the story, followed shortly by the story I didn't tell

Eight years old my hair was light and my teeth had jagged edges like babies changing to adults. Matt Robert lived on the other side of the fence and my oak tree planted from an acorn would drop leaves into his yard. I stood on the fence splinter palmed and watched the leaf piles build up in late September, imagined falling from the post into them and Matt Robert nowhere to be found. His hair sat stringy and his clothes hung gaping.
There was the bunny pen tucked into the corner, hidden under the thick branches. We had two: one black with a white stripe across the middle and the other white with big black rims around her eyes like make up. In the summer we would freeze water inside two liter bottles and bring them out to the bunnies panting in the heat. September brought relief and thicker coats.
On the fence near the ground was a path tunneled by Bogart the cat before I found him dead in my mother's closet. It went from my yard to Matt Robert's where there were less trees but it was closer to the field so it had more mice. Bogart would bring these mice to our doorstep, sometimes still half breathing, little offerings with big pink ears like paper twitching.
Now Matt Robert would use the hole to poke my ankles with sticks. He'd try to play paper rock scissors but I'd stomp on his hand and yell nuclear warhead I win! Matt Robert was always on my nerves, always breathing down my neck from his seat behind me on the bus, always pulling the bows out of my hair, always looking at me and Janie Causey from his hole in the fence. Olivia Osterhouse swore he gave her a mummified rat. At school he'd make up stories, said he was living in the sewers beneath the streets, thinking about sleeping in the fields once he got friendly enough with the coyotes.
It may have been October or it may have been April. It was a crisp morning--either dew or night time rain making everything wet. I went to feed the bunnies but there was a hole in their pen and only one bunny. The black one with a white stripe had disappeared over night and I ran and told my mother. We searched the entire backyard and found nothing. I don't remember now when I looked, but in the grass on the other side of the fence I found the bunny resting, fur slick, lacking dignity. I reached for her, pulled her back to my yard and held her in my hands. I could feel her skull halved, held together only by skin and fur so soft. I thought maybe she was still breathing, there were two labored gasps but my mother said no, no those are just nerves there's nothing we can do. But the bunny was looking at me, or at the treeline up above. I stroked her little bunny ears now reared, always to be reared.
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When I asked Caroline to marry me she said no so I asked why not and she said because Matt Robert you are weird and so then I asked her what I could do to make her want to marry me and she said well maybe if you grew your hair out real, real long, all the way down your back so you could sit on it so the next time my mom tried to cut my hair I ran outside and hid in the field and she gave up I guess because I didn't get another hair cut for a year until one day I heard Caroline and Janie laughing and I wasn't sure why they were or what could be so funny but I don't know it was one of those things where you just know you're the butt of the joke--I was always the butt of the joke with my outie belly button and my grass stained knees-- so that was it and I went inside and found my mom's scissors and I cut all my hair best I could and it fell to the ground in patches that I wanted to take and shove in Caroline's face, fill her throat with them, block out her eyes with them but I didn't I just fell asleep. The next day up before the sun had completely broke through the storm clouds I was in the back yard looking for salamanders when I found Caroline's bunny rabbit and I'm not sure what happened next-- I remember how calm it was (didn't run, only quivered with its nose and little lungs) and I remember reaching a point where I couldn't stop and couldn't go back I was just pushing it's face into the grass and it's little body struggled against me but my hands were bigger and my face was hot and there were no tears in my eyes and then it just cracked like something so fragile and everything was easy after that.