"He . . . he . . . he might deserve it," she stutters, "but that don't mean we have to be the ones to earn the time. Leave that to the guys in the pen."
I chuckle at her naiveté. "We’re not going to get caught," I say in utmost confidence, pacing the area in search of a method with which to awaken him. "He’s not going to the police, silly. What guy is going to go to the police and be like ‘Yo, I got raped by a couple of girls’? No, not happening. Especially when you consider how he got himself in this mess in the first place."
40
(Angela) She don’t just expect me to watch. She expects me to participate.
"Most women are too ashamed to report," she fumes, veins popping out of her forehead. A piece of her spit lands on my lip. "Do you really think a guy is going to?"
41
Aaah, a bucket of rainwater, perfect! I pick it up and splash him in the face. "Wake up, rape-o!" I call. "Wake the fuck up!" Splash!
He sputters slightly, and his eyes blink like a moth whose wings have just been touched but without any of the grace. Splash! He is on his way to consciousness, and I catch a hint of eye contact as I bend over him. Once more, splash!
"Wake the fuck up!"
42
(Angela) I don’t know if it’s the vodka or the strange force that’s possessed her, but Jane moves like a fucking ninja. No. Like a spider monkey. No, no. A ninja spider monkey.
Dude spits and snorts and blinks himself awake. She sets the bucket down and twirls to straddle him. She tugs on his pants, sends 'em to his ankles. He tries to scream, but the sock in his mouth don’t let it out.
"Oh, don’t be upset," she taunts. "You like this sort of thing, don’t you?"
His eyes are wide like on those nature shows where the lioness has the antelope by the throat. He struggles, desperate to break free, but I tie a damn strong knot. Jane stands and walks back up towards his head and kneels down. She waves our big, pink dildo in front of him, stroking and wagging it in his face. She picks the pipe back up and waves it in his face. Then she undoes the homemade gag, tells him to "Lick it." She waves the pipe again. Smacks it against her palm. "Lick it!"
43
His tongue quivers with contact. I wonder if he has seen himself yet. Either way, we shall proceed. He will face himself to the end.
44
(Angela) She scoots in closer. Tells him to suck it. He shakes and dry heaves, but he does what he’s told ‘til she grabs him by the hair and shoves the dildo down his throat. Puke comes spraying out, but somehow she outta the way in the nick of time, behind him now. I’m telling you, she’s gone fucking ninja! Fucking spider monkey ninja gets down on her knees and leans over him, pressing the hard pink plastic into his lower back while she puts the gag back in his mouth. She whispers cold, and my skin crawls. "I hope you enjoy this as much as I do."
45
Echo parts his cheeks and finds the target. Once she has it in sight, she rams the bright pink dick into his asshole, just a tear away from no resistance. With the head of her temporary manhood firmly lodged in his sphincter, she lets go of his butt cheeks and leans forward over him, hands around his neck, and whispers dirty little nothings in his ear.
46
(Angela) I know what’s coming, but I ain’t ready. There ain’t no way to be ready for something like that. I keep hoping that she’ll stop, change her mind, realize just how fucked-up this is. And then WHAM! His eyes bug out of his head, his face goes beet red, and he pours it all out into a pathetic silent scream muzzled by our homemade ball gag. She don’t stop there, no; why would she? She pumps away at his ass as tears stream down his face.
"You like that?!" she screams in a whisper. "Huh? You like that?"
The entire scene is hazy, unreal. It happens in slow motion, the audio one step behind. And there is blood. Lots of blood! Bright-red blood. Everything else is black and gray, and then there's the blood. It drips and splashes and runs down the pavement, seeps into the cracks, proof of everything that happens here tonight. And then, before I even know what done happened, she’s holding that bloody strap-on out to me, waving it in my face, splashing shit and blood on my forehead, my shirt, my lips, in my eyes. There’s proud pink and painful red in one giant swirl, and she just stands there waiting, expecting me to take it. She's getting impatient, and I gotta make a choice that ain't a choice, and it's gonna haunt me, probably forever.
Afterword
(The Circle, three weeks later) One in six.
"I don't know." Angela shakes her head and looks up at the baby-blue sky as if the answer is out there, up there, somewhere. "Obviously she's lost her goddamn mind! She's fucking crazy! Just like Rose. Fucking crazy, OK. I mean, who does that? If she just woulda stayed where she was . . ."
All of a sudden, Elisabeth looks up at her. Something between fear and shock comes screaming from her green eyes and stops Angela mid-sentence. "So you would rather he . . ."
"What! No!" Angela screws up her face.
