Free The Bitch Posse by Martha O'Connor

him, just for the high. “Fuck you, Sam,” I whisper against his lips, and now he lets go to unzip his jeans. He grabs me by the waist of my skirt and yanks it, breaking the elastic. “Asshole, I hate you.” This time I want to be the one to drag him to the bedroom kicking and screaming. I want to be the one to rape him. He’s not much bigger than me, and I grab his hands and yank them behind his back, reaching for the set of handcuffs we keep in a little secret place behind the TV.
    He bristles, pulls away. “No.”
    This is part of the game, so I slap him a little more. My handprints float across his back and his ass like butterflies. “Kitchen table, now, you son of a bitch.”
    A curtain of fire hangs in the air between us. “No, Cherry. You this time.” I sting another slap across his cheek, and the flames light his eyes again.
    He balls his hand into a fist and punches me in the face.
    Goddamn,
fuck!
I put my hand to my nose and it comes away with blood. This is a line we just don’t cross. The choke of sex flakes away to anger. “What the hell’d you do that for?” I make a fist too and land one in his belly before he grabs my wrists and pushes them over my head. The cuffs snap shut.
    “No one does that to me, Cherry, no one.” Even though I’m already bleeding, his fist lands on my cheek. But I’m strong and I kick him in the shin, hard. Tears are running down my cheeks. Am I supposed to be liking this? I’m a jumble of confusion and anxiety, and most of the sexy feelings have drained out of me. Somehow, I distance myself from the scene as he pulls me away from the kitchen table and tosses me onto the sofa, rolls on a condom and rides me. In my head my two best friends are holding my hands, and I watch Cherry Winters cry out and beg him,
Fuck me, fuck me hard!
despite herself. Inside I’m saying,
I’m really pissed off at you, Cherry Winters, how could you be so weak?
    When it’s all over, Sam fixes my skirt with a safety pin. His I’m-sorry-it’s-just-a-game kisses land all over my body, and he rubs my back, brings some tissues for my nose. When the bleeding stops, I pull my makeup bag out of my purse, hand shaking as I brush mascara back across my eyelashes, smudge cover-up over my nose. Why did it happen? Is he losing control?
    Or am I?

9
Amy

    March 2003
Chippewa County War Memorial Hospital
Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan
    Scotty’s still not back from wherever the hell he’s been all night. The logical thoughts of why this might be the case float around Amy’s mind, but she can’t process anything right now.
    What’s going on behind the curtain? She hears the strain in the doctors’ voices as they’re cutting her baby out of her. Her abdomen must be a mountain of steaming blood. Of course, they won’t let her see anything. The whole show’s going on behind the curtain, so all she can do is imagine.
    Next to her left ear, the anesthesiologist says, “I can give you something to make you sleep. If you don’t want to be awake for this, it’s perfectly understandable.” She wants to smack him. Of course she wants to be awake for her daughter’s birth. Only this isn’t how she imagined it, she pictured a vaginal birth, at term, Scotty cutting thecord, the doctor (just one, her OB) placing the baby on her belly, letting them nuzzle, snuggle, bond right away, maybe even nurse.
    Instead a hospital band’s tight on Amy’s wrist, the plastic cutting into her flesh, and for some bizarre reason that’s all she can notice even though the rest of her is numbed from the neck down, from the spinal for the emergency C-section. She’s watching it all like she’s in a dream, the doctors’ anxious voices rising around her. The ceiling is pure white, a sky of fog, and somehow, although she should be worried about the baby, all she can think about is the damned wristband and how she’ll get it off. Or maybe that’s all she’ll let herself think about, because if she doesn’t fill her head