The Bitch Posse (22 page)

For some reason that tube falls into my mind.
Are they washing it now, is it full of blood, or skin, or. . . .
My stomach turns.

Concentrate, Rennie, concentrate.
Act 2, Scene 1. Puck, Robin Good-fellow, flirts with a fairy before Oberon and Titania, rulers of the fairies, arrive. Oberon tells Puck to play a trick on Titania by squeezing the magic flower juice onto her eyelids. . . .

My head’s hurting. I feel an itch to smoke some dope and forget everything; this day is endless.

Finally the nurse says, “Come on, let’s have a snack.” My red beads wink from the counter, and I lace them around my neck and fasten the clasp. She leads me to another room, where a couple other girls are sitting at a table. One’s a Pammie McFadden look-alike with a ton of makeup; the other looks about twelve, with a Dorothy Hamill pixie cut. They look at me dispassionately. We sit and eat our donuts and drink a little orange juice. No one talks. I don’t feel like eating. Funny, I was so hungry earlier.

I look at the clock, and already it’s almost noon. Cherry and Amy must be starving. I stand and grab the little paper bag with the Tylenol samples and a month’s worth of the Pill, which they’ve decided to put me on, and walk like a zombie out to the waiting room.

Amy slides her notebook to the floor, and Cherry puts her poetry book on her chair. They both rush over to me, and I’m suddenly so exhausted I could sleep for a year. My friends open their arms, and we hug and tears flip out of my eyes, but they will never understand me anymore, no will understand me anymore. I’ve changed, I’m someone
else. At once I realize I will never forget this day; you just don’t forget moments when your life path changes forever. Tears swell to the surface as I try not to think of babies, sweet warm good-smelling babies.

I will have a baby someday. I’m not ready for a baby. It was the best thing.

But it makes my stomach swim to think like this. Squashing down my inner voice, I call a thank-you to the receptionist, who reminds me of my two-week appointment. Once we’re outside, my thoughts pop up at me like weeds.

When I see Rob at the motel today after school, I’m going to tell him how I bled. How I’m cramping now despite the two Tylenol I just took. The tube, I’ll tell him all about the tube and force him to hear me speculate about what the stuff they sucked out of me looked like. I’m going to give him as many details as I can remember, except of course bringing his change to Amy and Cherry.

I’m going to make him feel like hell.

Make him feel just as bad as I do.

May 2003
Freemont Psychiatric Hospital

Cherry studies the sleeping shoulders of her roommate, Josie, breaths pulling her chest up and down, blond hair curving around her face. She’s so skinny, like a bird. She reminds Cherry of Rennie Taylor in a way, and at that thought Cherry’s own disappointment with the poetry crests through her. Yesterday she took that poem that Josie saved for her, the one rejected from
Echo,
and over an ashtray lit the corner of it, watched flames lick across it, until the edges curled up like the wings of a bird and the black ash dropped into the tray. Following that she got a reprimand from the social worker Leigh for “lighting fires.” Oh, Lord, if Leigh only knew the fires she wants to light, and she can’t help the chuckle that presses out of her chest. She suppresses it, not wanting to waken Josie; the girl hardly sleeps.

Cherry’s too having trouble catching up to the elusive bird of sleep; seems she’s chasing the days so hard it’s impossible to drift off and forget
Since Josie’s remark at the women’s group meeting, Cherry’s made it her quest to look out for this girl, protect her, make sure stuff doesn’t happen. She’s told Josie too much about herself and shoved a wall between the two of them, but the wall is climbable, the wall can be broken down. There’s no one else to save the girl, surely not Leigh, surely not Dr. Bowker, whom Josie calls The Wanker. The only one she’s ever trusted is Cherry. She wants to tell Josie about Diana, what Diana said:
I understand people’s suffering, people’s pain, more than you will ever know yourself.

Josie moans. Through the dim moonlight streaming in the window Cherry slides to her friend’s bed and sits at the foot. Josie yanks the covers, and Cherry lifts herself up for a moment so Josie can grab them; but Josie’s rubbing her eyes and mutters, “Fuck.” She shoots her gaze around the room, and the bones in her neck seem fluid. Moonlight dips into the hollows formed by her collarbones, and she looks even frailer.

“Can’t sleep either,” says Cherry. “Maybe it’s the moon.” The moon is full and wide and wild and sparkling. Light dances through the window and encompasses both of them, and despite the setting Cherry feels hopeful. “Did you have a dream?”

Josie slides a cigarette from the pack on the table and lights it, staring at the wall. “It was weird. I was in my car driving to school and I felt this Presence behind me. I don’t know what it was, but it was something huge and dark, and it reached down and grabbed the car and crushed it, and I got smaller and smaller until I fell out through the keyhole, and then I started spinning toward Earth and . . . I don’t remember any more.” She extends the pack to Cherry. “I wonder what it means. I used to have this dream book, but I didn’t get to take that here with me. My mom thought it was satanic.”

That reminds Cherry of the day the Bitch Posse landed in the principal’s office faced with flurries of accusations, soon before the world
unhitched and she swung into the universe, unfettered. Dreams are just another kind of lie, something else keeping people solid and sane and under wraps. Diana’s dream turned into a nightmare. So did Cherry’s. Josie’s mom shoots heroin, she knows that. The two of them are cut from the same cloth, raw edges matching up. If you pulled a thread on either of them, she’d fall apart.

