The Bitch Posse by Martha O'Connor Read Free Book Online

years, and that accomplishment rolls waves of pleasure through her.
    Her perfect Princess was a cutter too. Afraid if Buckingham Palace found out they’d take her children away, put her in an institution. So she and Cherry have more in common than just a name.
    God, if she could bring herself to sleep with Dr. Anders, maybe it’d help. Dr. Anders is so aboveboard, her red hair coiffed into a neat bun. It’s not at all like those sessions with Dr. Baum, when he told her he loved her, that she wasn’t crazy after all, that he’d get her out. And he kept his promise. Two short years and he got her out.
    Of course, there were other promises he didn’t keep.
    “God fucking damn it.” Michael’s cut his warp thread by mistake, and his whole project starts unraveling.
    The art teacher leans over to knot it back together again. Josie looks up and meets Cherry’s eyes, Josie, the waif-girl who looks like a teenage Princess Di, or a combination of her two best friends, tiny Rennie, blond and gorgeous Amy.
    No, no. Never, never think of them.
    Josie the heroin-junkie-turned-brownnoser glances worriedly at Cherry. Josie. She could be a project too.
    Cherry looks away. Lately she doesn’t say much out loud. Words are massive efforts. Like moving boulders across football fields. Like creating Stonehenge.
    “This project fucking sucks.”
    Susan raises a disgustingly controlled eyebrow. Susan, the thirty-something-suicidal-housewife—Cherry probably should relate to her, but can’t, because Susan had a young adulthood without courts, psychiatrists, drugs—Susan’s problems are blissfully normal, a husbandwith an affair, a little Vicodin problem, a learning-disabled daughter. Susan likes to egg Michael on, makes her feel powerful or something. “This isn’t high school, Michael.”
    “Fuck you.” He slides the yarn over his fingers, and he’s cut himself somehow—a drop of blood soaks from his skin into the wool.
    Cherry’s heart quickens. Her dry lips scrape together as she pushes out the whisper. “If you don’t swear so much, they might let you out faster.”
    “Fuck you too. Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?” His nose ring quivers and he rises to his feet. Here it comes. The Michael tantrum.
    “Who the
fuck
do you
fucking
think you
fucking
are, you
fucking fuckhead? Fuck you!
” He pounds his fists on the table, his voice rising to a bloody, passionate, rolling-back-and-forth-on-the-bed, a fuck of the voice, a thump-thump-thump into the headboard, push her hands over her head and hold them together, teeth tear into flesh.
    Cherry’s knees go weak under the table. Michael hurls his half-completed tapestry across the room and wrenches the table from the floor, topples it. The art teacher stands up, her face awash with terror as her supplies float around her, suspended in slow motion.
    “Oh my God, oh my God,” whispers Josie.
    The blur of the moment whirs through Cherry, pulling laughter from her stomach, her lungs, and she bursts into the silence with sobs of mirth.
    The nurses call frantically for male staff, and Michael is gathered up and put into the quiet room.
    Cherry can’t stop laughing, even after Michael is put away into his little box. She’s laughing so hard tears come from her eyes as she crosses her arms awkwardly, her just-grown-out nails biting into her wrists. As she breaks the skin she crests onto a high, like being on the top of the roller coaster at Great America, as high as she was that night at the Porter Place. She pushes her nails into her skin, flesh poppingand wetness flowing, and glances at her red, sticky wrists. Suddenly she’s choking on her laughter. She can’t breathe, she’s shaking, and she becomes aware of arms behind her back, seizing her wrists together, but they can’t stop the blood from trickling down, licking her skin with warm wetness, ah yes, ah yes.

6
Amy

    March 1988
Holland Avenue, Stoplight
    As I’m waiting at a stoplight in my dad’s Mustang,