“Is there anything you can tell me about Claire?”

“She went by Bambi.”

“Did you see her before she died?”

“Yes. I saw her the day you said she went missing.”

“Did you see anything that seemed off? Anything that could help us?”

“A white car. A white car and the man of her fucking dreams.”

Claire Reid was better known as Bambi, from high school to her sophomore year in college, from the small high school to the vast campus—she was Bambi. It was written in her blood, bone-owned faux innocence. She had shockingly bright and wide doe-eyes and a gentle mouth that was capable of moaning the vilest things in a man’s ear. She was long legs and rocking hips; almond crème hair and spider fingers. She held the air with sharp electricity—her presence demanded mesmerized attention and it was always given to her in her short skirts and lace underwear.

Everyone wanted to touch her. She was both forbidden fruit and a shared drink at the bar. She picked her victims with careful consideration and she let them go the next morning, moving away. She was a butterfly you couldn’t hold.

And they asked me if I knew her—if I knew Claire Reid, if I knew Bambi. If I knew the way she tasted like cherries and moved like water, fluent and just out of reach. If I knew how she was a current of her own existing. If I knew the way she rocked her hips and hooked her fingers in your mouth, against your tongue, and dragged you to a place that felt like a dream missed.

Did I know her? Never.

Before she died, Bambi had found and gathered a lot of ‘life mottos’ to build her life around—quotes on Tumblr that weren’t really meant to be taken as literally as she took them. She built this imaginary world, this kingdom of control and wild tigers, based on these quotes and perhaps it was an obsession because it started to be as if she had a ‘motto’ for every situation she found herself in. She could be in a gas station bathroom snorting cocaine and still have a quote to give you that somehow made you rethink your choices—like maybe Bambi was living the dream and you just didn’t realize it.

Her favorite—because Bambi had a favorite when it came to everything in existence, just ask for it—was, “Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse.”

And ‘irony’ is defined as “a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.”

No one actually fucking wants to ‘live fast and die young’—I don’t even think Bambi really did, but there she went, taking another quote from a website too goddamn literally.

But she would have been pissed if she saw her corpse.