My Best Friend's Exorcism(13)

“Is that it?” Gretchen asked.

“No, I decided to bring you guys some paper to chew on,” Margaret said. “Doy.”

Glee reached out to poke her tab, but pulled her finger back before she made contact. They all knew you could absorb acid through your skin. There should have been more of a ceremony; they should have showered first or eaten something. Maybe they shouldn’t have been out in the sun all day drinking so much beer. They were doing this all wrong. Abby could feel everyone losing their nerve, herself included, so just as Gretchen was taking a breath to make an excuse, Abby grabbed her tab and popped it in her mouth.

“What’s it taste like?” Gretchen asked.

“Nuttin’ honey,” Abby said.

Margaret took hers, and so did Glee. Then, finally, Gretchen.

“Do we chew it?” she lisped, trying not to move her tongue.

“Let it dissolve,” Margaret lisped back.

“How long?” Gretchen asked.

“Chill, buttmunch,” Margaret lisped around her paralyzed tongue.

Abby looked out at the bright orange sunset burning itself off over the marsh and felt something final: she’d taken acid. It was irreversibly in her system. No matter what happened now she had to ride this out. The sunset glowed and throbbed on the horizon, and Abby wondered if it would look so vivid if she hadn’t just dropped acid. Reflexively she swallowed the little bit of paper, and that was that: she’d done something that couldn’t be undone, crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed. She was terrified.

“Is anyone hearing anything?” Glee asked.

“It takes hours to kick in, retard,” Margaret said.

“Oh,” Glee said. “So you normally have a pig nose?”

“Don’t be mean,” Gretchen said. “I don’t want to have a bad trip. I really don’t.”

“Do y’all remember Mrs. Graves in sixth grade?” Glee asked. “With the Mickey Mouse stickers?”

“That was so bone,” Margaret said. “Y’all got that, right? Her lecture about how, at Halloween, Satan worshippers drive around giving little kids stickers with Mickey Mouse on them, and when the kids lick the stickers they’re coated in LSD and they have bad trips and kill their parents.”

Gretchen covered Margaret’s mouth with both hands.

“Stop . . . talking . . . ,” she said.

So they laid around the backyard as it got dark, smoking cigarettes, talking about nice things, like what was up with Maximilian Buskirk’s weird butt and that year’s volleyball schedule, and Glee told them about some new kind of VD she’d read about that Lanie Ott almost definitely had, and they discussed whether they should get Coach Greene an Epilady for her upper lip, and if Father Morgan was Thorn Birds hot, regular hot, or merely teacher hot. And the whole time, all of them were secretly trying to see if their smoke was turning into dragons or if the trees were dancing. None of them wanted to be the last one to hallucinate.

Eventually, they lapsed into a comfortable silence, with only Margaret humming some song she’d heard on the radio while she cracked her toe knuckles.

“Let’s go look at the fireflies,” Gretchen said.

“Cool,” Abby said, pushing herself up off the grass.

“Oh my God,” Margaret said. “You guys are so queer.”

They ran through the yard and into the long grass in the field between the house and the woods, watching the green lightning bugs hover, butts glowing, as the air turned lavender the way it does when it gets dark in the country. Gretchen ran over to Abby.

“Spin me around,” she said.

Abby grabbed her hands and they spun, heads tipped back, trying to make their trip happen. But when they fell into the grass, they weren’t tripping, just dizzy.

“I don’t want to see Margaret pinch off firefly butts,” Gretchen said. “We should buy the plot next door and turn it into a nature preserve so no one else can ruin the creek.”

“We totally should,” Abby said.

“Look. Stars,” Gretchen said, pointing at the first ones in the dark blue sky. “You have to promise not to ditch me.”

“Stick with me,” Abby said. “I’ll totally be your lysergic sherpa. Wherever you go, I’m there.”

They held hands in the grass. The two of them had never been shy about touching, even though in fifth grade Hunter Prioleaux had called them homos, but that was because no one had ever loved Hunter Prioleaux.

“I need to tell you—” Gretchen started to say.

Margaret loomed up out of the dark, pinched-off firefly butts smeared into two glowing lines underneath her eyes.

“Let’s go in,” she said. “The acid’s coming up!”





The Number of the Beast


Four hours later, Abby watched the digits on the clock radio flip from 11:59 to 12:00, and the acid was definitely not coming up. Spread out across Margaret’s massive bedroom, they weren’t tripping. They were bored.

“I think I see tracers!” Abby said, twinkling her fingers optimistically.

“You’re not seeing tracers,” Margaret sighed. “For the nine millionth time.”

Abby shrugged and went back to flipping through Margaret’s shoebox of tapes, trying to find something to play.