She pulls a cigarette out and lights it, even though she knows smoking will wake her up and according to the clock on the wall it’s only 3:00
A.M
. She blows out smoke. “I dream about rivers. Dark rivers that stop flowing and just sit there still like a lake. I don’t know what the fuck that means either. But I talk about it in therapy sessions, seems to keep the doctors entertained.” She wonders if she should ask about Josie’s suicidal ideations, or if doing that would just remind her she felt that way. No, better not. She settles for “Leigh was a bitch in women’s group yesterday. She didn’t even listen to you.” She’s opened up the conversation, drawn a doorway if Josie wants to step through.

Josie just smokes in silence.

Cherry pulls her bare feet up onto the bed and crosses her legs.
Crisscross applesauce,
Marian used to say, back when she was Mama, back before the cocaine and the shooting up and all that followed. “I’ll be honest, Josie. I’m a little worried.”

“About what?”

“About you.” And there, it’s said, she’s grabbed the risk out of the air and seized it and it’s wriggling in her fingers and she looks hard into Josie’s eyes, waiting.

Josie’s hand shakes as she pulls the cigarette to her lips. The orange glow reddens as she inhales, softens as she blows out. “You don’t need to be.” And it’s very sudden the way it happens, but in an instant Josie’s face falls apart, sobs howl through her, and she drops the cigarette onto the bed. Cherry grabs it and rests it in the ashtray, then takes Josie’s hand and strokes it. But Josie shakes her away, pulls her knees to
her chest, buries her face in her knees, and the sobs are softer now because she’s hidden her face. Cherry wants to comfort her but doesn’t know how and so she just waits.

It’s a full three or four minutes that Josie cries, and there’s a break and then the sobs peal out of her again and strike the air in the room. Cherry shouldn’t have pushed it, no no she shouldn’t have asked, she’d make a lousy therapist, probably that was why she put herself here in the first place and damn, damn, damn she feels the urge to lift the cigarette from the ashtray and press it to her flesh until the skin reddens and then blackens and she’s done it all wrong.

Finally the sobs slow down and Josie quiets, but she won’t look up from her knees, won’t unwrap the arms that cling to her calves, interlaced with each other. Into the silence Cherry whispers, “I’m sorry . . . ”

Josie mumbles something.

“I’m sorry,” Cherry says again, “I didn’t hear you.”

Josie lifts her face from her knees for a moment to say, “It’s okay. This has been inside me for the last week, it’s probably good for me to cry.” She drops her head to her knees again and begins to rock back and forth on the bed. Cherry scoots up to the headboard and slings an arm across her back, and this time Josie doesn’t push her away. Cherry rubs her friend’s back like she would if she was a little kid, and finally Josie lifts her head again and looks around and finds her cigarette half burned up in the ashtray. She grabs it and starts smoking again.

“Do you want to talk about it? Is it about being here?”

“I got taken away from all my friends to come here. I’m not even supposed to associate with them when I get out, if I ever get out. So what happens when I get out of here? They’ll throw me back into the house with my mom and the same old shit’s going to start again. The people here don’t care if I get better anyway. They just want the money from my insurance. But if I stay here I’m damned between these walls that are caving in, crushing me. We’re so wrapped up in
here, the world’s spun inside itself. If we weren’t warped before we got in here, the experience of being here will warp us. It’s like being in prison. I can’t even go buy a pack of smokes myself, it’s . . . ”

And all the doubts Cherry had about coming here wash over her again. She came here because she was going out of control, because of that thing at Marshall Field’s at that godforsaken Hillsdale Mall. She doesn’t remember much beyond holding a knife to a cashier’s throat, shouting,
Take her, God, take this whole motherfucking world!
Even though she didn’t hurt anybody, obviously her past was creeping up inside her, following her, and now it’s happening again. It’s like Josie’s monster, she can’t outrun it. A shiver creeps over her skin, and for a moment her hand trembles on Josie’s back. But she has to be strong, for Josie.

“There’s no way out for me.” Josie’s cigarette hovers over her wrist, and a hot ash flakes down and winks out against her skin. “Getting out of here is worse than staying in.”

Cherry tries to say something helpful. “Then maybe you still need to be here. I mean, isn’t that why you’re here? Because you can’t handle things outside? That’s why I’m here.”

Josie turns to face Cherry. “Do you really think that being here’s helping you?” Her pupils are so wide that only slender green crescents encircle them; it’s the dark room, but she looks like she’s messed up on drugs.

Josie’s is a question Cherry can’t answer. The question almost doesn’t matter for Cherry because for her it
is
about getting out, making it, landing on her feet, and she’s determined but Josie’s flailing. All Cherry can say is “You’re better now than you were outside.”

“Do you know what happened that got my mom scared enough to send me here?”

Cherry shakes her head.

“I took a bunch of pills and woke up in the hospital. After I got well, on the outside I mean, she sent me here.”

Do you think you might do it again?
Cherry wants to ask but doesn’t. This is the safest place for Josie; here she can’t get at much that will hurt her, Cherry doesn’t think so anyway. “A lot of people really care about you, Josie. I’m sorry you’re feeling bad. Can I help at all?”

Josie leans her head on Cherry’s shoulder. “I wish someone could. But it’s all over for me, the road’s at an end. That’s all right.”

Cherry doesn’t like the way she’s talking. Maybe if she talked to Josie’s doctors. She needs to help this girl; she’s so young and sounds so desperate.

If she can save Josie, she can save herself.

And she pulls Josie into her hug and says, “Don’t ever feel like it’s the end of the road. You’re just turning a corner.”

It sounds so stupid, she should write for fucking Hallmark. But Josie doesn’t seem to care. She grabs Cherry’s hand and squeezes it so tightly it hurts. They sit like that for a very long while, smoking, wisps drifting up toward the ceiling.