Read The Bitch Posse for Free Online Page A

time.”
    Better. Next. Time. The words fall apart from each other in my head and don’t mean anything at all.
    I pull my leather coat around me. “Good-bye, Mr. Schafer.”
    “Rob.”
    I push open the metal auditorium door. The wind sweeps over me; I’m going to be blown away in it. “Good-bye, Rob.”
    I walk into the frigid air. It’s started to snow, and the flakes are dry and papery. They swirl around me as I jog to my car, without looking back.

5
Cherry
    March 2003
Freemont Psychiatric Hospital
Freemont, Illinois
    Cherry folds the length of yarn in half and loops it over the warp thread, pulling the knot snugly, just like the woman from the art therapy program—Cherry can’t remember her name, and it hardly matters—has explained numerous times. Soumak weaving, this is called. Cherry’s taken this class before, years back, the first time she was here, after. The scars on her arms are the only remnants of those days she has anymore.
What are the others doing now?
She laughs and passes the yarn under the warp thread and back through her loop.
Bet they’re not in a fucking mental hospital.
    She was so naïve then that she thought if she quit smoking and swearing they’d let her out. Back then Rennie wrote her letters—Amy never bothered, or was afraid to—and the memory of that night at the Porter Place was still so fresh in her mind she seized up in her dreams. Her eyes would pop open, and she’d be unable to see what was reallythere, because the screen in front of her eyes would play the old scene, and Cherry would be there again, drunk in the moment. Dr. Baum talked to her about those dreams or nightmares or whatever they were. Where she thought they were coming from. Why she was having them. Who was making them. And apparently there was a point to all his questions, but Cherry never got it and took a different tack. Soon she became the model patient, obedient, cooperative, took her meds without a fuss. And then she fell in love, and at last they let her out.
    And she lived her life for a little while, waitressing at Friday’s, paying rent, even (Jesus, it seems bizarre now) dating.
    And then . . . was it that very day at the Marshall Field’s in Hillsdale Mall, or weeks, months before that, that she realized they hadn’t made her well? That Dr. Baum was a liar like the rest of them? She pulls her fingernail over her lower lip, the little buzz of sensations awakening her, letting her
feel.
No. It had been weeks before. She can pinpoint the date she knew everything was a lie. August 31, 1997. The day everything crashed and shattered and broke into pieces.
    After Hillsdale, they labeled her a “chronic case” and locked her up again.
    She sighs. It feels so long ago. She tries not to care about anything now. She’s let her hair go stringy, watches it grow gray near her earlobes, doesn’t bother to dye it; she’s becoming an old woman in here.
    At least now she doesn’t have to worry about money, paying bills, showing up for work, dating. Everything is scheduled; she doesn’t forget to take her meds, and if she isn’t “somebody,” at least she’s doing good work. The tapestry she’s working on is for a crafts show to benefit the homeless of Chicago. She works across the row, tying a knot onto each warp thread. Making shapes on the tapestry is pretty simple, and the best part of soumak weaving is there’s no way to mess up. On her way back across the warp, she starts one thread away from her ending point and dizzies herself within the pattern, shutting outeverything, the art teacher, her fellow patients, the whole fucking occupational therapy room.
    Her fingers play against the yarn, knotting and weaving, building a pyramid with the wool. From time to time she takes the plastic comb and taps the row of knots, just to even things out. No one speaks, although Michael, the cute, Mohawked college kid whose trembling hands are always clutching a cigarette (he’s withdrawing from something,