The Girl Who Turns to Rabbits
When we get nervous we turn into white rabbits. We get put into a white room.
Sometimes it doesn’t happen all at once. I can tell I’m getting nervous when whiskers poke out of my cheeks, when my ears stretch-grow under my hair, pointing upward and swiveling like radio antennae. I know it’s happening when I can hear pencils sharpening three classrooms over, when I can smell the cafeteria on the first floor of the school frying bacon. But usually it starts in my heart. For me it does. It’s a spilling of rice grains, or a necklace of firecrackers, or my heart is full of mousetraps—that’s what it feels like.
Sometimes it does happen all at once—one moment I don’t understand who Ulysses S. Grant is, and I see the word TEST on the whiteboard, and I write in my assignment notebook in red bubble letters over and over and then poof, I’m a white rabbit with a red pen clenched in my teeth, and I’m seeing the world out the sides of my head.
I say, “we turn into white rabbits,” because it happens to a lot of us here: The School for Gifted and Nervous White Rabbits. When we graduate, we’re supposed to have mastered it—we’re supposed to have gripped our kicking, squirming hearts and held them shut like a compact. Our hearts are supposed to be solid as a turtle shell—with the soft thing hidden within. If we can’t control it, we don’t graduate. We can’t leave until we’ve gone years without turning into white rabbits.
I feel like I will never graduate. Sometimes I turn into not just one white rabbit, but many. The more nervous I am, the more white rabbits I turn into. I slide down the hallways, scatter through doorways, but they always catch me, all of me, white-gloved and white-suited. Then, they take me to the white room.
The thing about the white room is, it’s awful. It’s designed to dissuade us from using our powers to turn into white rabbits. In the white room, we panic. It feels like the walls are all muzzles, and behind the muzzles are teeth. I have teeth too, and I use them, running buckeyed and brainless through the room, teeth barred, a foam of white fur in my mouth. The floor is soft with the fur of past white rabbits. Sometimes we’re shedding and sometimes we’re tearing into or torn. The walls are white-rabbit white, the ceiling is a rectangle of sun, so blinding there are no shadows. There is nowhere to hide.
Once in the white room, I close my eyes. You’re not supposed to do this as a rabbit—it’s very dangerous as a rabbit to close all 3 of your eyelids, to pull the wooly one down. We learn about all this in school. We learn about our rabbit teeth growing into painful points, about the sensitive pads of our feet, about how we are poor swimmers and territorial lovers—all the things we learn to dissuade us from becoming white rabbits. I am trying. I have been told to breathe and so I am trying it: breathing. I am trying to picture the ocean, trying to feel like I will not be a failure forever, even though I cannot picture what that looks like. I imagine foam. I imagine a seagull scooping me up. I try to picture being buried underground, my fur decomposing, my little white bones. I try picturing how quiet it is down there with the tree roots.
This is the only way I know how to not turn into white rabbits. I think of my little white bones and I think of the roots of plants and the soundlessness of earthworms and of a place without teeth. I close my eyes and I stop my feet from running and I think: one day I’ll be bones. Even if I’m always white rabbits, even if I learn to control it: I will end up bones. I’m okay with ending up bones.
My sister doesn’t turn to white rabbits. My sister turns to a lion. My sister turns to a lion and sometimes my sister, she eats white rabbits. She has promised to never eat me, that she would recognize me by my smell, that she knows the difference between my white rabbits and the white rabbits she likes to eat.
She goes to a different school, of course, The School for Gifted and Angry Lions, but she is the type of student who scales fences in a single bound. She is the type of student who causes mischief and vandalism, or that’s what her school calls it when we are missing white rabbits, when our attendance steeply drops in the night.
In between our schools is jungle. In the jungle is where the wild children live.
We can hear them through our windows. It isn’t safe out there. The wild children turn to animals and never turn back. They don’t want to go to school. They don’t want to turn back.
In the jungle, the boys turn into snakes. The girls turn like a wish into thorns, into thistle, into a Venus flytrap. The boys turn into vultures and the girls turn into cats, narrow and yellow-eyed. Don’t go into the jungle they tell us at the School for Gifted and Nervous Rabbits. GO INTO THE JUNGLE they bellow and stomp at lion basketball games, lion football games, lion pep rallies. At the School for Gifted and Nervous Rabbits, we play Scrabble pretty competitively. We learn printmaking. We iron. We have lettuce-tossing competitions where the whole school goes mad.
One night a lion appears in my room. I had been running around as white rabbits because, see, the thing about me is I don’t just turn into rabbits when I’m nervous. I turn into rabbits when I’m giddy. I had been racing around my bedroom carpet at top speed, so quickly I charged up with static. When a lion appears through the window weeping, a lion I know is my sister, I try to turn human again. I try to calm down and use all the breathing techniques I’ve learned, but I’m still a rabbit. My sister touches her nose to mine, and I shock her. I hop up onto my bed and try to look as human as I can by leaning against my pillow.
It’s weird seeing a weeping lion. My sister is only supposed to turn to a lion when she gets angry. I never get angry, and so I never turn to a lion. I always thought people were supposed to turn to slugs when they got sad, but this is no slug. This is a lion with tears round as pearls, this is a lion with long cry-lines flattening the folds in her mane. She has a mane like a male lion, and it is as orange-gold as a canyon. I reach my rabbit paws up to her eyes. I have to do this side-ways so I can see her, sideways, so I know if her jaw is going to clench around my neck. I’m nervous. I lift a paw, pet her cheek.
What’s wrong, Lion? I ask. Rabbit, she says, I hate myself. You hate yourself?
I hate myself, says the lion. She says, I can’t do anything right. I’m always a lion. I’m always angry.
My rabbit legs are shaking. I can see her glistening, white teeth. So much bigger than mine. You are a great lion, I say.
You think I’m going to eat you. My own sister thinks I’m going to eat her. I think everyone’s going to eat me, I say. I’m always scared.
She says, I’m always angry.
I say, I love that you are angry. I wish I were like you.
She picks me up in her lion jaws, her jowls wet with tears. She picks me up by my torso, so she can feel that rattle-can heart of mine, the little self-detonator I keep in my chest. She jumps from the window and lands lightly, me safe against her tongue.
She carries us to the jungle between our two schools. With one paw, she digs me a burrow. She drops me down and I bound into it, digging hard to make it longer, wider, deeper, closer to the roots of the earth.
Melissa Goodrich is the author of the The Classroom, co-authored with Dana Diehl, and the fiction collection Daughters of Monsters. She’s currently at work on a novel about the end of the world. Find her at melissa-goodrich.com and bluesky as @goodmel.
