The Bitch Posse (38 page)

And now it’s done. D-A-W-N.

“So you’ll remember who you belong to,” I toss at him. “Not that she’d want you if she knew what you really are.”

Beads of sweat roll down his face, his hair is damp, he looks so fucking terrified. “ Please. . . . I’m sorry. . . . Please don’t hurt me anymore.”

Hmm, interesting how he suddenly cares about someone hurting.

“Don’t kill me.”
No one’s going to kill you, asshole,
I want to say, but don’t. This is the ultimate mind-fuck after all. “Please, I’ll do anything. Money, grades, anything.”

“Why?” says Cherry. “You’re a sick, abusing, cheating, manipulating rapist. Give us one good reason why you deserve to live.”

He’s begging for his life. We hold his life. The knife. The knife could end his life.

“Shut up, Schafer.” And now I’m doing it too.

Cherry pulls the blade out of my hands. “Really, girls”—and she’s speaking like he’s not even there—“why not end it now, just take his fucking life, reduce him to the object he is? Why let his sorry soul stay trapped in his body any longer? He doesn’t deserve it, doesn’t deserve to see to hear to feel to anything.” She grabs my hand and Amy’s and slips them over hers on the knife. We press the blade to his throat. “Come on, girls. Are you with me?”

“Please. Please . . . ”

And this is part of our script too. We’re going to make him face death, taste death, touch death, just for a minute. We’re going to drag him right to the edge and then pull him back to life, and once he’s seen his end he won’t fuck with anyone else, ever again.

“Please . . . ”

We trace the knife over his neck. “We might let you live,” spits Cherry. “If you promise to never touch another girl. We’ll let
you
figure out how to explain your little tattoo work to your wife. Since you’re so good at lying.”

His eyes are darting back and forth, and he’s trembling, good, good! And I get to say the next part, my line. “The woman who made
the mistake of marrying you would be standing right next to us if she knew what an evil, heartless, soulless prick you are.”

His blood-soaked shirt clings to his chest, letters etched in his skin, and I ball up my scarf and shove it in his mouth. There’s just one thing left to do, one last mind-fuck to pull, and Cherry’s the one who brings it up. “Get him undressed.”

I yank his pants and underwear the rest of the way off him (how many times have I done this before?), and it’s all lifeless, the parts of him that used to make me crazy, mindless, that mesmerized me, put me under a spell and made me an electric current of impulses I couldn’t say no to. God, what was wrong with me?

Cherry’s got the knife now, and she draws it along his balls, pulling up blood as she cuts the skin. Thank God there’s my scarf in his mouth because I don’t want to hear any screams. “So, Schafer. You can choose. Your cock, or your life.”

He shakes his head, his eyes are pleading.

I close my own. I can’t look, I can’t be drawn in, he’s becoming a person to me again. I’ve fallen for him so many times before . . .

Cherry senses my weakness. She grabs my hand, presses it under hers on the knife handle. “You, too, Amy.” Amy slips her hand under Cherry’s. “Look, the sorry little dog’s terrified. A creature like you,” she spits, “can’t function without sex. That’s the reality, isn’t it? You can’t say no. You’d even fuck a teenager. You’d even get her pregnant and then try to wash it away with money and an abortion and then pass it off as a little fling and then try to seduce her best friends. I pity you. But most of all I pity your poor wife. She deserves better.” Hatred pushes the words from her lips. “You’re pathetic.” Our hands follow Cherry’s as she moves the knife to his throat again. “Maybe it
would
be better all around if we just kill you. You’re nothing without your testosterone, and well, that’s the choice we’re left with, isn’t it? You surely can’t be allowed to go around following your impulses, now, can
you? You’ve done enough damage. And you’d rather be dead than look at a world without fucking whatever looks pretty to you at the moment.” She sighs. “Like I said, no one fucks with the Bitch Posse. Want to die? We aren’t afraid to go there. Be a man, Schafer, be a man and take it. Maybe then your wife’ll have the chance to find a decent person. Notice, two words. Decent. Person.”

And this’ll be our last mark, an underline below our beautiful red word. His eyes widen, he shakes his head.
Now you’ll learn your lesson.
Cherry’s hands guide ours and we slide the blade across his skin, and I close my eyes.

Words push their way into my head,
Awake, ye powers of hell! the wandering ghost that once was Clytemnestra calls
—
Arise!
and my heart catches in my chest and our hands are all melted together, it’s one hand that’s doing this, and more words, I love words, I would breathe words, eat words, wordswordswords scream into my head,
Seize, seize, seize, seize
—
mark, yonder!
and I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care,
Of justice are we ministers.
. . . I don’t even know where the words are from,
We wear and waste him; blood atones for blood,
but it doesn’t matter because life buzzes in my ears, our ears,
Queens are we and mindful of our solemn vengeance,
and I am alive again, I am me again,
me me me me me!

I open my eyes. Our line slashes jaggedly under the four letters that drip into it, and we hold the tip of the blade right under the N. Our final mark. Everything’s perfect.

A cry escapes his throat, and his body goes into some kind of spasm, jerks toward the knife. At once the blade sinks into his flesh, presses deeper, and blood splashes into the air, sprays against my face, and, and, and . . .

What?

So much blood, so much blood. Flowing over the knife handle and our fingers. Our arms. The barn floor.

What just happened?

A scream presses into my mouth, but fear claps her hand over my
lips. Blood, blood everywhere, still pouring from him as he’s twitching, trembling, gurgling. Words scramble and drop themselves into my head at random; they aren’t quite right.
Yet, dear Rennie Taylor, who would have thought your lover to have had so much blood in him?

Shut up!

And so I am empty of words, except for those simple ones that drum in my head, in this odd and blackened silence:
Oh God oh God oh God. . . .

