My Best Friend's Exorcism(52)

“So Jesus expels the demons and puts them in a bunch of nearby pigs,” he says. “And the pigs run off a cliff and die and the man is cured. He’s free. But everyone in the village is upset and they ask Jesus to leave. You see?”

“Poor pigs,” Abby said.

“Poor pigs,” Father Morgan agreed. “But do you see the bigger point?”

“That no one ever thanks you for trying to save them?” Abby said.

“That the people in that village needed the Gadarene madman to be sick,” Father Morgan said. “That way they could project all their problems onto him. They blamed him for everything: too much rain, too little rain, their kids staying out past curfew, cows dying. As long as he was sick, they could point to someone who wasn’t them and say, ‘That’s his fault. He’s possessed by Satan.’ And when Jesus cured him, they didn’t know what to do. They were at a loss.”

Abby was not following this logic.

“You think there isn’t anything wrong with Gretchen,” she said.

“I’m saying maybe you need something to be wrong with Gretchen,” Father Morgan said. “Sometimes the hardest thing for us is when the sick person gets better.”

“Why?” Abby asked.

“Because then we have to deal with ourselves,” he said, looking at her meaningfully and letting his words sink in.

A rap at the door broke the mood. Father Morgan put his hands on his knees and pushed himself up and opened the door. Gretchen stood there.

“Hi, Father M,” she said, smiling.

“Come on in,” he said. “I was just wrapping up with Abby.”

“What are you doing here?” Abby asked, staring at Gretchen. Standing behind her was Glee.

“I’m in vestry,” Gretchen said. “And Glee wants to join. What are you doing here?”

Before Abby could answer, Father Morgan answered for her.

“She’s still worried about you,” he said. “She just wanted to check in with me.”

Gretchen stepped into the room.

“I feel great,” she said, but her voice was too bright and hard.

“Now,” Father Morgan said, “if I recall correctly, you two shouldn’t be spending time together. So Abby, why don’t you skedaddle.”

As Abby got up to go, she eased past Gretchen in the door, and Gretchen made eye contact and smiled.

“I’d love to have been a fly on the wall,” she said. “I can’t imagine what you must be saying about me.”





The next day, the exorcist arrived.





Missionary Man


“When you’re worried and stressed out, when you feel like everyone hates you and your parents just don’t understand. When the world keeps coming at you and pushing you down and down, you’ll finally hear a still, small voice inside your head. No, it doesn’t mean you’re ready for the funny farm. That voice is God, and he’s speaking to you, and he’s saying, ‘Dude, I’ve got this.’”

Then the enormous young man lying shirtless on the stage floor gritted his teeth while his musclebound brother brought down a sledgehammer and smashed the cinderblock resting on his abs. It exploded into gray powder, and the football players in the audience cheered ironically.

“Praise God!” the shirtless guy shouted, leaping to his feet. “Sometimes God lets you hit rock bottom to show you that he is the rock at the bottom!”

Everyone in the auditorium hooted and cheered. Abby couldn’t tell if the five guys onstage understood that they were being laughed at, or if they thought they were being laughed with. She sunk down lower in her seat. She just wanted assembly to be over.

The Lemon Brothers Faith and Fitness Show was the funniest thing ever to hit Albemarle Academy. Five enormous meat potatoes strutted across the plastic-covered stage, popping their biceps, striking poses, and praising God. In the audience, the utter insanity of it all was blowing everyone’s minds.

Once a month, Wednesday assembly put on a barn-burner. One week it was a screening of “Black Ice, White Lines,” about a bunch of high school seniors who did cocaine at parties (“flying high on the Devil’s dust,” the narrator intoned) and then drove home and hit a patch of black ice that sent them straight to hell.

There was the day the assistant football coach from the Citadel came and described in vivid detail the Passion of Christ, lingering over every wound in nauseating technical detail. There was a kid with no arms who played trumpet with his feet. But this? This was something truly special. Throughout the entire student body, not a single pair of pants was dry.

Elijah, the second-youngest brother, took center stage.

“Sometimes,” he said, “when I’m shifting steel and sweating blood and I don’t think I’m going to make the clean and jerk, or when I’m stuck on the hang and can’t get the snatch, suddenly I’ll feel lighter, like someone has taken my load. And that’s when I look up and I say, ‘That was you, God. Thank you! Thank you for taking my load!’”

People were laughing so hard, they thought they’d never return to normal. Father Morgan sat in the front row, looking up at the massive bodybuilders, all gleaming and glistening in the spotlights, with his mouth hanging open in awe. Major looked unreadable. The Lemon Brothers seemed to think the laughter meant they were on the right track.