The Rabbit Hutch

I invited some of her friends from work—she works at a small environmental advocacy nonprofit—and because I wanted her to enjoy the day, I even invited Valentina, her friend from graduate school. Beth is close with Valentina, and defensive of her, as Valentina supposedly endured some kind of childhood trauma about which Beth refuses to elaborate. I’m skeptical of the “trauma”—it’s just like Valentina to fish for sympathy with lies.

In my opinion, Valentina is annoying at best, sociopathic at worst. She’s loud, rude, always drinks too much, and often shatters people for sport. I also suspect she’s a pathological liar. She’s only ever dated aloof billionaires, and none of her relationships has lasted longer than a month. She has a mysterious pool of money that funds her hedonistic lifestyle—she travels, collects graduate degrees, blogs about food, and calls herself a photographer. She seems to be a little bit famous on social media, though nobody knows why. The only pleasant conversation I’ve ever had with Valentina was about coding, since she took a coding bootcamp in Mexico City for fun. I’ll admit she’s something of a genius, and although I basically despise her, I also admit that she possesses a chilling kind of charisma.

At this year’s Thanksgiving party with our childless friends, Valentina got drunk and spun a series of elaborate tales about her family’s fox ranch in Spain. Because I have deeply cyber-stalked Valentina, I happen to know for certain that she is of Italian and Polish descent but that her family has been settled in New England for generations, and I’m pretty sure her real name is Valerie.

Somehow, while beguiling and horrifying the party with her fox stories, she managed to simultaneously convince the host, Jandro, that his husband, Ron, was cheating on him with someone present. Ron was on an alcohol run. Valentina sandwiched all the “evidence” between grisly fox-pelt facts. Most of the “evidence” came down to Ron’s nervous demeanor all night. Valentina would lean into Jandro and whisper in his ear as people gasped or laughed at something she had just said. Because I am always on high alert around Valentina, I was listening and watching closely enough to catch these exchanges, but I doubt anyone else heard. I admit that, for a moment, even I was persuaded of Ron’s infidelity.

But I know Ron well, and Ron would simply never cheat, not even on someone he disliked, let alone on Jandro, to whom he is totally devoted. They have always been monogamous; Ron is categorially opposed to infidelity. I think Ron had overstated his ability to cook a turkey and simply felt embarrassed that it had turned out so bad.

But once Valentina gets involved, facts lose their power. By the end of the night, Jandro and Ron were yelling at each other, nearly tipping off the fire escape, and Jandro was crying and Ron was baffled and Valentina—I swear to God—Valentina watched them through the window, smirking. She removed a cigarette from her purse and left the apartment. When she came back, she looked different. It took me a second to realize she had a full face of fresh makeup, her skin powdery, her lips like dark cherries. Jandro and Ron were still outside; the rest of us were nervously cleaning up. “Gotta go,” announced Valentina with a false pout. “I’m getting drinks with an actual Carnegie, believe it or not. Kiss kiss bang bang.”

When I explained what I had witnessed to Beth on the drive home, Beth dismissed it. “You probably misheard,” she said. “There’s no way you could’ve known what she was whispering from across the room.” Then she gave me a lecture on the trope of the Aimlessly Evil Female Who Uses Her Body to Destroy Good Guys, referencing Genesis and a bunch of movies. “You’re reducing Valentina to some man-made, stock character.”

“But she wasn’t using her body,” I said. “And Iago wasn’t female.”

“What?”

Suddenly, I recalled the plot of Othello—wrote a final paper on the play in high school.

“Iago. Shakespeare. No one understands his motives for the shitty things he does to Desdemona and Othello. And he doesn’t use his body, either.”

“Are you seriously comparing Valentina to a Shakespearean villain?”

“You’re the one who brought up fictional tropes.”

“Iago had a motive. He was racist. Or he wanted to fuck Othello. Or both.”

“So maybe Valentina has a motive, too. Maybe she’s racist.”

“Please.”

“Or homophobic.”

“Come on.”

“Maybe wants to fuck Jandro!”

“I can’t believe this.”

“Or maybe her motive is that she simply enjoys setting fire to people’s lives.”

