The Bitch Posse (5 page)

If I play my cards right with Mr. Schafer, I can turn all that around.

Rizzo’s words drop out of my mouth, words I can’t believe I remember with so many thoughts bouncing around in my head. I let him pull me closer, and now his hands are slipping off my shoulders, toward my chest. I move forward so my breasts touch his fingertips, singing the number like nothing’s happening. As the lyrics float into the air, his lips brush against my neck, and I cock my head so I’m closer and it’s a real kiss, practically. Then he backs away and it’s like I imagined it, fairy wings disappearing like they were part of a dream all along.

His wife’s name is Dawn. She works at a law firm in Chicago and makes at least twice as much money as he does. Maybe he’s jealous. Or bored. I don’t really care, because he’s suiting my purposes very well at the moment.

As he presses against my back—and yes, Rennie Taylor, that
is
a hard-on—my heart catches in my throat. My bravado melts away, and the fear I refuse to feel creeps inside my lungs. My abdomen’s empty. There’s no air to push through, and my voice comes out like a whisper instead of my usual belt-it-out alto. The words tumble into the air, do fairy cartwheels across the stage, and disappear; I’ve forgotten the rest.

“Sensational, Rennie,” he whispers in my ear, and his razor stubble brushes against my bare neck. We’ve been this close before, but he’s
gotten scared and stopped things. This time, I bring my fingers to his and squeeze them, coaxing his touch tighter around my breasts.

“Is that better?” I whisper. Sick of the charade, I turn to him and lift my hands to the back of his head. I pull his mouth down on mine, pressing my fear away with his lips, and my heart pounds in my ears. He’s surprised and stiffens against me, starts to push me away.

Now that it’s finally happening, I’m not going to let him stop it. I’m dizzy with it, the control I have over him, the thrill of ruining a decent man. I open my mouth, and his tongue slides in.

That’s when he pulls away. “Rennie,” he says, holding me by the shoulders. “Rennie, you’re only seventeen.”

“So what are you waiting for?” I grab his wrists, snake my fingers up his forearm, and pull him to me again. “Corrupt me already. I won’t kiss and tell.” I’m playing the confident hellcat, but despite my bravado I’m a little, well, scared. I’m in too deep now, though, too far to go back.

My heart thumps in my ears, but as he circles my nipple through my black sweater, he presses away my doubts. I’m drunk with delight, and my fear, if I feel it, has melted into that heartbeat feeling. Fear’s what’s making me open my mouth, murmur as his tongue tangles with mine; fear’s sending chills down my back as he tests me against his hips, pushes my skirt over my thighs, backs me up to the ladder near the wings, and lifts me onto a rung. Fie slides my sweater over my shoulders, unhooks my bra, fills his hands with my breasts. Fear thumps in my chest and I’m dizzy.

“Mr. Schafer . . . ”

“Please, Rennie, call me Rob.”

Rob? It just doesn’t sound right. I don’t know him as Rob. “I don’t want to call you anything, I just want you to fuck me.” God, did that really come out of my mouth? What the hell am I saying?

He doesn’t argue. And my boots and stockings have somehow
ended up on the stage floor with his jeans, and now it’s happening, as I’m sitting on the ladder, my legs are spreading. “Oh, God, Rennie, I can’t believe I’m doing this. . . . ” He pushes into me—are we really fucking, right here on the ladder? God, it
hurts,
he’s tearing me apart, bones are going to break, I know it! He hasn’t even taken his sweater off, and he’s too close to me now. Was it supposed to be like this? I suck in my breath, bracing myself. Was he supposed to be this close? His sweater is some kind of woolly material that’s rubbing back and forth over my stomach, and he pushes in all the way, grabbing my ass and pressing me even closer. His face looks pained for a moment as inside me it burns, and something rips, and I know he’s torn skin from my very flesh. I yelp, and tears blink down my face. The wool scrapes across my belly a few more times until he finishes with a groan and pulls away. He rubs his eyelids, not looking at me, and slides up his briefs and jeans from the tangle around his ankles.

