My Best Friend's Exorcism(39)

“Then tell me what’s happening,” Abby said.

Gretchen smeared her shirtsleeve across her face. It came away snotty.

“I’ve been having my period for two weeks,” she said. “I think I’m bleeding to death but my mom won’t listen. She buys me pads and I go through five or six a day.”

“You have to go to the doctor,” Abby said.

“I’ve been,” Gretchen said.

“A different doctor,” Abby said. “A real doctor. You could have a disease.”

Gretchen’s hollow laugh echoed in the Bunny.

“A disease,” she repeated. “It’s like a disease, sure. I caught it that night at Margaret’s.”

Abby felt her heart slow, her fists unclench. They were finally getting somewhere.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I’m not a virgin anymore,” Gretchen said.

The statement hung in the air between them. It wasn’t just that Gretchen had lied to her in front of chapel when she’d asked, but that they had promised not to do this without talking to each other; now Gretchen had crossed a threshold and left Abby behind with the little kids. On the heels of that thought came a more serious one. That night at Margaret’s. Gretchen hadn’t just lost her virginity. This was worse.

“Who was in the woods?” Abby asked.

Abby had read the stories in Sassy, she’d seen The Burning Bed, she and Gretchen had gone to The Accused. If this could happen to Gretchen . . . the thought couldn’t fit inside her head. Who would hurt Gretchen? Who would twist her and tear her up and then dump her in the woods like garbage?

“I can’t,” Gretchen said.

The pieces fit. These were the warning signs in the Cosmo features. And if Gretchen couldn’t say the name, then it was someone they knew.

“Who was it?” Abby asked.

Gretchen closed her eyes and dropped her chin to her chest. Abby reached out and rubbed her arm. Gretchen flinched. Faces from the yearbook flicked through Abby’s head.

“Who?” Abby asked again. “Tell me his name.”

“Every night,” Gretchen said. “Again and again. He sits on my chest and I can’t move. He watches me, and then he hurts me.”

“Who?” Abby asked.

“I can’t change clothes,” Gretchen said. “I have to stay covered. I have to sleep in my clothes and I can’t shower because when he sees my skin, he tears it. I can’t give him a way in. I have to keep him out. Do you understand?”

Abby was lost. Everything was coming too fast.

“If you tell me his name, we can go to the police,” she said.

“Every night . . . ,” Gretchen began, then she unbuttoned her left sleeve and rolled it up over her elbow. Three deep vertical slashes ran down her forearm, from her elbow to her wrist. Abby had heard that this was the right way to slit your wrist if you wanted to kill yourself: up and down, not side to side.

She grabbed Gretchen’s hand: her skin was ice cold. Abby turned Gretchen’s arm backward and forward, then lifted it and looked close. These weren’t cuts, they were gouges. Thick, black scabs scaled her skin, surrounded by yellow bruises. Something had dug in and torn out three trenches of flesh.

“What did you do?” Abby asked.

“I can make him stop,” Gretchen said. “But I don’t want to.”

“Why?”

“Because what comes next is worse,” Gretchen said, then she pulled her arm away and rolled down her sleeve.

“We need to call the police,” Abby said.

“It was in the woods,” Gretchen said. “He was waiting for me. It was dark and he was so much bigger . . . he was bigger than a person should be . . .”

So it was true. Someone had been in the woods and attacked Gretchen, and now she was hurting herself again and again as she relived the trauma, punishing herself just like Seventeen said. It all made so much sense that, insanely, Abby felt proud for having figured it out.

“We have to tell someone,” she said.

Gretchen yawned, a big jaw-cracker, and shook her head.

“No one will believe me,” she said.

“They’ll believe both of us,” Abby said.

Gretchen leaned back against the window, her eyelids heavy. She had delivered her secret to Abby, and now she was drained.

“I know how to stop it,” Gretchen said, eyelids drooping. “But if it stops, that’s when it starts. If it stops, you’ll never see me again.”

“I can fix this,” Abby said. “I can make it stop. Do you trust me?”

Gretchen nodded, eyes closed.

“I’m so tired,” she mumbled. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”

“I’ll make it stop,” Abby said. “And when it’s over, I promise, things will go back to the way they were, okay?”

Gretchen was silent for a long time.

“Okay,” she finally said. Then, in a little girl’s voice: “I want to go home.”

Abby turned the Bunny around and headed back over the bridge. They weren’t skipping school; she was taking a sick friend home. She could tell Mrs. Lang what had happened and together they could figure out what to do. This was bad, but nothing was ruined.