Rabbit Season

Once when I was younger, I held my breath until I passed out. It wasn’t because I was bored, I was just angry. I was so, very angry, and my gut reaction was to hold it in, to push it down until it choked me. I remember the feeling of pressure building up in my chest, the blurring of my vision as everything started going black. My mom shrugged it off, said it was nothing. She told me that sometimes, when I was a baby, she had to tap the bottom of my foot to remind me to breathe.

Right now, I’m fine, I can breathe. I’m just a little stressed.

“You got your answers down?” I ask Omar.

He nods, chewing the skin around his thumb, one of his nervous ticks. It makes him look even more like a baby, like he’s sucking his thumb.

I move his hand from his mouth. “Stop. Stop being nervous.”

“Oh wow,” he says, turning to me. “My anxiety is cured.” 

He smiles and I smile back. Then I hand him an apple juice from my lunch box. “Take a few sips. Calm down. They need to believe us when we lie.”

“I know, I know,” he says. He huffs a bit, rolls his eyes, but he takes the juice anyway and drinks half of it in one gulp.

I shift a bit in my own seat. It feels like a rock, and it’s digging into the bones in my butt. I think they dragged them from the principal’s office over here to the teachers’ lounge. It belongs to the Rabbit Gang now, the lounge. They use it as a home base of sorts, or an office. They had banners made for the gang, and they hang on either side of the door. The funny thing is they look more professional than a lot of the stuff the school had made for themselves. I guess the gang has more money than them now.

“Jay and Omar?” a voice calls from the door.

I turn to see Bee standing in the doorway. She was recently promoted in the Rabbit Gang, up to the coveted position of secretary to Maeve, the royal, the leader. You can tell she values her role by her new fashion choices: a blazer worn over her school uniform, her hair pulled into a tight bun, and cat-eye glasses. They don’t have lenses in them, but they go with her look.

Omar leans over me and waves at her. “Hi, Bee.”

She smiles the kind of smile that’s more of a flat line than a curve, then she waves us in.

No one else is in the lounge, which would be surprising if it wasn’t lunch time. Besides, given the level of claustrophobia the room gives off when void of people, I’m glad no one else is in here. It’s tidy in a cluttered kind of way. There are boxes and piles of papers and posters and masks and Nerf guns and knives, and they’re all put away neatly, but there’s still a lot of them. They’re stacked in corners and under chairs in a way that makes the ceiling feel lower.

Bee makes eye contact with me then gestures around the room. “We’re not done moving in yet,” she says.

I nod.

There are several desks in the room, teacher sized desks that were most likely stolen, and Bee sits in one while motioning for us to sit across from her.

She leans back in her chair. “So you kids wanna join the Rabbit Gang, huh?”

“Yes,” I say.

Omar nods. “Honestly, it’d be an honor.” Bee eyes him, and I nudge him with my foot, a sign for him to tone it down a little. 

“Of course,” Bee says, “but I gotta ask you a few questions before you can become official members.” She grabs a couple of papers off her desk and straightens them, clears her throat.

“Do you support the revolution?”

“Of course.”

“Oh, completely.”

“What would you do if an adult disrespected you?”

“Laugh in their face.”

“Probably throw something. Something heavy. Like a rock.”

“What if your own mother was found with filthy American propaganda? What would you do then?”

“Turn her in. No exceptions.”

“Mother or not, we don’t allow that stuff.”

“What if it was someone in the gang had something like that? What if they betrayed us?”

“Same answer as before. No exceptions.”

“Yeah, no exceptions.”

“Would you punish them?”

“Of course.”

“Yeah.”

“Would you kill them?”

“If I had to, yes.”

“…Yeah. Same.”

Bee looks between the two of us and nods slow, an impressed smirk smeared across her face. “You guys are pretty hard core, huh?” 

I shrug.

“Wait, is that another interview question?” Omar asks.

Bee shakes her head and sits up. “Nope, interview’s over. You guys passed, which, let’s be real, isn’t very hard. But big groups look good, so…” She reaches under her desk and pulls out two Rabbit Gang patches and masks. “Welcome to the club, kids.”

“Thanks,” Omar says before grabbing his. I grab mine too and examine them. The patch is pretty official: a hand embroidered picture of a smiling, cartoon rabbit head holding two knives crisscrossed in a way that frames its face. One of the upper classmen designed it. The mask, on the other hand, is mediocre and made of craft foam, like a kindergarten project.