I’m sticky all over, and I slip my hand between my legs and bring it to my eyes. His semen mottles slickly over my fingers, dappled with my own blood.

That’s it?

I feel ripped off, and disgusting. As I hop off the ladder, the rest of his semen trickles out of me. I need a shower, I’m meeting the girls later and—

“Are you all right?” he asks, pulling the “Rydell High” banner off the ladder and bunching it into a pile. “I didn’t know you were a virgin. I wouldn’t have . . . ”

Tears come from somewhere and work their way into my throat, but I will never, never let them fall in front of him. I don’t feel brave, or sexy, or any of that anymore. I feel like a stupid little girl. I don’t have any words.

“Rennie?”

“I’m fine.” And suddenly it’s very cold on the stage, and I snap on my bra and pull my sweater back over my shoulders and button it, the
little peekaboo sweater that seemed sexy when I picked it up this morning, figuring I’d see him after school, the sweater that now seems shitty, uninspired, dirty.

“This is just between you and me, Rennie.” He leans close and kisses me. “Our secret.”

My mind is a swirl. I pull on my underwear, and I know when I go to the bathroom later, when Cherry and Amy and I’ve been hanging around at the college downing the scotch or tequila or vodka or what-ever Amy’s swiped from her parents’ liquor cabinet, there’ll still be blood and semen clinging to the cotton panel, staining it, staining me.

“You’re a very special woman, Rennie. You’re absolutely beautiful. Perfection.”

I’m seventeen years old and now I am a woman. A very special one. Perfection.

I slide on my stockings, their feet damp with my own sweat. “Do you have any smokes? I’m out.” The mundane request centers me somehow, and as I’m pulling on my Doc Martens, I notice my hands shaking. I do need a smoke.

He pulls a rumpled pack from his pocket and hands me one. Cupping his hand near my face, he lights mine first, then his. “Did you like it, Rennie? You didn’t, did you? It was too fast.”

I pull in some smoke and answer as I’m blowing it out. “It was fine, great.” And a tiny part of me feels it
was
great, it’s sexy to have an affair with a teacher, he’s gorgeous, I’d be crazy not to want him as a lover. Tendrils of smoke curl over the stage, drifting into the auditorium. We smoke together quietly for a while, watching the empty audience; the show we’ve put on is over. My cigarette burns down to the filter, and I stub it out on the floor. “I have to go. I’m meeting my friends.”

He bundles the banner in his arms. “I need to take this to the Laundromat.”

Because you can’t wash it at home, Dawn might see. “Whatever.”

“When can I see you again?”

“You see me every day, in drama class.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

I gather my backpack and my script from the corner of the stage. They seem the accoutrements of a grammar school girl, someone I’m not anymore. I don’t know who I am now, who I want to be, what face I will show when I’m with my girlfriends later. Will they worm it out of me? Do I want them to? Do I want to have sex with Mr. Schafer, Rob, Mr. Schafer again?

I just open my mouth and let words fall out of it. “Sure, we’ll do it again. Maybe we can go to a hotel or something. Sex onstage is kind of weird.” And as the words come out of my mouth I feel that dizzying heat again, the buzzing in my ears, the excitement of our secret.

“It’ll be better next time.”

Better. Next. Time. The words fall apart from each other in my head and don’t mean anything at all.

I pull my leather coat around me. “Good-bye, Mr. Schafer.”

“Rob.”

I push open the metal auditorium door. The wind sweeps over me; I’m going to be blown away in it. “Good-bye, Rob.”

I walk into the frigid air. It’s started to snow, and the flakes are dry and papery. They swirl around me as I jog to my car, without looking back.

5
Cherry

March 2003
Freemont Psychiatric Hospital
Freemont, Illinois

Cherry folds the length of yarn in half and loops it over the warp thread, pulling the knot snugly, just like the woman from the art therapy program—Cherry can’t remember her name, and it hardly matters—has explained numerous times. Soumak weaving, this is called. Cherry’s taken this class before, years back, the first time she was here, after. The scars on her arms are the only remnants of those days she has anymore.
What are the others doing now?
She laughs and passes the yarn under the warp thread and back through her loop.
Bet they’re not in a fucking mental hospital.