"Well . . ." Elisabeth looks back down at the grass, focuses on it, tries to keep the world around her from spinning.
One in six.
"I could have handled it myself. Without r . . ."
Elisabeth squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head. "Don't say it." Such an ugly word. An ugly word that somehow does not fit here. When the perpetrator is the victim, well, there is no victim to begin with. And where there is no victim, there is no crime; there is no . . . "I'm sorry." She looks back up at Angela. "It's just that . . ." But she trails off, shocked that the thoughts in her head are her own.
"What?"
She sighs. "Don't you think he deserved it?"
"Well fuck, of course he did!" Angela booms, loud enough to silence the playground. Around them, mothers turn to stare, frown, and otherwise show their disapproval. Bee pops his head out of the plastic tunnel where he has been playing on his own since they arrived. "It's OK, baby. Mama's OK. Go back to playing." She ignores the other mothers but lowers her voice. "Of course he deserved it. But that don't make it right! And it don't mean I shoulda been a part of it!"
"Doesn't it make you feel . . . vindicated?"
Angela stares at her friend, searching for eye contact, but Elisabeth doesn't look up from the ground. "Hey," she calls. "Hey, look at me." Elisabeth obliges, and her eyes glisten like she is fighting back tears. "I have horrible nightmares. Horrible, horrible nightmares. And they're so real. So real I relive that shit every night. Every fucking night," she explains. "Do I deserve that shit?"
I have nightmares too, Elisabeth thinks. Every night and every day. Every moment . . .
All of a sudden, Angela asks, "Are you OK?"
There are tears streaming down Elisabeth's face. She doesn't know it until she wipes her eyes and pulls back her hand, salty and wet. "Yeah, yeah," she stutters. "I've . . . I've got to go." She stands to leave, but her knees give out, and she falls back to the grass, her white stockings stained, her face buried further into her hands.
"Oh my god, Beth, what's wrong?"
Her tears flow free now, and her body heaves.
"Beth? Beth?"
She shakes her head and scrunches up her face, but the tears won't stop.
"Beth, are you OK?"
Finally she whimpers, "I just need to go home."
The next ten minutes are a blur. Angela helps her to her car while Bee struggles to carry Beth's oversized purse. Vague and far away, she sees Angela slide into the driver's seat. She hears her complain, "Damn it, it's a stick." She listens to the gears grind and sees the streets slip by in a trail of muted colors. Then she is home; Angela is sliding her into bed, and everything goes dark.
But sleep is not a better state. He visits her again. Reminds her. Violates her all over.
One in six.
She screams.
One in motherfucking six.
From the bottom of her tortured soul, from the depths of her nightmare, she screams until she wakes, alone once more. Alone and scared. But she is tired of being
scared, sick and tired of it. She thinks of Angela, how determined she is that she would have better defended herself that night if Jane had not come around the alley corner with a lead pipe in one hand and a pink strap-on in the other; how, no matter what, Angela refused to be the one in six. She thinks of Jane and how her rage boils and seethes, how she refused to let an evil piece of shit off that easy. Angela is wrong, after all; Jane is not crazy. Elisabeth may have thought so before too when her friend took off for a week without telling anyone and came back looking and smelling like a hobo, but now that she knows the girls' secret, now that she knows what Jane is truly capable of, she doubts insanity has anything to do with it. No, what Jane suffers from is anger. Ire. Fury over what's wrong with the world. Wrath for justice. No, it isn't bi-polar that torments her; it is the evil that men do.
One in six.
No one would have ever thought to look up to Jane, to make her a role model, a mentor, least of all Elisabeth. Until now. Until something snaps and bangs and explodes together inside of her. Until she finds herself wanting, needing, that rage. Until she finds herself refusing to live in fear, refusing to cry another tear, letting the blood in her veins boil with vengeance instead. Ruthless. Merciless. Hungry for retribution, ready to sink her teeth into some proper eye-for-an-eye revenge. Revenge for herself. Revenge for the one in six.
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About the Author
Armed with a useless liberal arts degree, Riya Anne Polcastro is a student of human behavior and a conduit for raw words. Maybe it is because she learned to read and write in her second language before she learned to do the same in her first. Maybe it is because she was raised a missionary’s daughter at the same time that she was taught to question everything. Maybe there are a whole lot of reasons. Either way, her fascination with mental illness and human interaction is weaved into fiction with a language that is at times caressed and loved, at others beaten into submission. A long- time resident of the Pacific Northwest, Polcastro aims to join the ranks of great Oregon writers. www.riyaannepolcastro.com
Jane. Page 34
