mean.
I’m going to have my first kiss tonight on a dock in a violet dress, Bianca declares to our mirrored selves. I pinch my cheeks so they turn crimson. My reflection says to hers, you’ve been kissing Nina in plays for years. She frowns at her feet. That obviously doesn’t count, she says.
I watch Bianca watching herself. She pirouettes and stretches, her eyes velvet and smiling at the reflection belonging to her. She seems to know what I don’t. Her shadow billows across the blue wallpaper behind us, faceless and knowing, too.
My heart thrashes and thrashes at the thought of being with them tonight, I tell her. It feels like I’ll die.
Bianca pauses. One day a girl wakes up and decides to kill the rabbit of her heart, she says. Or she wakes up to find it has died.
My only luck is scaring it to death, I think.
*
Tonight the earth is quiet as if listening for Bianca and me as we slip out the front door. The stars stare blankly as we cut through the woods towards the road. A truck idles just beyond the treeline. We freeze on Bianca’s lawn and look back at her house even though it’s empty. Leaves on the trees brush against each other like the song of cicadas. We run to the truck and climb into the flatbed. A black dog rises from the corner and sniffs us dubiously, then lies back down. The truck shifts and we start down the night-blue hill, passing my house that is neat and nearly sleeping; I crouch down so it doesn’t see me. A hand reaches through the back window and passes a bottle through. Bianca takes a drink without flinching and grins. I catch a glimpse of her last baby tooth, crooked and clinging to her gums. It glints beneath the moon like a treasure in the cave of her mouth. The truck rambles down the dirt road towards the lake, its engine whistling.
By the time we park the moon is high and golden like the eye of a bobcat in a tree. I can’t see the lake but I smell it—algae, lilypads, old driftwood. A warmth blooms inside from the liquor. I want to lie down with Bianca and sleep with the smell of gardenias but she’s already climbing out of the truck bed. I get out after the dog who vanishes into the larger darkness of the woods. Cicadas always sound like the end of the world, I think. I follow Bianca’s laughter as it drifts away from me.
The lake shimmers and laps at the bank methodically. Bianca and the boys talk low near the shore. Tucked into a corner of night is a fishhouse with two eyes of lamplight. It dimly illuminates their bodies. Bianca’s silhouette shakes with laughter and something is flung from her hand. I’m crouching in the switchgrass. Bianca says no and she’s laughing high and quick like a bird’s alarm call. Their shadows are clustered together, fluttering in the dark. I hear splashing and a sharp yelp. Limbs flail in the water like a dog treading anxiously, though the only dog around is lost to the woods. Quicksilver movement of their bodies. It grows quiet suddenly except for the lake that continues to wash over the shore. What’s wrong with her, someone asks.
I hear cursing and water dragging after legs as they walk out of the lake. Bianca’s floating and they pull her by the arms onto the sand. The boys stumble back into their clothes. I crawl up to Bianca slowly. Her face is a damp pearl beneath the lamplight.
We get into the truck bed and the boys start driving us home. All of a sudden the body has a life of its own, I think. There is an extension of myself hovering ahead now, constant and anonymous as my shadow. I press my face into the dog’s neck, warm and smelling of sap. I open my eyes and let them move around the darkness of her fur till the truck stops. We climb out of the bed and the boys have their windows rolled up. They drive off and the dog barks at us till we’re no longer visible.
Bianca spits onto the moonlit pavement and squats down, rooting around the puddle of her saliva. I ask her what happened. She picks something up and shows it to me. I think it’s a pebble, but then I squint and see that it’s her tooth, very small and dark in her cupped palm.
I played dead, she says. She puts the tooth in her jacket pocket and we start walking home.
We sleep on the floral rug in Bianca’s living room. Her breath moves rhythmically like the lake as she dreams. I keep waking to the sound of insects humming and fluttering against the lamps we leave on. The door opens and the smell of a mother wafts in, softening me. She switches off the lamps quietly.
*
Nina’s backyard is shrouded in gardenia blooms, white like our costume gowns must’ve been once, though we can’t remember it. We watch the play from the shrubs till Nina sees us. Our eyes meet and she stands rigid like her sword. You’ve interrupted, she says, gesturing towards her little sister sprawled out in the yard playing dead. Bianca puts her thumb in the space where her tooth used to be. I’m sorry, we say, one after the other. Nina orbits her yard, thinking. Fine, she says, and we take our places kneeling in the bruised grass. Her sister’s eyelids flutter in the sunlight. We place a bouquet of flowers on her chest. I am someone else, only slightly, I think; I vary. I am composed of everything I have been and thought to be. Bianca weeps as Nina pretends to twist the sword into her sister’s heart.
I hear the boys’ tinny laughter far off. Bianca’s gown rustles as she glances around, listening. Inside me the rabbit starts to stir like something caged, or dreaming. I realize my mouth is open. There is a sound escaping it which reminds me of autumn—trees knocking against one another bullishly, and their leaves, nearly yellow, twisting down and away with a shimmering violence. The rabbit’s heart pounds like a restless fist on the door of my mind. It starts a fire with the kindling of my thoughts. The girls stand up from their soiled green knees, watching me, a dull flicker of recognition in their eyes.