“Thanks,” I say.

“No problem,” Bee says. “If you have any questions or wanna rat someone out, blah blah blah, don’t hesitate to come to one of the officers; you know who we are. Also.” She leans forward in her chair, standing almost, leaning into the desk. She points at us. “If you really wanna move up in the ranks, get a good position like I got, you gotta show some real devotion to the gang, do something to really get Maeve’s attention.”

I nod. I can feel Omar looking at me. “Good to know,” I say.

“Good to know it’s good to know,” Bee says. She sits back down and waves her hand in a shooing motion. “Now get out of my office.”

I stand and start to leave. “Thanks again,” Omar says as he moves to follow me. 

“Oh yeah,” Bee says. She points at Omar. “You. Boy. Wait.”

“Me?” Omar says, turning back towards her.

“Yeah. You sit in front of me in algebra, right?”

He nods.

“Yeah, you gotta help me cheat on tomorrow’s test. Club business. Super official.”

 . . .

Sometimes going home feels like a game of Russian Roulette, like a gamble. I find myself holding my breath every time I put my key in the lock and turn. Sometimes things will be fine, calm, quiet. Sometimes not.

Today, I open the front door, and I’m assaulted with the smell of burning. My mom’s in the living room, sitting by the fireplace, throwing in papers, pictures, books, and clothes. She turns at the sound of the door opening and smiles at me. 

“Hey honey.” She wipes the sweat from her forehead, leaving a streak of soot and ash on her face like war paint. “Welcome home.”

I stand in the doorway for a moment, no words, no expression. I tap my middle finger against my thigh, a steady rhythm, a time signature for me to breathe to.

My dad moves towards me, and I step aside. “Stinks in here,” he mumbles as he moves past me out the door. He closes it behind him.

“What are you doing?” I ask my mom as I move into the room. It’s more of a rhetorical question really, something I feel she wants me to say. This isn’t the first time she’s gone on a spontaneous purge.

“Just getting rid of a couple more things.” She shakes her head, clicks her teeth. “Honestly, I can’t believe how much of this stuff I missed before, I mean, look at this!” She holds up a pillow I’d sewn in a home economics class. It’s a small, lumpy, misshapen, almost-square. It’d been sitting on my bed for the past four years, completely harmless, albeit criminally under-stuffed. It’s the first thing I’d ever sewn with a sewing machine. But the fabric is Looney Toons. So it’s probably banned now, or at least discouraged. Anything American is discouraged.

“I can’t believe we were keeping something like this,” she says. “Could you imagine what would happen if one of those kids found it?” She groans, dramatic, then tosses it into the fire. 

I watch as it catches, as the red of the flames licks at its edges and stains it black. I watch the smiling faces on the fabric disintegrate. The stuffing inside floats up like dust, like snowflakes catching orange, moths floating through a flame. My hand is a fist now, knocking against my thigh, keeping the time: breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.

I turn on my heel and walk down the hall to my room. I resist the urge to run. I resist the urge to slam the door. I do lock it though. 

I squeeze under my bed and note that it’s a tighter squeeze than it used to be, that I can no longer get my hips through, and I take that as a gift. Things will be safe here.

I stretch out my arm, feel around with my fingers for the edge of the loose floorboard, pry it up with my nails. I grope around the empty space, and when my fingers wrap around the familiar texture of the wooden box, my muscles relax and breathing comes easy.

I crawl back out, hold the box in my lap. It was a gift from my dad; he bought it in what used to be Ohio on a business trip. It’s covered in carvings of plants and woodland animals, and my name is engraved in cursive on the top. I trace the letters with my finger.

Every couple of weeks or so, I take this box out, when I need a reminder that there are good things in the world. It’s full of small toys, figurines, letters, notes, coins, pictures. Usually, I would empty its contents on the floor to look at them, lining up all my toys and figures in rows like soldiers, organizing my notes and letters and pictures into equal lines, holding each object for a moment, letting the feelings soak in before moving on to the next one.

I don’t do that now. I set them out, but I don’t dwell; I just need to be sure everything’s there before I hide it again. My hands move quick, placing them in their specific spots. 

Everything is in order and accounted for, and when I get to the last picture I stop. It’s of me and Omar during field day back when we were in second grade. Omar was so much smaller than me then. Both of us were missing teeth, and Omar’s eyes still looked too big on his face. It’s my favorite picture of us; I used to have it hung up on my wall, but I’m wearing a Disneyland shirt in the photo, which is discouraged, so I hid it.

