Chapter 7: Amelia Chase

Takes place a while after the episode.

Why, they ask.

Why, asks my therapist. Why, ask the pigs who I do therapy with. Why, ask the reporters, the psychiatrists and psychologists, the would-be authors who want to write my life story.

Well, why not? It's not like no one's done it to me.

My father beat me, and mom let him. He abused her as well, and she always let him walk all over her. Then she divorced him when he "had an affair," i.e. raped, another women. Oh, he was only allowed to rape her, no one else. He could beat her black and blue, as long as she was the one getting the attention. My first stepfather liked to strangle me. My second stepfather, who Mom married when I was thirteen, molested me. Once I made the mistake of mentioning my first stepfather and then he turned to strangling me while he molested me.

I guess I picked up my strange fixation from him. Well, when I was seventeen, and he was almost too drunk to stand, I finally rebelled, and punched him in the gut, knocking him on his butt. I then put the rope around his neck, choked him two or three times, and then told him that if he ever laid a hand on me again, I would kill him.

So he left me alone. Six months later, he died. Cirrhosis of the liver. He was insured, so I used the insurance to get myself into college. Mom wanted to use it for herself, but she was always weak, and I browbeat her to give it to me. Once stepdad number two became afraid of me, I could do whatever I wanted.

I had a few boyfriends. Unfortunately, I couldn't seem to enjoy them much. So I tried getting a girlfriend. Well, turns out I'm not a lesbian. So did I just not enjoy sex? Well, I found out what it was when I discovered that I missed being strangled. It was the one way to get off. How could I miss being strangled? Well, abuse messes the mind up, I suppose.

So I began my fixation with choking myself.

After that, I discovered how much I liked control. Perhaps it's because I had been controlled all my life until I stood up to stepdad number two. But not just control, as in dominatrix, as in playing games.

I liked real control, as in being able to force the other person to act against their will. Generally, I would always pick the shyest guys to go out with, or pick them out at parties, and hang around with them. I'd come on to them, and if they were interested, I'd maybe hook up with them and then usually dump them. If they weren't interested, I'd get them drunk, intimidate them, keep coming on to them, whatever it took to have sex with them. Until it stopped being fun, then I'd move on to someone else.

I could get away with it too, because who would believe that I had forced myself on someone. Or for that matter, that if I did, it was somehow criminal. I was a women. Women don't rape.

Personally, I didn't see it mattered. Most guys are just animals underneath. Rapists if you let them be. Abusers. Sexist misogynists who want to "put you in your place." So I put them in their place first.

I'd go to the Take Back the Night Marches, help out with any programs to deal with rape that my college had. Mainly because I enjoyed the irony. No one ever suspected that I was turning the tables on the men, not just helping my sisters who had already been victimized. Somehow I don't think that most of "my sisters" would have approved. Well, they are wimps anyway.

Once someone got very close to charging me, so I had my friend Pam Adler find some dirt on him and threaten to reveal some information that could put him in jail. She even suggested that I claim him as my attacker. So he dropped.

Sydney Green was a friend, too. She didn't know about parts of my life, but she knew I tended to approach men aggressively.

Well, then she got engaged. At a rehab center. Oh, yeah, she claimed it was on a cruise, but I know she was a junkie. I worked with her, and I saw her popping pills. She left almost dead, and came back engaged and sober. I hated the guy.

The night of the bachelorette party- well, Pam and I decided to show her that she could have a better time with any man, and that she needn't attach herself to one. Pam suggested that we use the male stripper. Said she's paid him so we could pass him around. I agreed, and we got him into the bedroom. then we brought Sydney in. She had fallen off the wagon a few weeks earlier, and was currently pretty wasted.

Pam whispered something something in the stripper's ear, and he said "no thanks, just the money you owe me, please." Angry, she picked up the letter-opener and swung it at him. I don't know if she intended to force him or not at that point, but I immediately saw this as a chance to show another man who's boss, and helped her to force him toward the bed and to restrain him. Sydney was a little too hopped up to think rationally, and followed my lead, and Pam, if she had been playing before, now decided to join in with us in earnest.

Pamela had been taunting the guy when I left. Telling him to shut up and get over it, no one would believe him, he was lucky, he got his money and a bonus, so shut up. I saw her unlock him and tell him to get dressed as she threw some money at him. I adjusted my clothes and walked out to the party, where the other women were playing some sort of stupid "truth or dare" game. A few were playing a drinking game as well.

Then Sydney came out and told everyone else to go home. After they left, Peter Smith ran out of the bedroom as fast as he could and out of the apartment.

As soon as it was just us three, Sydney broke down in front of us. She wanted to tell someone. We convinced her that it wouldn't help, that the stripper would get over it and that it would only make difficulty for her upcoming marriage if she came forward. She said that she couldn't keep it a secret from her fiance, and we nicely suggested that maybe she should dump him, then. But she eventually calmed down and we left, and she did, of course, marry him anyway.

So then Pam Adler gives me a call one night, in a panic, and says that we need to shut Sydney up. We decided to reason with her, but I bring a rope, just in case. One of my special ropes.

Well, Sydney won't listen to reason. she's the only one that can ID us, and she is going to betray us to that little bastard of a stripper, and so we kill her.

Well, long story short, I'm in prison now. And after discovering what my cellmate did, I administer a little retributive justice to her. No one believes her, and she is now totally under my control.

Hey, she lied a man into jail. I don't begrudge her that, per se, but it wasn't for anything but crass money. Being in jail for rape myself, I suddenly have a sympathy for that man that I never had before. In jail on a false charge, and as a result he gets raped and murdered in jail. So I am giving little Miss Miller a little bit of revenge in kind.

Not that I am attracted to women, mind you. But the look of fear on her little face is quite satisfying. Seeing her pay for what she did.

In therapy, I am not making progress, I guess. Not by their measurements. But I am making enormous progress from my own way of measuring.

I insisted on being given group therapy with the men. Finding enough women to make a group was too difficult, and I didn't want individual, and so they decided to let me join the group on a trial basis.

I almost got kicked off the first day, when some of the men ridiculed me, and I suggested that the therapist have them all tied up and give me an hour alone with them. I suppose in a less controlled environment, I would have been scared out of my wits by all of these muscly, brutish guys, any one of which could have beaten me up. But knowing that they weren't allowed to hurt me, I managed to threaten and attempt to intimidate every last one of them.

Some of them respect me. Others hate me. And some are just a little afraid of me. With their strength advantage neutralized, what do they have?

Well, that's my story.