My Best Friend's Exorcism(31)

“Sure,” Abby said. “Can I go upstairs?”

He considered her for a minute, trying to peer through Abby’s skull with his lawyer eyes, then stepped aside. “Go on,” he said. “I have to get the cat.”

“What cat?” she asked, reaching for the door handle.

Mr. Lang started toward the back of the house.

“There’s a dead cat on the lower level,” he said.

“Whose is it?” Abby asked.

“We’ve got owls,” he said. “They’ve been carrying off cats all week. Just snatching them up. It’s a mess.”

“Abby!” Gretchen said, exploding out of house. Talking and noise and laughter poured through the open door; Gretchen grabbed Abby’s arm and pulled her inside. “Stop bothering my friend,” she snapped at her dad.

The house was bright white and filled with the smell of flowers and the sound of happy women in the living room.

“Yoo-hoo!” Mrs. Lang called. “Is that Abby Rivers?”

Gretchen took the white carpeted stairs two at a time, pulling Abby behind her, turning back over her shoulder to shake her head. Abby paused at the top of the stairs and leaned over the rail.

“Hi, Mrs. Lang!” she called, and then she was in Gretchen’s room and Gretchen was closing the door. The air-conditioning

was on subzero, so Abby pulled her sleeves down over her hands.

“Did you get it?” Gretchen asked, plucking at Abby’s bookbag.

Abby opened her bag and produced the beige Trimline phone she’d bought from First Baptist Mission for eleven dollars. There was a scuff mark on one end, and it was spattered with white paint. Gretchen snatched it, bounced over her twin beds, and crouched on the carpet to plug it into the jack behind her headboard. Then she lifted the receiver and grinned.

“Dial tone!” she whispered.





She unplugged the cord, wrapped it around the phone, and opened her closet. Max stood up stiffly and crawled out from underneath Gretchen’s desk, yawning and stretching. While Gretchen buried the phone in her closet, the dog trotted over and stuck his cold nose into Abby’s hand.

When Gretchen emerged, Abby noticed the dark circles under her eyes and that her skin was cloudy. Her jaw was tight and she was jumpy, but she didn’t seem quite as exhausted as before.

“Come on,” Gretchen said, heading into her bathroom. “I’m doing my hair.”

Gretchen stood at the counter while Abby lowered herself into the empty bathtub and stretched out. She liked sitting in Gretchen’s tub. It was her thing. Max settled himself in the doorway. He never came into the bathroom because he was scared of floor tiles.

“They took away my phone privileges,” Gretchen said, focusing on her reflection, lifting a long section of hair straight up. “But I still need to call Andy.”

“You need to call Margaret,” Abby said, her feet propped against the wall.

Gretchen lifted the crimping iron. “I’m not apologizing. Everything I said was true, and Margaret knows it. That’s why she’s mad.”

“Wallace totally deserves to be barfed on,” Abby said. “But he is her boyfriend.”

Gretchen squeezed the crimping iron and held it for five seconds. The bathroom filled with the smell of hot hair.

“Margaret’s so far up his butt, she’s lost her identity,” Gretchen complained.

“What’re you doing to your hair?” Abby asked.

“Andy told me I should embrace change.”

A muffled burst of laughter rose through the floor. Abby wished she could go downstairs. She wanted to see the book club. She wanted to be around their jokes and their gossip. She wanted to see if Mrs. Lang had made those miniature quiches.

“I hope we still laugh like that when we’re their age,” Abby said.

“They’re drunk,” Gretchen said. “I’d rather die than turn into them.”

More laughter filtered through the floor. At the sound, Gretchen tightened her lips; she released the crimping iron with a clack, sniffed her warm length of hair, and then moved on to the next section.

“Wallace is lame,” Abby said. “But you need to be diplomatic if we’re all going to stay friends.”

Gretchen squeezed the crimping iron so hard her knuckles turned white.

“Maybe I don’t want to be friends,” she said.

Abby couldn’t even process this. How do you decide you don’t want to be friends anymore? How do you toss aside people you’ve known for years?

“But they’re our friends,” she said.

It was the best she could do.

“Listen to them,” Gretchen spat as more laughter shook the floor. “They’re giving me a headache. You should have heard my mom going on about her ‘problem daughter.’ How I’m ‘troubled’ and how she’s ‘crucified on the cross of my adolescence.’ They’re such hypocrites, it makes me sick.”

She put down the crimping iron and turned her head from side to side in the mirror.

“Does this look hot? Or bizarre?”

“I liked your hair the way it was,” Abby said.

She used the toe of her sneaker to raise and lower the lever that opened and closed the tub drain. Gretchen lifted another section of hair and kept crimping. Abby caught a whiff of that sour smell again.