   I still remember parts of the day so clearly. There was one game in particular where we had to take turns trying to pop a balloon by sitting on it with our butts, and Omar and I couldn’t stop laughing. I think the picture was taken right after that, and we smiled so big for the camera, we were having so much fun. I remember smiling so much and laughing so hard that my face started to hurt. I thought my cheeks would split open, that the slabs of skin on my lower jaw would flop over like cuts of meat, and Omar said that, if that did happen, his grandma had taught him how to sew and he could fix me. 

I hold the picture to my chest for a while before putting it back and hiding everything away again.

These trips down memory lane always come with the risk of emotion. I lay on my bed, and I notice that I feel too much. The blanket underneath me presses up into my skin, and I can feel my clothes rubbing against my body. Deep in my stomach, there’s a pull, like a rock or a black hole, and it hurts so bad that it makes me wince. I wanna cry. I wish Omar was here.

I remember when I met him; that was second grade too. I didn’t talk to him at first. I didn’t talk much at all that year. That was the period of time when I was basically mute, when I tried my best not to make any sound ever for any reason. I remember once my mom yelled at me for it, said I should be a normal kid and stop moping about nothing like a teenager.

At recess, I’d bring out a book and read in the grass, and one day, while I was reading, Omar came and sat next to me. When I glared at him, he smiled, but he didn’t say anything. He just sat and read his own book. Once I realized he wasn’t there to annoy me, I kept reading. 

I still don’t get why he did that; it’s out of character for him to be that bold, though the gentleness of the gesture had “Omar” written all over it. I asked him about it before, and he just shrugged. “Everyone else was just trying to get you to talk and do stuff you didn’t wanna do,” he had said. “I figured it’d be easier to make friends with you if I did something you liked.” He never could give a satisfying answer to why he wanted to be my friend though.

No one ever asked why I was friends with him, but that answer would be easy. He gives off such a calm energy, the same kind of tranquility you’d feel walking in the woods in the early morning or feeding a deer. I just feel good around him. I remember sitting next to him as we read and feeling safe. I felt safer than I’d felt in so long, and I never wanted to let go of that. I wanted to glue myself to him, to sew our bodies together with red thread. I followed that boy around like a puppy, and even still, he walked next to me in a way that wouldn’t feel like he was leading. He told me that that wasn’t on purpose, that he just tries to walk next to me, but I don’t know if I believe that. Never in my life had I met someone so good.

I roll over onto my side, tuck my knees up into my chest. I have a theory that if I scrunch myself into a small enough ball, my emotions will compress inside me and shrink away into nothing. So far, I’ve been unable to roll my body up tight enough. Tears stream down my face, but I refuse to cry. Whenever a whimper escapes, I pull my knees in tighter.

. . .

At the start of the school year, Omar and I didn’t have all the same classes together, but we’re in the gang now, which means we can basically do what we want. So a month or two ago, we decided which of our teachers were the best and made ourselves a new schedule based off that. 

The first time I walked into a class that wasn’t originally mine, the teacher stared at me, and I glared back. 

“This isn’t your class,” he had said.

I shrugged and turned slightly, making sure he could see the Rabbit Gang patch sewn to the arm of my jacket. “It is now,” I said.

None of the teachers really care about it anymore. It’s not like it even matters. Neither of us have ever been disruptive in a class, and we’re getting the same education as before, maybe even better. Even still, the only teacher that likes us is the language arts teacher.

Omar and I walk into language arts now, and as soon as we enter the room, the teacher, who used to be Omar’s teacher, smiles at us. “Hello, Omar,” she says. “Hello, Jay.”

“Hi, Ms. Fleming,” he says. He smiles at her; I don’t. I’m convinced she only likes me because of my association with Omar, but whatever her reasons are, I don’t care. If she wants to be kind, I won’t stop her.

Overall, this class is nice, almost normal, like how things were before. The kids will joke, Ms. Fleming will tease, and that’ll usually be the end of it. Sometimes it goes further and the gang’s brought up, but Ms. Fleming never succumbs to their threats, and the lessons continue like nothing ever happened.

