My Best Friend's Exorcism(10)

“Good,” Gretchen said. “Because I’m freezing and I have sand in my underwear.”

“Do you think we’ll still be friends the next time it comes around?” Abby asked.

“I think we’ll be dead,” Gretchen said.

Abby did the math in her head and realized they’d be eighty-eight years old.

“People are going to live longer in the future,” she said. “We might still be alive.”

“But we won’t know how to set the clocks on our VCRs and we’ll be old and hate young people and vote Republican like my parents,” Gretchen said.

They had just rented The Breakfast Club, and turning into adults felt like the worst thing ever.

“We won’t wind up like them,” Abby said. “We don’t have to be boring.”

“If I stop being happy, will you kill me?” Gretchen asked.

“Totally,” Abby said.

“Seriously,” Gretchen said. “You’re the only reason I’m not crazy.”

They were quiet for a moment.

“Who said you’re not crazy?” Abby asked.

Gretchen hit her.

“Promise me you’ll always be my friend,” she said.

“DBNQ,” Abby replied.

It was their shorthand for “I love you.” Dearly But Not Queerly.

And they lay there on the freezing sand and felt the earth turn beneath their backs, and they shivered together as the wind blew off the water, and a frozen ball of ice passed by their planet, three million miles away in the cold distant darkness of deep space.





Party All the Time


“You guys want to freak the fuck out?” Margaret Middleton asked.

Blood-warm water slopped against the hull of the Boston Whaler. It had been quiet for almost an hour as the four girls drifted in the creek; Bob Marley played low on the boombox, their eyes closed, legs up, sun warm, heads nodding. They’d been waterskiing on Wadmalaw, but after Gretchen wiped out hard, Margaret cruised them into an inlet, cut the engine, dropped the anchor, and let them float. For an hour, the loudest sounds were the occasional spark of a lighter as someone lit a Merit Menthol or the ripe pop as someone cracked a lukewarm Busch. Underneath it all was the endless hiss of marsh grass rustling in the wind.

Abby faded up from her nap to see Glee rattling a beer out of the cooler. Glee made her “Want one?” face and Abby stretched out an arm, dried salt cracking on her skin, and took a slug of the warm watery wonderful Busch. It was their drink of choice, mostly because the old lady who ran Mitchell’s would sell them a case for forty dollars without asking for ID.

Abby was overflowing with a sense of belonging. Out here, there was nothing to worry about. They didn’t have to talk. They didn’t have to impress anyone. They could fall asleep in front of one another. The real world was far away.

The four of them were best friends, and while some of the kids called them bops, or mall maggots, or Debbie Debutantes, the four of them didn’t give a tiddly-fuck. Gretchen was number two in their class, and the other three were in the top ten. Honor roll, National Honor Society, volleyball, community outreach, perfect grades, and, as Hugh Horton once said with great reverence, their shit tasted like candy.

It didn’t come easy. They cared hard. They cared about their clothes, they cared about their hair, they cared about their makeup (Abby especially cared about her makeup), and they cared about their grades. Abby, Gretchen, Glee, and Margaret were going places.

Margaret was sitting in the driver’s seat, legs up on the hydroslide, blowing out big plumes of mentholated smoke, rich as shit, loaded with old Charleston money, American by birth, Southern by the grace of God. She was Maximum Margaret, a giant blond jock whose sprawling arms and legs took up half the boat. Everything about her was too much: her lips were too red, her hair was too blond, her nose was too crooked, her voice was too loud.

Glee yawned and stretched. The total opposite of Margaret, she was a tiny, tanned girl version of Michael J. Fox who still had to buy her shoes in the children’s department. In the summer her skin turned chestnut and her belly button darkened to black. Her hair was highlighted seven different shades of brown, and despite having a koala nose and sad puppy-dog eyes, she always attracted too much male attention because she’d developed early, and way out of proportion to her height. Glee was also scary smart, a baby yuppie down to the bone. Her little red Saab wasn’t from her daddy: she’d made the down payment with money she’d earned on the stock market. The only thing daddy did was put in her trades.

Gretchen lifted her head from where she was lying facedown on a towel in the prow and took a sip of her Busch. Gretchen: treasurer of the student vestry, founder of the Recycling Club, founder of the school’s Amnesty International chapter, and, if the bathroom walls were to believed, the hottest girl in tenth grade. Long, lean, lanky, and blond, she was a Laura Ashley princess in floral print dresses and Esprit tops—a stark contrast to Abby, who barely reached Gretchen’s shoulders and whose big hair and thick makeup made her look like she should be waiting tables in a truck-stop diner. Abby tried very hard not to think about the way she looked, and most days, especially days like this, she succeeded.

As they lit their cigarettes, as they opened their beers, as they came blinking back into the world, Margaret pulled a black plastic film canister out of her bag, held it up, and asked: