My Best Friend's Exorcism(19)

“Are you okay?” Abby asked.

“I’m in so much trouble,” Gretchen said.

Abby looked at the digital clock glued to her dashboard: 10:49. Gretchen’s parents were usually home from church by 11:30 these days. There was plenty of time for her to hose off her shoes, get inside, clean herself up, and get her head together but she needed to start moving. Instead, she sat there staring out the windshield. She needed a pep talk.

“I know you’re seriously freaked out,” Abby said. “But I promise you that things are not as bad as they seem. Nothing you’re feeling right now is permanent. But you have to get inside and get cleaned up and get normal or your parents are going to kill you.”

She leaned over and gave Gretchen a hug.

“Eye of the Tiger,” Abby said.

Gretchen looked down at the gearshift and nodded. Then she nodded again, more definitely. “Okay,” she said. “Eye of the Tiger.”

She pushed open the door with her shoulder, then heaved herself up out of the car, slamming the door behind her and stumbling up the driveway to her house. Abby hoped she remembered to leave her shoes outside.

Gretchen was cold. Gretchen was tired. Gretchen had spent all night alone in the woods. They’d hang out later that night, Abby told herself. They’d rent a movie or something. Nothing was wrong here. Don’t worry. Be happy.



The Old Village was in Abby’s rearview mirror as she crossed back over Coleman Boulevard and headed up Rifle Range Road, driving toward a neighborhood where no one ever told you to repaint your trim. In Abby’s neighborhood, telling someone their trim looked a little orange could get you shot.

She passed the Kangaroo gas station across the street from the guy who sold boiled peanuts and garden statuary out of a shack surrounded by hundreds of concrete birdbaths. Then she passed the Ebenezer Mount Zion A.M.E. church, which marked the boundary of Harborgate Shores, a bland cookie-cutter subdivision that ran for miles; after that, the houses got smaller and the yards were mostly full of boat trailers and dirt. Abby passed a thicket of brick ranchers with fake colonial columns holding up vestigial front porches, then it was all roadside shacks, tin-roofed cinderblock bunkers, and, finally, Abby’s driveway.

She pulled up in front of her sad, sagging house, with its broken spine and huffing window-unit air conditioners and the army of busted lawn mowers sprouting from the weeds, which were the only things growing in their yard. Despite owning close to three hundred lawn mowers, Abby’s dad never cut the grass.

When Abby entered Gretchen’s house, it was like opening the pressurized airlock of a gleaming spaceship and walking into a sterile environment. When she entered her own house, it was like forcing open the waterlogged door of a hillbilly’s shack and walking into a moldy cave. Boxes were still piled along the walls and pictures were stacked down the hall because even four years after the move from the larger Creekside house, Abby’s mom still hadn’t unpacked.

Mr. Lang sat on the worn couch, shirt off, hairless belly resting in his lap, holding a Styrofoam cereal bowl, his feet resting on their scratched-up coffee table. He had the TV on.

“Hey, Dad,” Abby said, crossing the living room and kissing him on the cheek.

His eyes didn’t move from the screen.

“Mm,” he said.

“What’re you watching?” Abby asked.

“Gobots,” he said.

Abby stood to the side and watched mopeds transform into grinning robots, and fighter jets shoot lasers out of their tires. She waited for a conversation to materialize. It didn’t.

“What’re you doing today?” she asked.

“Fixing mowers,” he said.

“I’ve got TCBY,” Abby said. “I might go over to Gretchen’s after. What time’s Mom home?”

“Late,” he said.

“You want me to get you a real bowl?” she tried.

“Mm,” he shrugged.

Based on past experience, this was about all she could expect from him, so Abby headed into the kitchen, grabbed a green apple, and walked quickly through the drab house to her bedroom. She opened and closed her door as fast as possible, so that none of the poison gas that made her parents so depressing could follow her.

No one was allowed inside Abby’s room. It belonged to a different house, one she’d built herself, with her own money and hard work. Diagonal pink and silver wallpaper lined the walls, and a carpet of black and white circles with a large red triangle cutting across them covered the floor. There was a JC Penney two-deck stereo sitting on a milk crate she’d draped in silver shimmer fabric, the touch-tone Mickey Mouse phone she’d gotten one Christmas sat next to her bed, and her 19-inch Sampo color TV sat on a glass coffee table.





A shiny pink and black vanity stood against one wall. Its round mirror bordered with layer upon layer of snapshots: Gretchen in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin that time she had mono, Gretchen and Glee at the beach looking hot in their neon green and black bikinis, Margaret catching air on the hydroslide, the four of them posed for a photo at the ninth-grade semiformal, Gretchen and Abby with their cornrows in Jamaica.

Abby’s bed was a high, soft nest, held together on three sides by curly white metal railings that rattled whenever she got in. It was piled deep with comforters and blankets, six huge pink pillows, and a mound of her old stuffed animals: Geoffrey the Giraffe, Cabbage Head, Wrinkles the Pound Puppy, Hugga Bear, Sparks, and Fluffy the Fluppy Puppy. She knew it was childish, but what was she going to do? She couldn’t stand to see the hurt in their beady plastic eyes if she put them in the trash.