Obviously Read online

  Bo came home a while later, and we met him at the door to introduce him to the family’s latest addition.

  “His name’s Bunbun,” I announced, thinking it more clever than when it was simply an afterthought.

  “Nah, let’s call him Li’l Turk,” he suggested, after his most recent rap obsession.

  Bo was then, and still is now, the most elusive member of my family. Five years older than me, we never had much in common. I definitely thought he was the coolest, and he definitely thought I was the perfect target for Nerf darts and balls. If he wasn’t shooting me, he was closing his bedroom door on me to listen to Master P or call one of the endless high school girls that had a crush on him.

  “No! BO! COME ON! Say hi to Bunbun!” Lanie couldn’t control herself and picked Bunbun up out of the cage for Bo to hold.

  Bunbun scratched and kicked and Bo lost his grip and dropped Bunbun in the cage roughly.

  “Fuck that.” And with that, Bo went up to his room to listen to his music loudly. Teenagers.

  Maybe his name wasn’t unanimous, but his main points of contact would continue to call him Bunbun for the duration of his time on earth.

  * * *

  * * *

  Rabbits were way different than we expected. Their nails get so long and they scratch the shit out of you. Lanie and I still have scars fifteen years later. They also pee and shit everywhere. Then they get bored and start eating their own shit. It’s gross. Why do they eat their own butt poop? Whose idea was that? And what’s worse, sometimes they eat their crap and then try to lick you with their crap-tongue and then BAM! There’s another memory you’re going to have to push away when you’re lying awake in the late hours of night decades later.

  My oldest sister Tasha’s then-boyfriend, Chris, came over once and we decided to let him hold Bunbun. We thought Chris was the coolest, so we really wanted them to hit it off. Tasha watched us intently, waiting to find out what way we’d embarrass her this time. The last time she had to babysit us during a date to see The Lost World: Jurassic Park, I cried during the scene where the guy gets eaten through the waterfall and the water runs red—loud enough to get us all kicked out. It was not a distant enough memory for there to be any slipups this time.

  Bunbun wasn’t quite as enamored with Chris as any of us were and proceeded to pee all over him and his white tee.

  * * *

  * * *

  One time Bunbun got loose in the morning and was way too fast for any of us to catch him.

  “He’s going under the couch!” I screamed as he made a hard right out of the living room.

  “Secure the perimeter!” Lanie yelled as Mom and I put up couch cushions to make sure there was only one way in and one way out.

  Bunbun ran right into our trap, but then climbed up my mom’s shoulder, parkoured onto the couch cushions that had collapsed without a couch behind them, and exited again, leaving us looking like Elmer Fudd’s dumb ass trying to catch Bugs.

  Regrouping, we decided to try a new strategy. Clearly we’d have to corner him in the moment. Just then, Bunbun came flying over the couch cushions back into the room.

  “Ahhh!”

  “Is somebody throwing him?”

  We knocked over tables and threw shoes around trying to find and capture him.

  “Grab him already!” I yelled, exasperated at Lanie. Bunbun’s cage was in her room, and she would always take him out in the morning, risking it all for a little bit of love from him.

  “I’m trying,” she yelled back, missing him as he beelined under another chair.

  “I’m on my way. The rabbit got loose again, so I’ll just keep you posted,” my mom explained to work, laughing, and hung up.

  After two hours of unabated chaos, the whole downstairs looked like that scene in Kill Bill after Uma Thurman’s character, Black Mamba, breaks everything in the living room and kitchen and then shoots Vivica A. Fox’s character, Copperhead, through the cereal box and tries to convince her victim’s now-orphan daughter that her puppy caused all of the destruction. We eventually cornered Bunbun between two pillows and a plant and got him back in the cage. Since it was now noon, Mom let us stay home from school for the remainder of the day.

  * * *

  * * *

  Aside from a few funny, formative episodes with him*, Bunbun was a hassle. He learned how to escape from the cage, and we’d often come home to him roaming around eating poisonous houseplants. He had intermittent seizures that caused him to have explosive diarrhea on everything we owned.