All we can do is watch; and I can now put into words just how eyes change when the soul slips out of them, when a living being becomes just another object. In one moment his eyes sparkle with pain, fear, emotion, life; and in the next they are empty. My heart sinks to my toes, and nausea creeps into my throat. The three of us back away, holding hands, and the knife drops to the floor. I’m numb.

Oh, my God.

We’ve just killed someone.

I want the universe to swallow me up into it, my head’s going to explode, my heart is an empty balloon.

I
am
evil. Truly, truly evil. I didn’t think I had it in me, but I was wrong.

I study the girls’ eyes and I can’t even imagine what’s going through their heads. It wasn’t supposed to end like this.

It was an accident.

An accident an accident an accident.

A murder.

I don’t even know what the words mean anymore. They may as well be synonyms.

Words. We are in a place now where they can’t exist and so in silence we walk together to the barn door.

That’s when we see the headlights approaching from the highway.

May 2003
Freemont Psychiatric Hospital

A spring rain is falling and Cherry’s awake, watching it sob down the dark windows, the spatters crystalline against the glass, the moon casting a shaft of light across the empty bed next to her. Tomorrow they will tell her she’s ready to go outpatient. She’s not so sure.

Michael’s slipped from her grasp. She’s pushed him away, or he’s pushed her away. Last night, after they told each other to fuck off, he stole into her room (how he snuck out she doesn’t know) and said, “This may be good-bye, Cherry, so let’s make it a good one.” Before she knew what was happening they were in bed together, sheets tangled around their legs, but it was less like making love and more like fucking, Sam Sterling all over again, hot and sweaty and
slap-yes slap-yes slap-yes
and in the end just messy. The condom discarded in her wastebasket is still shiny and sad looking, a wrinkled lump of what
could have been, and he left without kissing her and what the hell did
that
mean?

Another “fuck you,” most likely.

She’s so fucking weak and pathetic. Why does she let men walk all over her?

It hurts too much to try to help people, anyway. You set yourself up for disaster and you end up not even being able to save yourself. She fingers the quilt on the plain wooden bed, the bed she may be leaving. The diamond tennis bracelet of Josie’s still sparkles from her wrist, a bunch of rocks and some metal is all it really is, but it’s a reminder of what she almost accomplished, the redemption she almost made. Anyway, she tried.

They don’t build empires on “tried.”

She takes a deep breath, wanting a smoke. But the pack on the table between the beds is empty, so she sucks in pure white air instead. It clears her head, and she stares out the window into the rain-soaked night. I
always had a hunch there was no God. . . . Now I know there is no Goddess, no Buddha, no Vishnu, no Mohammed, no Diana, no nothing.
Every single time she thought she’d found the Answer, she turned out to be wrong. There’s really no one out there listening, no one at all, just this wide vast expanse of Nothing. Nobody looks out for you, not really. You have to look after yourself.

So I will pray to the God of Nothing, Nothing above, Nothing before, Nothing beyond.

The only real Goddesses are the ones who were in the Bitch Posse.

She pulls the tapestry out from under her bed. Almost done, now. She knots a few more stitches and taps everything into place. Then she uses her safety scissors to cut the threads and pulls the weaving from the loom.

Lacing the first two warp threads together, she knots them, then ties together the second and third. She works quickly along the top
edge of the design, slides in that last yarn tail, and does the same along the bottom edge.

She holds the weaving up in the air. A million mountains in red, green, and blue, with a night-sky deep-sea background of richest purple. The little silver and gold threads blink like stars in the sky and fish in the sea. It’s perfect. Complete. Like nothing else she’s ever done.

Well. Like one other thing she did. A pair, the best moment of her life and her greatest creative work.

She closes her eyes and lets the girls sit next to her for a minute and gives them each a hug and a kiss. I
love you. See ya later.
Then she spreads the tapestry over her pillow, lights an imaginary cigarette, and pretends to smoke it. The phantom scorch of heat in her lungs is twice as hot as the real thing. She always thinks deep when she smokes, and sure enough, something else comes to her now.

What awaits her outside is just another Institution. Fewer rules and more ways to fuck yourself over but another Institution nonetheless, with Someone Else in charge. Oddly enough the realization sobers her, and the nine Carbitral in her dresser flicker into her palm again. She licks her finger and presses it to one of the tablets, then licks it again, thinking.

Amy Linnet. Whatever happened to her? What did she do with the freedom Cherry gave her? Did she keep pounding down pills and vodka and turn into her parents despite herself? Or did she make something good of her life?

And Rennie, “Wren” Taylor. What made her embrace the name she hated, the person she hated? Did killing purge her of all the anger she felt? Or did it just fuck her up even more?

The answers might be interesting, but they don’t really matter. Her Bitch Posse girls aren’t part of her story anymore, but she’ll always love them and they know that.

It all makes sense in a weird sort of way Because the Fates and the
Furies were sisters, children of Mother Night. Straight D’s in senior English, but she remembers that little tidbit.

The windows on the second floor don’t open, of course, but she presses her face to the glass, imagining the rain soaking her face, wetting her hair. She will never know what happened to her friends, not unless she goes on some big Internet search for them and looks them up and calls them out of the blue—
hey, you probably don’t remember me, but
—and that, well, that’s just not the kind of thing Cherry Winters does. Cherry’s too strong for that. Right?

Right?

She’s just a pinprick of light in an enormous roll of butcher paper, she will drown in the sea of the world. If she could turn invisible and float through the glass without being cut, and be outside in the rain, pelted by cold water, soaking, real. . . . would that make her strong? Strong enough?

Diana used to listen to her little brother crying in the night, calling for their absent mother, while Diana lay frozen in bed, terrified.