Free The Washingtonienne by Jessica Cutler Page B

it’s totally sick.”
    Of course I wanted to know. I lived for this stuff.
    “He wanted to put M&Ms in my butt,” she whispered, even though she was telling me this in her own bedroom.
    “What?”
    “And then he wanted to eat them!”
    “Ugh!”
    I fell on the floor, laughing.
    “Plain or peanut?” I asked her.
    “He had plain ones.”
    “Did he keep them in a candy dish next to the bed?”
    “Oh, shut up, Jackie! It was seriously the scariest thing that ever happened to me. I couldn’t understand half the stuff he was saying, but he implied that he could do whatever he wanted with me because he had diplomatic immunity or something.”
    “But that doesn’t give him the right to make you his human Pez dispenser! You didn’t let him do it, did you?”
    She wouldn’t answer.
    “Ha,” I laughed. “You can never tell me anything ever again!”
    “I was scared, okay?” April admitted. “For all I knew, the guy could have kidnapped me, pumped me full of drugs, and dumped my body into the ocean from a helicopter when he got tired of raping me. And he would get away with it because he’s a Very Important Person.”
    “I don’t know, April. That seems pretty far-fetched.”
    “Oh, whatever! Didn’t you once say that you had a boyfriend who liked to strangle you during sex?” she reminded me. “There are a lot of weirdos out there.”
    “It’s actually pretty common. I used to think that I was the only one who did this freaky stuff, like there was something wrong with me, that I was attracting all these sickos. But the more people you talk to, the more you realize that
everyone
has stories like these.”
    April shook her head.
    “No, that’s not true,” she said after doing another bump. “Most people have really boring lives. I really think that we have a tendency to attract weirdos.”
    “No,” I argued. “We just have a tendency to find strange ways to entertain ourselves.”
    I took off the Heatherette Hello Kitty minidress that I had worn out the night before. My eyeballs hurt and I could feel a headache coming on.
    “I think I’m coming down,” I said, pulling my Donovan McNabb jersey over my head.
    “Then I’m out of here,” April said, throwing her Coach bag over her shoulder. “If I talk to Laura, I’ll let you know what she had to say about last night. I hope things don’t get weird between the two of you.”
    On her way out the door, I didn’t want to burden April with the regrettable truth that it was too late.
    Laura came by the apartment that afternoon to discuss.
    “I think we need to talk,” she said, sunglasses clamped to her face.
    We were both fighting coke hangovers, and I wasn’t in the mood.
    “There’s nothing to talk about,” I offered. “We were both high as kites and we got carried away. It’s no biggie.”
    “Speak for yourself,” Laura said. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me. I’m really not the threesome type.”
    “Well, who is?” I laughed. “Everyone has at least
one
threesome at some point in their lives.”
    “Maybe where you come from, they do,” she snorted, “but where I come from, people don’t do things like that.”
    “Not true! Haven’t you ever watched Jerry Springer? Apparently, poor white trash have threesomes all the time.”
    I knew that it was a mean thing to say, but someone needed to knock Laura off her high horse. No wonder I didn’t have many female friends: Girls were such goddamn bitches.
    “How dare you make yourself out to be the innocent Southern Belle,” I told her. “What does that make me? The Big City whore? Give me a break! We both know what happened last night, so just cut the shit.”
    Laura smirked.
    “Well, I’m glad we finally got it all out into the open,” she said. “Now I can go home and get some sleep.”
    “Good for you,” I retorted. “Now get out of here and take your ugly Vera Bradley bag with you.”
    She walked toward the door, then turned around.
    “Jackie, I