Right before class is about to start, two boys barge in, loud and rowdy. I’ve seen them around before, but this isn’t their class. That doesn’t really matter though, because they’re wearing the signature burgundy military berets of Rabbit Gang officers, the ones with floppy bunny ears sewn to the top. They bounce on the top of their heads as they saunter in, and some kids woop in response to their presence. I can’t tell if it’s in recognition of them as people or of their status, but people usually only ever holler out of respect.

One boy holds up his hands as if to silence the cheers, and he walks up to the teacher. I can’t tell if he’s older than us or not, but he’s at least a full head taller than our teacher. “You Ms. Fleming?”

“Yeah?” she says. “You need something?” There’s more sass in her voice than I would probably recommend, and the two boys look at each other with raised eyebrows. 

The other boy steps up. He’s shorter than his friend, but he’s still taller than Ms. Fleming. “We’re just gonna sit in on your class today if you don’t mind, ma’am.” 

There’s a bite to his last word that makes me tense, and I try not to stare as they walk past Ms. Fleming and out of my view. Using the movement of her eyes, I can tell they walk to the back of the room and stand there. I imagine them smirking, their arms crossed, and their eyes glued on Ms. Fleming. 

If she’s worried, she doesn’t show it on her face. She watches the boys for just a quick moment before letting out a somewhat exasperated sigh. “Well,” she says. “Let’s learn about some more rhetorical devices, shall we?” She walks over to the board and starts writing. “We talked about anaphora yesterday; can anyone tell me what that is?”

Nobody answers. The air in the room is different, heavier. The presence of the two boys pulls the attention behind us. It adds an unbalanced feeling that everyone must notice. It’s like everyone’s holding their breath or trying not to laugh.

Ms. Fleming turns back around, hands on her hips. “Does no one remember?”

Omar starts to raise his hand, but I grab it in mine and hold it down in his lap. I feel his eyes on me, but I don’t look at him.

“Why don’t you tell us?” a girl in front of me says. “Isn’t that your job?”

“No, my job is to make sure you retain the information I already taught you.”

“Well maybe you didn’t teach it good enough the first time.”

“Or maybe you don’t listen well enough, Ms. Henrika. Does anyone in the class wanna help her with the answer?”

Ms. Fleming is just teasing, just poking fun. She’s even smiling. But Henrika isn’t. She swivels in her chair towards the back of the room, and I can see her face. Red blotches of blood spread beneath the skin of her cheeks like watercolor as she pouts. “See!” she says. “I told you she’s disrespectful! Too much of a smartass for her own damn good.” 

When the boys in the back move, the room shifts. Our heads turn like a wave, and their chests puff up at the attention. They move through the rows of desks slowly, like caricatures of bad boys in a movie.

 “She sure is, huh?” the tall boy says. “I think you need a reminder of who’s in power here, Ms. Fleming.”

“Is that so?” she says. Her face is stone. In the past, I’d think the boys were about to get in trouble, maybe get sent to the principal. But this isn’t the past.

“Yeah,” the shorter boy says. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but things have changed.” He balls up a piece of paper and throws it near her, barely missing. She doesn’t flinch.

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make a mess in my classroom.”

“Your classroom?” Both boys start to laugh, and much of the class laughs with them. Ms. Fleming still doesn’t move. But there’s a twitch in her hand, like a shake she’s trying to stop.

The tall boy holds out his arms, addressing the room. “How about we show this woman how the Rabbit Gang deals with unruly adults?” The room cheers, and suddenly everyone is standing. I move my hand up to Omar’s forearm and pull him up. I know I’m holding on too tight; I can feel his pulse beneath my fingers, but he says nothing. I use his heartbeat like a metronome, but it’s beating so fast, and I feel like I’m hyperventilating.

The tall boy grabs a text book and rips out a page, balling it up and throwing it at Ms. Fleming. The shorter boy does the same, and soon the whole classroom is filled with the sound of tearing paper, and every inch where someone isn’t standing is filled with paper balls. Ms. Fleming is ducking slightly now, covering her face with her arms, yelling for order that won’t come.

I rip a page from my own text book and shove the ball into Omar’s hand. For the first time, I look at him. There’s a terror in his eyes that I haven’t seen in a long time. Every few seconds, he leans forward before jerking back, like his body is trying to choose between two conflicting commands.

I squeeze his hand and pull it, urging him to look at me. When he does, I take my own paper ball and throw it in a way that’s pathetic enough to miss completely, but not so much that it looks intentional. I look at him again, plead with my eyes for him to copy, and when he does, I ball up another piece and hand it to him.