  The last straw was when Bunbun started screaming in the night. And I mean screaming. No one talks about it, but rabbits scream like people. It’s high-pitched and jarring, like Taylor Swift on helium. None of us was expecting it, so the first time it happened my mom came running down the hall with her revolver screaming, “WHO’S IN HERE? WHO’S IN HERE?!” and Lanie had to talk her down and explain that something was wrong with Bunbun. This happened every night during the best part of every dream for months.

  One day we came home and Bunbun was rock-hard and cold. I wrongly assumed he had picked up some new annoying habit that we’d have to correct. Nope. He’d died—presumably from the blunt-force trauma of trying to break out of the cage on which we’d started putting stacks of weighty books to stop his daily reenactments of Escape from Alcatraz.

  “Good riddance. He smelled awful anyway,” my mom said as she coldly put his stiff body in a garbage bag. Her touching eulogy continued as she dug a hole in the backyard, remembering to lament how chewed up everything had gotten and how thankful she was knowing her food would have fewer clumps of rabbit hair tainting it in the future. After trashing the rest of the cage, Mom handed Lanie and me the plastic clamps that attached the metal bars of the cage to its plastic bottom to remember him by. My life returned to normal pretty quickly, but Lanie still misses Bunbun and has acquired numerous dogs, rats, rabbits, and birds since his death to fill the bunny-shaped hole in her heart.

  * * *

  * * *

  High school was a largely pet-less time in our lives (save for the few fish that wouldn’t be cool for once and just die already). Life was moving along great until one summer when a peculiar nightly scratching sound started haunting our house.

  Was it a rat? Was it a serial killer? Was it a ghost? We had no idea, but it scratched above every bedroom after ten p.m. every night. One night my mom called me up to her room because there was a raccoon staring at her from behind the screen in her bathroom window and she needed a witness. The culprit had been found.

  For years my mother took to literally barking like a dog and shooting Nerf guns at the ceiling to scare the raccoons out of the house. It never once worked but remained hilarious regardless.

  The summer of 2005 was a truly strange time in my life. I had begun working at Hershey’s Ice Cream in the old mall food court with a bunch of self-described “emo kids.” We all got along because their sadness meant I never had to ask how they were doing. It also meant that I was introduced to a slew of bands on Myspace.com that reminded me that no matter how well-adjusted and understood I felt, how could that be possible if I was a teenager? We all decided to take our feelings to Warped Tour in lieu of opening shop one July day, and what was the hottest day of my life became literally hellish. I bought a room-temp Powerade and tried to down a chicken quesadilla from Taco Bell to soothe my headache, but heat exhaustion had set in. I got home, smelled something heinous, vomited all over the bathroom, and then slept on my cool sheets for six hours.

  Only later did I find out that the ghastly, vom-inducing smell was baby raccoon carcasses that had rotted in the walls. That’s right. The big-ass raccoon from the window that night had idiotically laid babies IN THE WALL. And they died! Because they’re babies.

  * * *

  * * *

  Summers later, when Lanie and I were both home from college, a truly cra
zy thing would happen: the raccoons would get all the way in the house.

  I’ve always preferred a bedtime schedule more closely associated with babies and grandmas, and even as a teen I liked being in bed before ten. This particular summer night I had tucked in early. Around eleven p.m., Lanie started screaming.

  “IT’S IN HERE! It’s in here!!!!” she screamed from the kitchen directly under my bedroom.

  Down the hall from me, Mom opened her door and started screaming, “WHAT?! WHAT’S IN HERE?!” and simultaneously watched a raccoon come up the stairs and go through the cracked door into Bo’s defunct bedroom.

  That’s when the texting started.

  Mom: It’s in here! IT’S IN HERE!

  Me: I heard! What are we going to do? Will it kill us???

  Mom: We have to leave the house. FUCK THE HOUSE!