Beth paused, then said, “You’re looking for reasons to hate her, and you’re trying to make me hate her, too. If anyone’s acting like Iago here, it’s you.”

“Are you calling me racist?”

“You know that’s not what I’m saying.”

“Racist against a white girl from Boston?”

“She’s from Madrid.”

“She’s not even Spanish!” I cried. Our driver pulled up to our apartment and gave us a frightened look. I clenched my fists. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry.” We were both exhausted and tipsy. I decided to drop the subject and repent. Valentina had damaged enough relationships for one night. Beth walked ahead of me and let herself into the building.

All this is to say, you can probably understand why I didn’t want to invite Valentina to Beth’s birthday party.

But I invited her anyway because I love Beth, and Beth is regrettably undiscerning in her social taste. Either that or she has a preference for the mysteriously deranged.

The dinner went well. DIY spring rolls. Spicy basil tofu. Butterscotch cream pie. Champagne. All of Beth’s favorites, handmade by me. She wore a sexy emerald dress and pulled me into the bathroom at one point to give me a quick thank-you blow job, so I know she really appreciated my efforts. By the end of dessert, I was drunk. At some point while I was clearing the dishes, someone suggested that we play Clue. I hadn’t played the game in years, but I was pretty sure we owned it. Went to the home office to check. The knob of the office door is crystal, so I knew it was safe to touch. The room was dark and cluttered. As I fumbled for the light switch, someone quickly moved behind me and closed the door. Put a cold smooth hand over my mouth. I could feel each of her rings.

I pushed her off. “What are you doing?” I asked. Valentina moved her hand to my chest.

“Your heart is racing,” she said.

“Because you fucking startled me.”

It was only half true. Valentina’s presence always disturbs me, but I wasn’t quite startled. I must have subconsciously expected to find her there.

It is important at this point to make it clear that although some people think she’s sexy, I do not find Valentina attractive at all—her gaunt and avian appearance repulses me as much as her personality.

“What are you doing in here?” I asked.

“I was just getting my lip balm. Relax,” she said. I could hear her smiling. “Why are you so nervous? Hiding something in here?”

I forgot I had piled the coats and bags of the guests on the desk. She was still touching my chest, or at least that’s what it felt like, so I stepped backward, rattling the door.

“You can’t just lurk around in the shadows of someone else’s apartment and put your hands on them and expect them to—to be—it’s fucking creepy, okay?”

“Okay, okay, God.” She laughed. “I thought it’d be funny. Sorry. Playing Clue always makes me jumpy, too.”

“I’m not—”

“When I was little, my older cousins became obsessed with Clue—at some point we stopped using the board game. We had this old house in Ludlow, Vermont, where my whole extended family would summer. There were about forty of us. Me and my cousins would act out the game at night. It evolved into its own version, with different rules and characters and props, and we even had costumes—I always had to be Mr. Boddy. The murdered—”

“Excuse me.” I brushed passed her to flip on the light. Once the room was illuminated, I saw that she was facing me, her back to the door, holding the game in her hands, a tube of lip balm in her shirt pocket. “Way ahead of you.” She smiled, then left the office and joined the others in the living room. I heard them laugh.

I stood for a moment in the office, chills all over. Valentina wore too much black on her eyes—her eyes seemed to linger in the room without the rest of her. Like the Cheshire cat’s grin.

The remainder of the party is a blur to me now. Valentina barely looked my way throughout it. Our friend John won. Professor Peter Plum. Lead pipe. Billiard Room. Doesn’t matter.

What matters is what happened afterward.

Around two a.m., after everyone left, I went back into the office to retrieve the birthday gift I had curated for Beth: forty personal letters from forty of her most beloved people—family, childhood teachers, college professors, two of her favorite novelists, one senator, an environmental activist, a comedian. I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but I had been soliciting the letters for the past ten months, and the gift was fucking spectacular. It would have been perfect had I not found a rusted pipe beside the letters. It was the size of my forearm.

“Babe?” I called out to Beth.

“Hmm?” She was brushing her teeth.

“Is this your pipe?”

“Wuh?”

“Do we have a pipe?”

She spit. “Pipe?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t understand.”

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