She was so naïve then that she thought if she quit smoking and swearing they’d let her out. Back then Rennie wrote her letters—Amy never bothered, or was afraid to—and the memory of that night at the Porter Place was still so fresh in her mind she seized up in her dreams. Her eyes would pop open, and she’d be unable to see what was really
there, because the screen in front of her eyes would play the old scene, and Cherry would be there again, drunk in the moment. Dr. Baum talked to her about those dreams or nightmares or whatever they were. Where she thought they were coming from. Why she was having them. Who was making them. And apparently there was a point to all his questions, but Cherry never got it and took a different tack. Soon she became the model patient, obedient, cooperative, took her meds without a fuss. And then she fell in love, and at last they let her out.

And she lived her life for a little while, waitressing at Friday’s, paying rent, even (Jesus, it seems bizarre now) dating.

And then . . . was it that very day at the Marshall Field’s in Hillsdale Mall, or weeks, months before that, that she realized they hadn’t made her well? That Dr. Baum was a liar like the rest of them? She pulls her fingernail over her lower lip, the little buzz of sensations awakening her, letting her
feel.
No. It had been weeks before. She can pinpoint the date she knew everything was a lie. August 31, 1997. The day everything crashed and shattered and broke into pieces.

After Hillsdale, they labeled her a “chronic case” and locked her up again.

She sighs. It feels so long ago. She tries not to care about anything now. She’s let her hair go stringy, watches it grow gray near her earlobes, doesn’t bother to dye it; she’s becoming an old woman in here.

At least now she doesn’t have to worry about money, paying bills, showing up for work, dating. Everything is scheduled; she doesn’t forget to take her meds, and if she isn’t “somebody,” at least she’s doing good work. The tapestry she’s working on is for a crafts show to benefit the homeless of Chicago. She works across the row, tying a knot onto each warp thread. Making shapes on the tapestry is pretty simple, and the best part of soumak weaving is there’s no way to mess up. On her way back across the warp, she starts one thread away from her ending point and dizzies herself within the pattern, shutting out
everything, the art teacher, her fellow patients, the whole fucking occupational therapy room.

Her fingers play against the yarn, knotting and weaving, building a pyramid with the wool. From time to time she takes the plastic comb and taps the row of knots, just to even things out. No one speaks, although Michael, the cute, Mohawked college kid whose trembling hands are always clutching a cigarette (he’s withdrawing from something, Cherry’s pretty sure), sucks in his smoke quickly, puffs it out, sucks it in, fast fast fast. Cherry’s breath quickens in her throat; even though she doesn’t smoke anymore, he makes it look so damn good. His green eyes are pools of vulnerability, like Sam Sterling’s, so long ago. Another project there for the taking, like Sam or Marian or her tapestry. Michael doesn’t tap his ash, so the spent tobacco becomes a long charcoal ghost, just ready to fall. Cherry wonders how she looks to him. Old, probably. The first time she was in here, she would have made a pass. God, it sucks to be thirty-two when you really still need to be seventeen.

As far as she can tell, she’s made no progress in convincing them she’s been cured. It isn’t like the last time, when even if they didn’t exactly want to give her a chance, they were at least willing to watch her, to assess. Now it feels like a life sentence. It’s been six years since she lost control at that Marshall Field’s, pressed the knife to the cashier’s throat; she remembers hearing they locked up all sharp objects after that. Weirdly enough, her “episode,” as they called it, hit her right after her gorgeous flawed Princess died in a car crash. Why did she care so much about a Princess she’d never know? The grownup, the Diana that Cherry would never become?

The police were called, and then came the blur of the second trial, the same old same old with the attorney, the greasy-haired public defender who stared at her tits instead of listening to her. Except of course this time everything happened without the guidance counselor,
without the school psychologist, without all those little safety people who made the first time feel important. Almost six years it’s been since they threw her in here again.