Ms. Fleming’s body is tense now, angry. The veins in her neck are popping out, and her lips are curved into a snarl. “That’s enough!” she shouts, though the paper balls don’t stop. She moves her hands from her face, and stands up straight, facing us. “I will not tolerate this kind of—” 

I assume she was gonna say, “behavior,” but she was cut off by a text book hitting her square in the nose. She clutches her face in her hands, and when she moves them away, blood is freely flowing from her nose and down her chin.

The room gasps, and for a moment, there’s silence. Almost immediately, that silence is filled with laughter. There are high fives and cruel jokes and shuffling, and then the room is empty except for Omar, Ms. Fleming, and me.

Omar doesn’t look like he’ll move without convincing, so when I’m done with mine, I pack his bag for him. I slip it over his shoulders, thread his arms through.

“Come on,” I say, pulling him. 

We almost make it out the room. Almost. Then he moves away from me and towards Ms. Fleming. She’s sitting at her desk, shoving tissues in her nose and wincing.

“Are you ok?” Omar asks.

“I’m fine,” she says, waving her hand.

“Do you need some ice or anything?”

“Don’t worry about me.”

I walk up to Omar, lay a hand on his arm. “We need to go,” I say.

“Are you sure you don’t need anything?” he asks, ignoring me.

Ms. Fleming glances at him then looks at me. I watch her eyes scan my face, and I wonder how well I’m doing at hiding what I’m thinking.

She sighs then looks back at Omar. “I’m a grown woman; I can take care of myself.”

He nods, and I pull him out the room.

. . .

“That was stupid,” I say. We’re in my room now, sitting on my bed. Neither one of us wanted to stay at school, so we left. Because I guess that’s how things work now.

“I just wanted to make sure she was alright,” he says.

“Her nose was bleeding.”

“So…? That means she wasn’t ok, right? So I should’ve helped.”

“What could you have done that she couldn’t?” He tenses, and I fix my tone. “You need to look out for yourself first. That was dangerous.”

“Everyone was gone.”

“They could’ve been listening.”

He groans and falls backwards into my pillows. “Everything’s all confusing now!” He buries his face in his hands. “I just wanted to help.”

I lay down next to him, scooch in close. “Don’t feel bad, ok? You’d be right if things were normal.”

He scoffs.

“You know I’m just trying to keep you safe.”

“Yeah I know. You always do that.”

I smile. He’s not wrong; I got in trouble once for it. A bunch of kids were bullying him at recess, so I hit one boy across the face with the thickest stick I could find, and he ran away crying. It was the moment I realized that Omar being ok was more important to me than whether or not I got yelled at. It was the moment our friendship became official.

“I really wish you wouldn’t,” he continued, snapping me out of my memory.

“What?”

He moves his hands from his face, turns towards me. “I can take care of myself, you know.”

I stare at him for a second, unsure of how to respond. There are way too many feelings floating around in my body, too many for me to sort through to form a coherent thought. “You can’t make good decisions,” I say.

He sits up as his eyes widen. “Oh, so just because I don’t wanna go along with everyone else, that means I’m making bad decisions?”

“They’re… just not decisions that’ll keep you safe.”

“I don’t care if I’m safe!” He throws his hands into the air before yanking them back down, clenching them into fists. “I don’t care if my decisions are bad, I just wanna do the right thing. I wanna be right.”

I don’t know what to tell him; I don’t know which one of us is right. Either way, he’s in danger. We all are. 

I drag my hands down my face and take a deep breath. “I need you to understand that no matter what you say, I’m gonna try to protect you. You could be the strongest person on Earth, and I’d still try to protect you. You could be bulletproof, and I’d still try to protect you. You can’t stop me.”

He pouts, scans my face. But then a smile tugs at the corners of his lips, and he turns his face away. “Fine,” he says. “I guess I can’t stop you from trying.”

. . .

I walk into homeroom late, and no one’s there. I look back at the number outside the door, make sure I didn’t walk into the wrong room. But I’m in the right place. Everyone’s bags are at their desks, some are open, but no one’s here. Even Omar’s bag is at his desk, but he isn’t.

I go into the room and look around, rub my eyes, blink. It feels like a bad dream, one of the ones where the halls in the school never end, and the only room that isn’t empty is full of shadows. 

“There you are!” someone says from the doorway.

