My Best Friend's Exorcism(22)

“He’s done acid before,” Gretchen said. “And he told me that the thing in my bathtub was totally normal. A lot of people have had that happen, so I’m not Syd Barrett.”

Abby was gripping the steering wheel so hard her fingers ached.

“I told you it was fine,” she said, smiling.

Gretchen leaned forward, rifled through Abby’s tapes, and popped in their awesome summer mix. By the time they roared into the student parking lot in a cloud of white dust, they were both screaming along with Bonnie Tyler, having Total Eclipses of the Heart. Abby cruised into an empty space at the far end, put the Dust Bunny in park, and yanked the emergency brake. They were facing the sports fields that led to the headmaster’s house, where five of the stray dogs that made their home in the marsh were chasing one another through the mist.

“Ready for AA?” Abby asked Gretchen.

Gretchen flinched, then turned to check the backseat.

“I’m having flashbacks,” Gretchen said.

“What?” Abby said.

“Someone keeps touching the back of my neck,” Gretchen said. “It kept me up all night.”

“Wowzers,” Abby said. “You have turned into Syd Barrett.”

Gretchen flipped her the bird.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go to AA.”

They got out of the Dust Bunny and headed into school. On the way, Abby brushed her hand against the back of Gretchen’s neck and Gretchen jumped.

“Stop,” she said. “You wouldn’t like it if I did it to you.”

Albemarle Academy sat at the end of Albemarle Pointe on the Ashley River, bordered by marsh on two sides and by the Crescent subdivision on the third. Albemarle was expensive and intensive, and everyone who went there thought they were better than everyone else in Charleston.

“Uh-oh,” Gretchen said.

She nodded ahead and Abby looked as they crossed Albemarle Road, which separated the student parking lot and the sports fields from the school buildings. That enormous wall of meat, Coach Toole, was crossing in the opposite direction, wearing obscenely tight weightlifting pants.

“Ladies,” he said, nodding as he passed.

“Coach,” Gretchen said, swinging her bookbag around and reaching inside. “You want some nuts? My mom gave me a bag.”

“No, thanks,” he said, still walking. “I’ve got my own nuts.”

The two girls looked at each other, incredulous, and then ran away laughing, racing up the sidewalk by the drop-off lanes where Trey Sumter, already behind on his homework this early in the year, was sitting on the bench by the flagpole, begging them as they passed. “Did y’all do those earth science questions?”

“Igneous rock, Trey,” Gretchen said. “It’s always igneous rock.”

Then Abby and Gretchen turned the corner into the breezeway, with the front office on one side and the glass doors leading into the upper school hallway on the other, the vast green Lawn spread out before them, the bell tower rising on the other side, and they were in the thick of it, surrounded by the student body of Albemarle Academy.

“Oh, God, spare me,” Gretchen said. “We’re all so pathetic.”

They were the children of doctors and lawyers and bank presidents, and their parents owned boats and horses, plantations in the country and beach houses on Seabrook, and they lived in gracious homes in Mt. Pleasant or in historic houses downtown. And every single one of them was exactly the same.

The Albemarle student handbook was the Bible, and the dress code was clear: you dressed like your parents. The kids saved their big hair, big colors, and big shoulderpads for the weekends. During the week the dress code was all New England prep academy. The girls dressed like “young ladies,” the boys like “young gentlemen” and if you didn’t know what that meant, then you didn’t belong at Albemarle.





The boys had it the worst. They shopped at M. Dumas, the shabby chic store on King Street where their moms picked one look for them in seventh grade, and they stuck with it for the rest of their lives: khakis, long-sleeved Polo shirts in winter, short-sleeved Izod shirts in spring. After college they added a navy sportscoat, a seersucker suit, and an array of “fun” ties to wear to their first jobs at local law firms or their fathers’ banks.

The girls tried. Occasionally, a rebel like Jocelyn Zuckerman showed up wearing cornrows, which, although not explicitly banned by the dress code, were considered outrageous enough to get her sent home. But for the most part they kept their self-expression inside the dress code through elaborate workarounds. White turtlenecks were for girls who wanted to draw attention to their chests without showing forbidden cleavage. Girls who thought they had good butts wore stirrup pants that clung to their assets. Subdued animal prints (leopard, tiger, zebra) were popular with girls who were trying to project unique personalities. But no matter how hard they tried, they all still looked the same.

Because it wasn’t just their clothes. Albemarle taught grades one through twelve but there were only seventy-two students in Abby’s class, and most of them had been going to Albemarle together since first grade. They had carpooled to Brownies together, and gone to Cotillion together, and their mothers belonged to the Hibernian Society together, and their dads did business and went dove hunting together.

It was a school where everyone complained about the work load, but ragged on public schools for being “too easy.” Where