Bad to the Bones(21)

What was he thinking? A real relationship? Frustrated now by the ceremonies and rituals of courtship, Knoxie practically lifted Misty’s toes off the ground as he swiveled his hips against hers. They kissed sloppily, passionately, like two people in a grimy alley who had literally just bumped into each other by chance. His other hand snaked around the curve of her butt, helping to lift her up the gritty wall. With a little hop, she locked her ankles around the backs of his thighs so that only the thickness of his jeans and hers prevented them from “bonding.”

Bonding? Why the f*ck am I thinking of Bellamy’s asinine f*cking word for f*cking? Putting his all into it, Knoxie licked Misty’s lips and muttered, “I’ve got a job to do…got to go…” Over and over he pressed sucking kisses to her pouty little Botox-enhanced mouth. “We’ll finish this later, tomorrow.”

She sighed into his mouth, little ladylike sounds she had probably perfected after hours in front of the camera. Shivers ran down his spine, erecting his nipples, when she scrabbled her fingers through his hair, massaging his skull. “Sure, Knoxie. Anything for you. You know that.”

Detaching with a loud kiss, Knoxie tried to clear his head. He forced himself to laugh, turning her so he could slap her ass. She giggled with delight. “You’re a fine piece of ass, Misty. I’ll catch you later.”

He had to call Lytton, to confirm the rendezvous point at the BLM sign for Agua Fria Monument. But he didn’t want Misty, who was lingering by lovingly as he straddled his bike, to overhear any details of the job. He was forced to ride down Bargain Boulevard a few blocks, then pull over to call Lytton.

This time he risked random strangers overhearing his plan. This outlaw business sure is cloak and dagger. But it would be worth it if he could even save one girl from the clutches of that cult maniac.

That one girl being Bellamy Jager.





CHAPTER SEVEN




BELLAMY


I started trying to gain more insight into myself. I really did.

Maddy hooked me up with her P&E shrink, and I saw Dr. Petrie the very next day. I was hesitant at first, wary of any outsider’s attempts to make me conform to society. But because Maddy vouched for him a hundred percent, saying he’d helped her through some crisis, and because I was attempting to wrap my head around the strange happenings lately, I agreed to see him once.

I would not talk about my master with this stranger. I already knew how everyone on the outside thought we were weird. Even though we dealt with therapies on a set schedule every day at the ashram, even the mainstream world of experimental psychology had light years to go to catch up with our methods. I wasn’t about to set any of that out for discussion. I really just wanted to maybe gain the “insight” people always said I lacked so badly.

So I confessed to Dr. Petrie that as a tween I had been diagnosed with “borderline personality disorder,” whatever the f*ck that is. He told me that BPD sufferers feel emotions too strongly, too deeply. He said I may have started out sensitive and emotional, but had covered it up with the hard shell, the veneer we see today. If I had been affected by my father’s “abandonment” of me, I had determined to shut down these horrifying feelings of failure and shame. I had actually swung full circle in the other direction, burying all of my terrifying emotions under a chokehold of uncaring.

He called this dissociating. I had dissociated around the time of my parents’ divorce to avoid feeling anything. He could tell this by my “flat” voice and lack of facial expression. I agreed with him—I had suspected as much.

Dr. Petrie asked if I had ever self-harmed. That amazed me, that he’d figured that out. I used to carve crosses or stars of David into my arms with pins or Swiss army knives. And that was before my father had left. Petrie said this is because people with BPD feel emotions to such an extent, our methods of distracting ourselves from these terrifying feelings may be to self-injure or even become suicidal.

He said it might be better if I actually got back to being the BPD sufferer I had been as a tween. With his guidance, I could see that my father had not intended to abandon me. A person who could feel emotions fully was a person totally alive, and we should attempt to get back to that more intuitive, natural, feeling state. He said my black-and-white thinking would lead to me acting impulsively the rest of my life—running from relationships, indulging in substance abuse, self-harming—unless I put a stop to the cycle. Without access to these other healthy emotions to guide my decision-making in life, I’d keep blowing it, over and over.

I panicked when I heard that. Did I want all of those emotions to come rushing back to me? So I lashed out, told Petrie it sounded like he planned on a long-ass relationship with me when I was just going home soon anyway. When he asked where “home” was, of course I clammed up, and by then our fifty minutes were up anyway.

But of course everything he’d said stuck in the back of my mind.

Madison must’ve known better than to ask me detailed questions about the session. She just asked how it went, I said fine, and that was it. Her little angelic daughter Fidelia was with her in the waiting room, wreaking havoc, and we needed to get lunch in her stomach or she’d go ballistic. So that was a good excuse not to bring up the session again.

Of course I really wanted to get back up to Bihari, to ask Shakti why I’d been corralled in the bus with those winos. I was going to have Bulsara’s head on a platter when Shakti discovered what he’d done. But Maddy did a good job of distracting me. The cell phone she’d given me, for instance. I didn’t know Shakti’s number, of course, but she hooked me up with a few of our teenaged buddies, and I spent hours catching up with them. Not mentioning my Bihari experience, of course. When they asked what I’d been doing, I just said bike mechanics over in Munds Park, one town over.