I jump and turn towards them. I can tell by their uniform that they’re a girl, but they’re wearing a rabbit mask, and I can’t see any of their face. Whoever this is went for a mascot head over a simple mask, and it takes a lot of focus to look past the large, open grin, the giant, crooked, blue eyes, and oversized ears to find where the eye holes are hidden. Even then, seeing the eyes on the other side is almost impossible. 

“Come on, put on your mask,” she says. “Everyone’s waiting for you.” 

She disappears as quick as she showed up, and I hesitate a moment before taking my mask out my bag. It’s not the foam one from before; Omar’s mom gave us money to buy new ones so we wouldn’t look like newbies. It’s plastic with a face that rides the line between realistic and cartoony. I rest it against my forehead rather than pulling it down over my face, and I walk out into the hallway.

The girl in the mascot head is leaning against the wall right outside the door. Her head snaps to face me, and I jump again.

“Sorry,” she says. “No peripheral vision.” She waves her arm as if to say let’s go this way, and I follow her down the hall.

The ears on her head bounce as she walks, and I breathe in time with them. I’ve only been in the Rabbit Gang for a few months, but nothing like this has ever happened before. I can’t help but think I messed up, that maybe my things weren’t hidden well enough and someone broke into my house and found them. I try to run through every single thing I’ve done, figure out how I got in trouble.

We get to a girls’ bathroom and stop. Mascot girl steps aside and frames the entryway dramatically with her arms. “After you.”

Everything in my body wants to walk in the other direction, but I listen to her and go inside. 

I can’t go in very far because the whole bathroom is filled wall to wall with kids in rabbit masks. They’re even standing in the stalls, some going so far as to stand on the toilets and peek over the wall. Some of the masks are like mine, full face, plastic, others are masquerade style with softer ears. A few kids have the foam ones they give out for free. No matter the material, each mask was pointed downwards at the middle of the floor.

“Found her!” Mascot girl yells. Each masked face swivels toward me, taking me in, then they part all at once, as if on cue, and make a pathway for me into the middle of the room.

The first thing I notice is Maeve, our royal. She’s wearing a mask, a plastic one, a realistic one, but I can tell it’s her because she’s wearing her tall, king’s crown, and no one else would dare wear that. 

The second thing I notice is Omar, on the floor, with tape over his mouth. He’s staring at me, his silent pleas leaking from his eyes and flowing down his face.

Maeve hits me on the arm in greeting, and I choke out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.

 “Hey there, Jay,” she says. I look up at her, but I don’t say anything, and she smiles. “Not much of a talker, huh? Yeah, I expected that.” She chuckles and so does everyone else. Then she cuts them off with a swift hand motion, and the room falls silent. 

“I got a report about what happened last week with a certain Ms. Fleming,” she says. “And one of my faithful subordinates told me that, not only was Omar hesitant to take part in some harmless teasing, he also went so far as to try and comfort her!” She clicks her teeth. A few kids copy her, some boo. “I was told that you were also there, but, when we questioned your friend Omar here, he said you were only trying to stop him.” 

My eyes flick over to Omar. I can see him saying sorry with his eyes, sorry for not mentioning they talked to him, sorry for not listening to me when I tried to get him to leave. Or maybe he isn’t sorry. Maybe he’s scared but regrets nothing.

When I look back at Maeve, her hands are cradling her face in a mockingly sweet gesture, and I get the urge to punch her in the stomach. But I ignore it.

“It’s so cute how you care for him,” she says. “But since you suck at controlling him, we thought it’d be fitting for you to start his punishment.” 

She reaches behind her, and someone hands her a wooden bat. She holds it out to me. And I stare at it. I glance around the room and realize at least half the people in here are holding some kind of weapon: bats, golf clubs, random pieces of pipe. I look down at Omar. I can hear him whimpering. 

Maeve leans in close to me, so close that her breath sneaks out from the corners of her mask and presses against my face. “We could punish the both of you, of course, if you refuse. The choice is yours.”

I look at the bat again. I glance between it and Omar, the scared look on his face, the way he squirms in place. His hands are probably bound behind his back; he wouldn’t even be able to throw them up to protect his face. 

I look back at Maeve, at the crown on her head. She lifts the bat up higher, holding it between her forefinger and thumb and waving it slightly. “Your choice,” she says again.

As I take the bat from her, she smiles. Omar’s whimpers turn to cries, but I don’t look at him. I can’t look at him. My eyes rest in the space between him and Maeve as I reel back, then they snap onto my target.