  Homelessness had to be better than being eaten alive by vermin. I would have to put on pants and pack a suitcase and unlock my door and go downstairs to flee. We’d reconvene at mom’s RAV4 and head for shelter at Tasha’s house. By this point in my life, Tasha had finished both college and law school and was living a pretty swanky life about ten miles north of us in her own house. Chic and adult, there was always a fear that we’d break something. Even though we were fully teenagers and not complete idiots.

  Frozen solid, I lay there and contemplated the alternative: if the raccoons could tunnel in, it would only be a matter of time before I would wake up to one chewing on my eyebrows.

  That settled it. I quietly turned on a lamp and got out of bed, scared that maybe another raccoon was under my bed and would try to bite my ankle. It was irrational, but all bets are off when you have to defend your home from fuzzy intruders.

  I quietly picked out the essentials. Underwear. A pile of shirts, shorts, and jeans. My two decent bras. I began to open my bedroom door when I heard my mother scream.

  “What?! Oh god, what?” I yelled back.

  “Nothing, you scared me with your door! Hurry up!”

  My heart was now beating in my ears. I crossed the hall into the bathroom and shut the door behind me. I grabbed an amalgam of toothbrushes, toothpastes, and face washes. If I needed anything else, we’d just have to make a Kroger run tomorrow.

  Just then there was a knock on the bathroom door.

  “Ah!” I screamed.

  “Quit yellin’! It’s just me!” my mom shouted. “I’m heading down, are you ready?”

  I zipped my suitcase and cracked the door. We looked at each other. I guess I thought she was going to count down from three or something, but there was no time. With the stealthiness of Seal Team Six we descended the stairs and fled to the car, looking back at our home for probably not the last time, but we weren’t sure.

  We all fled. I was kind of excited to be staying at Tasha’s house for two weeks while my mom’s weird rugged friend set traps of antifreeze and rat poison and peanut butter, hoping that something would kill them, but nothing ever did. The moment we thought they were gone for good, a new one would be back, knocking like Poe’s goddamn raven forevermore. When we finally moved back in we all just agreed not to open Bo’s bedroom door. He had found an apartment with his girlfriend and had no real attachment to the stuff in his room anymore anyway.

  A couple months later we moved. We didn’t even bother going into Bo’s room to fix it up. It wasn’t worth it. Whatever sucker would move there after us would just have to deal with the generational raccoon war. We were tapping out.

  Still, if I’m in Kentucky and we’re driving at night and we see a raccoon, let’s just say none of us is swerving to miss it.

  These days, my most common encounters with wildlife happen at bodegas late at night or on the subway. The rats stay in their lane (on the tracks) and bodega cats know to get out of the way when I’m ordering my one a.m. bacon, egg, and cheese on a roll, three napkins, please. I wish my heart was big enough to love all the animals in the animal kingdom, but I’m content to just smile at pups at the dog park from a safe distance or let my friend’s cats walk across my lap while we’re watching Netflix.

  But seriously, fuck raccoons.

  Internet Person

  I don’t remember the first time I got on the internet. It must have happened sometime between playing Oregon Trail (a game where children try to ford a river and shoot squirrels and not die of cholera on a treacherous journey across the country) and designing my first Geocities page, which was literally just a quiz asking visitors (of which there were maybe five over the course of its lifespan) what their favorite pizza-flavored snack was. Unsurprisingly it was pizza rolls. I absolutely do remember a time before the internet, but I don’t think I ever felt truly myself before the internet.

  I spent a lot of time in extracurricular activities. And my mom spent a lot of time waiting in the car for me to be finished with them. Too much time, probably. Years later I’d talk with my therapist about how over-socialization has made me far too well-adjusted and really good at hiding my own problems from other people and also myself. Anyway.

  Upon entering the fourth grade, I became the newest member of Latonia Elementary School’s “webbies” team. It was more of a club than a team, since none of us was in shape and the entire “sport” took place in desk chairs in front of those bulbous, colorful iMacs in our computer lab. Still, having lightly supervised internet time was like what it must have felt like to be the kid from Blank Check. The movie is pretty self-explanatory. A kid gets a blank check and then just buys everything including a mansion with a secret waterslide exit.

