My Best Friend's Exorcism(6)

Actually, Abby was thrilled. She’d never totally believed the whole Witness Protection Program story anyway because, like her mom said, if something seemed too good to be true then it probably was. And if Gretchen’s parents treated her like a baby, that made Abby the cool one. Gretchen needed her if she was ever going to see a PG movie or keep up with Falcon Crest, so they’d always have to be friends. But Abby also knew that Gretchen might stop being her friend now that Abby knew a secret about her, so she decided to give her a secret back.

“You want to see something gross?” she asked.

Tears splatted onto the couch as Gretchen shook her head.

“I mean really gross,” Abby explained.

Gretchen kept crying, clenching her hands until her knuckles turned white. So Abby got a flashlight out of the kitchen drawer, pulled Gretchen off the sofa, and forced her upstairs into her parents’ bedroom, listening for their car pulling into the driveway the entire time.

“We shouldn’t be in here,” Gretchen said in the dark.

“Shhhh,” Abby said, leading her past the trunk at the foot of the bed and into her dad’s closet. Inside, behind his pants, there was a suitcase. Inside the suitcase was a black plastic bag, and inside the black plastic bag was a big cardboard box containing a videotape. Abby switched on the flashlight and shone it on the VHS box.

“Bad Mama Jama,” she said. “My mom doesn’t know he has it.”

Gretchen wiped her nose on her sleeve and took the box from Abby with both hands. On the front cover, an extremely large black woman was bent over, dressed in nothing but a string bikini, spreading her fanny wide open. She was looking back over her shoulder, wearing orange lipstick that matched her nail polish, smiling like she was thrilled two little girls were looking up her butt. The caption under the photo read: “Mama’s got supper in the oven!”

“Ew!” Gretchen squealed, throwing the tape at Abby.

“I don’t want it!” Abby shouted, throwing it back at her.

“It touched me!” Gretchen said.

Abby wrestled her onto the bed and straddled Gretchen’s squirming body, rubbing the tape all over her hair.

“Ew! Ew! Ew!” Gretchen screamed. “I’m going to die!”

“You’re going to get pregnant!” Abby said.

That was the moment. When Gretchen stopped lying to Abby about the Witness Protection Program, when Abby showed Gretchen her dad’s secret sex fetish for large black women, when Abby wrestled with Gretchen on her parents’ bed. Starting that night, they were best friends.



Everything happened over the next six years. Nothing happened over the next six years. In fifth grade they had separate homerooms, but over lunch Abby told Gretchen everything that had happened on Remington Steele and The Facts of Life. Gretchen wanted Mrs. Garrett to be her mom, Abby thought Blair was usually right about everything, and they both wanted to grow up to run their own private detective agency where Pierce Brosnan had to do whatever they said.

Gretchen’s mom got a speeding ticket with the girls in the car and said “Shit” out loud. To bribe them into not telling Mr. Lang, she took them to the Swatch store downtown and bought them brand new Swatch watches. Abby got a Jelly and used her own money to get one green and one pink Swatch guard that she twisted together; Gretchen got a Tennis Stripe and matching green and pink Swatch guards. After playing outside, they’d sniff each other’s watch bands and try to figure out what they smelled like. Abby said hers smelled like honeysuckle and cinnamon and Gretchen’s smelled like hibiscus and rose, but Gretchen said they both just smelled like sweat.

Gretchen slept over six times at Abby’s house in Creekside before Abby was finally allowed to spend the night at Gretchen’s house in the Old Village, the la-di-da part of Mt. Pleasant where all the houses were dignified and either overlooked the water or had enormous yards, and if anyone saw a black person walking down the street who wasn’t Mr. Little, they would pull their Volvo over and ask if he was lost.

Abby loved going to Gretchen’s. The Langs’ house sat on Pierates Cruze, a dirt road shaped like a horseshoe where the house numbers went in the wrong order and the street name was spelled wrong because rich people could do whatever they wanted. Their house was number eight. It was an enormous gray cube that looked out over Charleston harbor through a back wall that was a two-story high window made of a single sheet of glass. Inside, it was as sterile as an operating theater, all hard right angles, sheer surfaces, gleaming steel, and glass that was polished twice a day. It was the only house in the Old Village that looked like it was built in the twentieth century.

The Langs had a dock where Abby and Gretchen swam (as long as they wore tennis shoes so they wouldn’t cut their feet on oysters). Mrs. Lang cleaned Gretchen’s room every other week and threw out anything she didn’t think her daughter needed. One of her rules was that Gretchen could have only six magazines and five books at a time. “Once you’ve finish reading it, you’ve finished needing it” was her motto.

So Abby got all the books that Gretchen bought at B. Dalton’s with her seemingly unlimited allowance. Forever . . . by Judy Blume,

which they knew was all about them (except for the gross parts at the end). Jacob Have I Loved (secretly Abby believed that Gretchen was Caroline and she was Louise). Z for Zachariah (which gave Gretchen nuclear war nightmares), and the ones they had to sneak into the Langs’ house hidden in the bottom of Abby’s bookbag, all of them by V. C. Andrews: Flowers in the Attic, Petals in the Wind, If There Be Thorns, and, most scandalous of them all, My Sweet Audrina, with its endless parade of sexual perversion.