My Best Friend's Exorcism(35)

It wasn’t that Abby didn’t try. She had three classes with Gretchen: Intro to Programming, U.S. History, and Ethics. She saw her at lunch. She saw her at fourth-period break. And every time, she made sure she told a funny story about a lame customer at TCBY or about something ridiculous that Hunter Prioleaux said in class. Anything to distract Gretchen, to get her mind off home, to make her laugh.

Nothing worked.

At lunch she tried to convince Glee and Margaret to sit with them.

“We’re not talking to Gretchen,” Margaret said.

“Anymore or right now?” Abby asked.

Margaret rested her shoulder blades against the wall as Glee rooted around inside her locker, hunting for her lunch.

“She’s spastic,” Margaret said. “You know that, right? She’s gone fucking schizo.”

Abby was shaking her head before Margaret even finished.

“There’s something wrong with her,” she said. “Like, for real. We can’t ditch her now.”

“We aren’t ditching her,” Margaret said. “She ditched us.”

Margaret talked in a way that made Abby feel helpless. Everything was the way Margaret said it was, and if you didn’t agree you were a moron. Arguing was useless.

“But we’re her friends,” Abby said.

“We’re taking a Gretchen vacation,” Margaret said. “So you can hang with us or hang with her. Come on if you’re coming.”

Then she pushed herself off the lockers and headed toward the Lawn.

Abby turned to Glee, who was pulling out her Tupperware lunchbox.

“She’s your friend, too,” Abby said.

“Sophomore year is the most important one on your transcript,” Glee said. “So that’s cool if you want to stick with Gretchen, but I’m staying out of it. I’ve got too much on my plate.”

She closed her locker and spun the combination.

“You’re already in it,” Abby said.

“Not if I don’t want to be,” Glee said, and then she followed Margaret.

Abby couldn’t entirely blame them. It was getting harder and harder to be seen with Gretchen. At first she’d just recycled the same calf-length gray skirt that she wore too often anyways because some senior once said it made her look hot. Then Abby noticed that Gretchen wasn’t wearing makeup anymore. Her nails were always dirty and she was chewing them again.

Plus, she was starting to smell. This was no simple whiff of bad breath; it was a constant sour stink, like the boys after PE. Every morning Abby wanted to crack her window, but they had a rule: the Bunny’s windows stayed up on school days. Otherwise, she’d have to respray her hair when they got to Albemarle.

“Did you step in something?” Abby asked one morning, trying to drop a hint.

Gretchen didn’t answer.

“Can you check your shoes?” Abby said.

Gretchen was silent. It had gotten to the point where Abby wondered if she spoke at a pitch Gretchen couldn’t hear. Some mornings Gretchen would pull out her daybook and scribble in it, not saying a word all the way to school. Other mornings she would pull it out and let it sit unopened in her lap. This morning was a scribbling day, and Abby was grateful to pull onto the old bridge so she could focus on something besides the sound of Gretchen scratching away in her book.

There were no more 11:06 phone calls because Gretchen never called anymore. Abby still called Gretchen’s house, but Gretchen was always taking a nap or doing homework. Mrs. Lang would keep Abby on the phone, asking if Gretchen was seeing someone, or if she’d said she was feeling sick, or if she’d seemed a little funny recently. She burbled and chirped, circling around the question she couldn’t bring herself to ask: What was wrong with her daughter? Abby wanted to ask the same thing: What were they doing to Gretchen? After the doctor, after the book club, Abby had a good idea that whatever was making Gretchen lose her mind was happening at home, behind closed doors. She was too polite to hang up on Mrs. Lang, so she faked conversation; when that got too hard, she stopped calling altogether.

PSATs were coming up, and Kaplan books started appearing underneath everyone’s arms. Glee had already taken them once the year before, and Margaret had a tutor; normally, Abby would be studying with Gretchen, but now she sat alone in her room every night, burying herself in test prep, unable to focus on the practice questions; she was trying to think of how to get through to Gretchen.

Gretchen was still wearing the same skirt, and by the second week she had started recycling her blouse, too. It was a plaid Esprit top in electric blue, belted at the waist. After a few days, she stopped wearing the belt, which made it look like a shapeless sack. Worst of all, her skin started breaking out. Tiny inflamed pimples appeared all around her nose.

One morning while they were waiting at the stoplight on the crosstown, the minor-key piano opening of “Against All Odds” started playing on 95SX. They had a rule that whenever Phil Collins came on the radio, they had to stop everything and sing along. This morning, Abby was ready.





“Cow Chicken is eating all my hay,” Abby sang to Gretchen, replacing the lyrics with rhyming nonsense. This never failed to crack Gretchen up. “And she’s pecking at my face/I can’t take this pecking anymore . . . can you . . . oooOOO/She’s the only one/Who ever pecks me at all.”