The Bitch Posse (33 page)

“You wouldn’t, Rennie.”

“Try me.”

“You started this, you know. You begged for it.
Corrupt me,
you said.”

“What kind of pervert gets off on teenagers who look even younger than they are? Don’t put this on me, you’re the grown-up.”

“You’re not a baby, Rennie. You made your own choices, just don’t forget that. What do you want? Money?”

So he thinks I’m not just the regular kind of slut, but a mind-slut too, a whore for cash. My stomach turns, he makes me sick. “No.”

“Then what?” His skin is pasty, chalky.

I want him out of my life. I don’t want to see him every day at school. I don’t want him to fuck over anyone else the way he fucked me over.

Ever.

Yeah, it’d feel good to shove a pair of scissors in his throat, like I did with the deer. Yank them through his flesh, stab him over and over and over, and picturing that sets me apart from the scene again; I don’t feel real.

And I’m not that evil anyway. I couldn’t do it.

I don’t think.

Since I’ve gone a while without answering he says, “I doubt you’d want this relationship out in the open yourself, Rennie. People might find out about your abortion. What would your parents think?”

My abortion. Like I really wanted to think about
that
on top of everything! He’s right, of course, but he’s such a cold insensitive boorish asshole! And he referred to Dad and Kelly as my “parents.” He doesn’t fucking know me at all.

“Go ahead and leave, I don’t care. What makes you think you’re so special?” A smirk creeps across his lips. “I could make a list a mile long of girls who’d like to be in your position. Pammie McFadden . . . Abby Green . . . So—”

“So just go fuck yourself!” I don’t care who hears me.
HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE.
The word pounds in my head, threatening to overwhelm me. “You’re a fucking cocksucking fuckhead, and I hate your fucking guts and I always will!” I pull the silver cuff bracelet he gave me off my wrist and hurl it at the makeup mirror. It shatters. The jagged pieces hang in their frame for a split second, then fall to the floor.

“And know what else I figured out? Life is not a motherfucking Broadway musical. So guess what? I quit the goddamn play. Find yourself someone else to learn Rizzo’s part in a week. I don’t want it.”

I don’t even look at his expression as I stalk past him and out the door beyond the orchestra room. I hate his fucking face. I want to smash it, destroy it, destroy him, like he’s destroyed me.

The orchestra kids are doing some shit with the Madrigal Singers for the spring concert, and they’re playing so damn loud no one heard our fight. I guess that’s good, though I’m kind of disappointed because a big scene, a huge drama, would play real well about now. What drifts past me is some English or Scottish sounding folk song, slow music, mournful almost, probably what they always sing,
hey nonny nonny
or some crap like that, but it’s kind of compelling:

Oh where are you going? said Milder to Moulder
Oh we may not tell you! said Festel to Fose.

I slam my hand into the wall as I walk past, my book bag hitting my hip, hard. The pain wakes me up, makes me feel alive, strong.

We’re off to the wood! said John the Red Nose
We’re off to the wood! said John the Red Nose.

The woods sound mighty appealing about now. Cherry and Amy and I should just run away from everything, secede from the world, start a commune of three.

And what will you do there? said Milder to Moulder
Oh we may not tell you! said Festel to Fose.

Maybe I’ll find a way to hurt him. If I hurt him, I don’t have to hurt me. As I push open the door to the main hallway the last thing I hear is

We’ll shoot the Cutty Wren! said John the Red Nose.

Then it all hits me and my stomach heaves. I duck into the girls’ room, run for the toilet, and throw up. As my tears drip into the water, the lyrics echo through the walls of the orchestra room to the hallway and into the bathroom itself.

We’ll shoot the Cutty Wren . . .
. . . said John the Red Nose.

May 2003
Freemont Psychiatric Hospital

Josie, her little princess, her second chance, is dead.

It’s that stun she felt when she saw the BBC announcement, via CNN.
A short while ago Buckingham Palace confirmed the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The Princess died following a car accident in Paris. She was thirty-six.
The gulp in the stomach, the world shifted off its bearings. Her Queen of Hearts, dead. Killed by the media giant, eaten by the vultures of prime time and supermarket tabloids.

Josie’s death is an echo of it all over again.

Cherry presses her face into her pillow, clasps her hands behind her head, and pulls them against each other, unlacing, unlocking, falling to the floor. She drags her fingertips across the wooden headboard. The tears aren’t anywhere near to coming; she’s not even sure she has any left.

Josie was supposed to be her second chance. Her opportunity for
redemption. Getting something right for a change. She was so close . . .

Or maybe she wasn’t nearly as close as she thought she was.

The second death she’s responsible for. Taking someone’s hand (just about, it was just about that), leading them toward the black-cloaked figure, pushing them into Death’s arms, into Nothing, into blackness.

The emptiness inside is so vast that not even self-hatred can fill it.

It was the oak tree, the oak tree and her long winter scarf. The red one.

Anyone determined to kill herself will find a way. Marian taught her that.

Josie’s mother came by yesterday to pick up her things. A thin, drawn face. Gaunt, her arms needled with track marks that belied her real estate broker job, a heroin junkie as Josie had said, a functional one, there were probably more out there than you thought.