  Three times a week after school I’d arrive at the computer lab, sit down, type in my username and password (predetermined by the school to keep us behaving), and open the Paint program. Paint was basically the caveman version of Instagram except there were no feeds or stories, but it was absolutely a way to waste time by looking at something pretty. I’d pick the paint can, choose the color “rainbow,” and click on the blank canvas, prepared to type something stupid like “Akilah RULES!” in fluorescent green and then beg the teacher to let me print it out, using half the computer lab’s colored ink in the process. Why I needed this printed out, I don’t know. Then, I’d click Netscape. I almost feel bad comparing it to Google Chrome, because it was just a browser, but a really really really crappy one. Imagine waiting two-ish minutes for the homepage to load, and then, since there was no social media, typing in whatever was on your mind: Beanie Babies. Britney Spears. Butterfly hair clips. I’d scroll incredibly slowly as the images loaded one at a time like when you have to squeeze the shampoo bottle for just a little spittle of product to dot your hand over and over before you get frustrated and decide that smelling like a hot scalp is not the worst thing one can smell like. At the same time I was seeing roughly four images and web pages over the course of a very slow hour, my mom was exploring the internet for the first time herself.

  “I’m a webMASTER, Kilah!” my mom exclaimed proudly. She had started taking a Saturday “webmaster” class. Usually Saturdays were reserved for HGTV-inspired Lowe’s runs or something else time-consuming like hypnotism or yelling at us for not cleaning the house.

  “MASTER” was a loose term (a few months into webbies I would teach her how to copy and paste, changing the trajectory of her afternoons forever), but she was super on board with my newfound obsession with computers. Webbies was basically one free hour after school during which we would learn a few HTML tricks to build the school’s website (complete with unlicensed cardinal images from the Ask Jeeves search engine). It got me out of my mom’s hair, and she was able to catch up on the latest Janet Evanovich book without being bothered.

  But it was here, in the afternoons between three and four p.m. in an elementary school computer lab, where I got hooked on the social media gateway drug: Neopets. Neopets was an entire universe. The site had every kind of environment. There was a desert, a jungle, a tundra. Once logged in you got
a free fictional pet and through games and events could earn enough points to buy a paintbrush (to make your unicorn-ass creature look like the night sky or a rainbow or flames). You could even save enough points to eventually buy special snacks for your pet, or even buy more pets. I believe Webkinz is the modern equivalent, but do I look like the kind of person who is going to type “Webkinz” into the search bar to be sure?

  I have a theory that every person you love online who has mastered the balance of self-deprecating oversharing and well-adjusted cool got indoctrinated on Neopets. Don’t believe me? I have receipts.

  Chrissy Teigen tweeted a thread about Neopets while she was pregnant, and we all love her:

  “I miss Neopets.

  “I was a comment board moderator. I won multiple caption contests. I’ve basically been told to barely move and let my baby grow so fuck it, I’m going back on neopets.

  “oh my god neopets has not changed a bit. the omelette . . . is still cooking”

  Mara Wilson (who has an impeccable Twitter feed and performed a voice on one of my favorite shows, BoJack Horseman) once tweeted:

  “Where are the nostalgic Neopets think pieces? Where are they?”

  Neopets had everything. Sci-fi creatures that were both inventive and cute, chat rooms where we all role-played and wrote bizarre fan fiction about literally anybody, but mostly the Hanson brothers. The site also had games. An omelet every season where you could get a snack for ya pets or a cave where you could get a paintbrush to paint your Tuskaninny. Good times.

  Mind you, this was pre–social media, so any and all friends you made here must really like what you were posting. Hate-following wasn’t a thing yet, and everyone was earnestly trying to raise their Neopets to be productive members of Neopian society. This website truly was where many of us learned how to exist online with strangers, make them our friends, and tell stories that were compelling enough to keep us using our brain cells after school.