Free I've Got Sand In All the Wrong Places by Lisa Scottoline Page B

had to get off my back. I used all my adrenaline to somehow break from his grasp and hurl myself forward onto my hands and knees.
    I started to crawl away, the sensation of freedom gave me hope, but he was back on me before I had crossed a sidewalk square. He swarmed me with his body, I felt his arms all over me like an octopus, and I knelt in the tightest ball to protect myself, all the while screaming as loud as I possibly could.
    I surprised myself with my own volume. I told myself I only had to resist long enough before someone came to help. But as the seconds ticked by in my brain, I realized waiting was not a survival strategy.
    He got hold of me and tried to pull me toward the street. Feeling my bare knees scraping even an inch shot panic through me—I could not let him move me anywhere, least of all toward a car.
    I threw my arms out onto the sidewalk, straining at one point for the small fence around a tree but unable to reach it, instead digging my fingernails into the sidewalk. I believed my life depended on my ability to stay exactly where I was.
    He stopped pulling me, and again, I experienced a split second of relief—another tiny victory my spirit clung to so that I would keep fighting—before he kicked me under my chin. The impact under my jaw came as a shock. The shock made me slow to interpret the next sensation: a chain pulling taut around my waist.
    My purse.
    My purse?
    My purse!
    True elation as I realized I had a bargaining chip, something my attacker wanted that I was actually willing to give.
    But it was a cross-body bag, now somewhere near the ground, tangled around my limbs, not readily coming loose when he yanked on it. He must have thought I was resisting, or maybe he was driven mad with frustration, or anger, or fear. I can only speculate as to his emotion that made the violence escalate.
    Because before I could do anything, he started hitting me, hard. I think with his fists, I’m not sure. But he hit me again and again and again. Pummeled is a better word. On my head and neck and shoulders, but the most on my head. My skull rattled with every blow, whipping my cervical spine, crushing my tongue between my teeth.
    Another clear thought materialized in my battered brain:
    You have to figure out a way to make this stop fast, or one of these blows will cave your head in.
    I had been protecting my face with my hands as much as I could, but I realized that finding the bag was my only chance for getting rid of him. I lowered my hands to feel for the purse chain. This was when he got his best shots in.
    He hit me square on my right brow. Light exploded behind my squeezed-shut eyes.
    Keep feeling for it.
    Again, under my right eye, snapping my head to the left.
    I felt the cool metal, closed my fist around it, but now I had to lift it over my head.
    Again, in the center of my forehead, hard enough to send my head ricocheting backwards on my neck, hopefully hard enough to hurt his hand.
    But I’d done it. I got the chain over my head and shoved the bag in his direction.
    He bolted one way and I scrambled to my feet and ran the other. I didn’t dare look over my shoulder until I was halfway down the street. By the time I turned around, he had disappeared.
    My glasses were long gone, and the world was a bleary mess of dark shadows and orange streetlight. The relief of the attack being over hadn’t hit me yet. Instead, the fear that I’d suppressed in order to survive came crashing over me at once.
    I screamed a final time and the sound echoed down the street, ringing in my ears as if it weren’t coming from my own body.
    She sounded terrified and fierce.

 
    Laugh at My Pain
    Francesca
    They say that tragedy plus time equals comedy. But the night I was assaulted, I found, through virtue of shock, divine intervention, or head trauma, I was able to appreciate the humor in a terrible situation while it was happening.
    Well, not when the assault itself was happening. That