Cherry rolls onto her back, presses the balls of her thumbs into her closed eyelids, the blackness breaking with red and purple spiderweb patterns, and a dull ache throbs into them. She sits up and opens her eyes. The diamond tennis bracelet from Josie sparkles on her wrist. When Josie’s mother stopped by, Cherry hid the bracelet in her own drawer, so she’d get to keep it. She covets the thing not for what it’s worth (she’ll never sell it, never) but for the fact that Josie gave it to her. Later she fastened the double clasp again, and here it rests, on her wrist, the scars from years of cutting faintly visible.

Anyone determined to kill herself will find a way.

She’s been palming her medications for a while now, even before the Josie thing happened. It’s pretty easy to pretend to drop a pill into your mouth, gulp down the water with one hand as you slip the pill into your jeans with the other.

Not that she’s planning to.

It’s just in case.

Another set of poems came back from
Echo.
Michael convinced her the personal note from Hattie Gibson-Smythe meant something, so she wrote a cover letter saying “thank you for your encouragement.”

This time Hattie wrote back with:
Please don’t misconstrue my personal note as encouragement. Take some writing classes. Lose the sentimentality. Don’t submit here for at least five years.

That set of poems went out with the trash yesterday. Josie wasn’t there to pull them from the wastebasket, smooth them out.

The spiral is sucking her down further into the vortex, the spin where she’s lost control. She can’t even weave anymore, she’s getting so careless. This morning she was trimming the tail off a finished green triangle and almost cut the warp thread too. Who knows how she’ll fuck up next.

She remembers what it’s like to function when she feels this bad, and it doesn’t take long to get used to. The crash at the bottom’s what she looks forward to because then, it’ll all be over.

She’s really hit the bottom only once before. That night at the Porter Place. The scene at Marshall Field’s with the knife—the
Take her, God, take this whole motherfucking world!
—that wasn’t really a bottom. That was an excuse to come here so she could get well so she wouldn’t crash and burn like she did at age seventeen, ever again.

Until, maybe, now.

Funny. Cherry slides a cigarette from the pack on the nightstand she doesn’t share with Josie anymore and lights it, slipping smoke from her lips, thinking. She came here to get well. Only it didn’t work. Somehow, she’s sliding toward the bottom, again.

This time, though, she won’t hurt anyone else. She sets her cigarette in the ashtray, slides open the drawer of the nightstand, and counts nine Carbitral. Sleeping pills, that’s one of the easiest ways to do it, shouldn’t take much. Nine? Will that be enough?

A knock comes on her door, and Dr. Anders walks in without a word. Cherry slams the drawer shut, shaking, and picks up her cigarette.

“How are you doing, Cherry?” Her voice is gentle, kind.

Cherry won’t meet her eyes. “Fine.”

“Good. Listen. The staff and I have done some talking about you.”

About me? Oh crap.
Someone’s seen her hiding the pills. Cherry says nothing, blows out more smoke.

“You showed a clear head. It’s unfortunate it turned out how it did, but you showed real leadership, determination. You’ve been progressing well for several weeks, in fact. Your therapy’s going well, individual and group. We’d like to recommend to the county board that you go outpatient.”

Outpatient? “Me?” Cherry can’t help it, and her lips curl into laughter. She giggles silently, tears squeezing from her eyes. “I just don’t think I’m ready for that.”

Dr. Anders rests a hand on Cherry’s arm. “The important thing to know is
we
think you’re ready. All of us. We’re all behind you, Cherry. And you’ll still be coming here to our Partial Hospitalization Program, five days a week.” She taps Cherry on the shoulder and flashes a wide smile, the first one Cherry’s ever seen Dr. Anders give. “You think about it.”

“Yeah,” says Cherry. “I will.”

Later, at dinner, she sits next to Michael and whispers the news to him. They’ve attached somehow since Josie’s suicide, have even, for some odd reason, been walking around holding hands. Relationships among patients are against regulations, but theirs is a friendship. On their walk back to the lounge, he asks her what happened with
Echo
and she tells him and he’s pissed she threw her poems away. “Don’t do that again without talking to me, Cherry.”

As they’re walking back to their rooms, he leans down and kisses her. There’s no violence, no forcefulness, nothing like that. Just a warm, sweet kiss. He’s twelve years younger than her, but it could work, it could work, couldn’t it? She opens her mouth and kisses him back. Then she sinks into his arms, and he holds her for a long time.

I’m not ready to leave. Not without him.

His eyes are so green, green like grass, green like hills. I
can’t leave him, I love him
. . . .

You’re so fucking pathetic, Cherry!
A man. She’d fuck herself over for a man? The Bitch Posse would never forgive her.

But they’re not real anyway, they’ve left her forever. She breaks away, turns without saying a word.

“Cherry?”

She doesn’t turn around and walks back toward her room.

“Damn it, Cherry, what the hell did I do?”

I could never explain it. Only a woman could understand.

“Fine,” he calls after her. “Fuck you then.”

The words slap her, and maybe he doesn’t care after all, she pushed him away and he’s pushed back. The “Fuck you” was likely deserved, but something impels her to spin around and say, “I love you. So fuck you too.”

As soon as the words—not the “Fuck you,” the other words—float out of her mouth, she regrets them.
Damn you, Cherry. You’re too strong for this billshit!
She closes her eyes. The tiny pieces of her friends that are still in her heart jigsaw together, and each grasps one of Cherry’s hands. “Fuck you is all I meant.”

Heat drains from her face. She whirls around and runs back to her room and opens up the drawer. On her pillow she lines up the nine Carbitral, lights a cigarette, and stares at them, thinking, pondering, deciding.