My Best Friend's Exorcism(60)

Dr. Richards kept talking, full of macabre observations and corny jokes. When a cadaver’s hand slipped off a table and dropped into his pocket, he mugged a startled reaction.

“Get out of there,” he said, chuckling, and he plucked out the dead hand by its hairy wrist and dropping it back on the table. Everyone laughed too hard as he said, “I think he was going for my wallet.”

Dr. Richards was eager to give the students his best stories: a balloon of cocaine found inside a stomach cavity, a donor whose feet were mysteriously crossed every morning when they opened the lab, a donor who was the class valedictorian’s long-lost aunt. Abby saw Gretchen and Glee standing behind Father Morgan on the other side of the circle, whispering to each other. Before she could start to feel left out, Dr. Richards changed the subject.

“And this,” he said, leading them to the wooden shelves in the back of the room, “this is our little cabinet of curiosities.”

It was exactly as Wallace had advertised. Floating inside jars of yellow pickle juice were a disembodied breast, a two-headed baby with its sternum laid open so they could see its bifurcated spinal column, a tongue distended by a tumor the size of a baseball, a severed hand with six fingers.

“Hey, Abby,” Hunter Prioleaux said over her shoulder, “you dropped your lunch.”

Abby looked down and nearly tripped over a white plastic ten-gallon bucket. It was sitting on the floor and overflowing with gray fetuses. They were pressed from the same mold: skin smooth, eyes closed, mouths open, tiny hands bunched into fists. Piled in the bucket without rhyme or reason, they looked like hairless kittens, heavy and sleek.

Abby swore she wouldn’t be the first one to go out to the hall. Her vision swam and blurred around the edges. She looked up and locked eyes with Gretchen. They stared at each other for a second and then Gretchen smiled, and though Abby thought the smile looked mean, she instinctively smiled back. She couldn’t help it. Gretchen stopped smiling and whispered something in Glee’s ear and the two of them giggled. Abby flicked her eyes away. All she could think was, Why on the floor? Couldn’t they at least put them on a table?

On the drive back to school, Abby could still smell pickles clinging to her clothes. In front of her, Dereck White and Nikki Bull continued talking about some kid named Jonathan Cantero who’d stabbed his mom to death in Tampa. Abby couldn’t stop seeing their muscles moving beneath their skin as they talked. She imagined what their mouths would look like with no lips.

“He was a Dungeons and Dragons geek,” Nikki said. “That’s why he killed his mom. The game made him do it.”

“You’re insane,” Dereck said. “A game can’t make anyone do anything.”

“It’s a satanic game,” Nikki said, and she rolled her eyes. “You’re so naive.”





Abby peeled the skin back from everyone on the bus, which became a metal can on wheels full of wide-eyed skeletons with clacking jaws. Their muscles jerked and danced like puppet strings, raising and lowering their arm bones and leg bones, and they were all just bones and meat and they all looked exactly the same.

Through the window, Abby saw the red school van pull up alongside them on the West Ashley Bridge. Father Morgan honked, and Abby watched as Glee and Gretchen looked out the window. They saw her, and Gretchen locked eyes again.

“Satan made him do it,” Nikki was saying. “Plus he was probably on LSD.”

Abby imagined peeling the skin from Gretchen, pulling off her flesh like a damp glove, exposing her bones. But it didn’t work. In her mind, she couldn’t see what was inside Gretchen. She had no heart, no lungs, no stomach, no liver. She was full of bugs.

Gretchen and Glee waved.

Abby didn’t wave back.



“I’m so sorry, Abby,” Mrs. Spanelli said. She was dressed as a witch, holding a shopping bag that contained her turban and crystal ball. “They didn’t tell me until I got here this morning.”

Friday was a half day because of the Halloween carnival. It was sponsored by the parents, but the upper school clubs were expected to run the booths that filled the Lawn, and whichever club took in the most tickets got half the door money. Abby didn’t belong to any clubs, so she’d agreed to help Mrs. Spanelli do the fortune-teller booth. Except this year, no fortune-teller.

“They don’t want anything that might be, you know, occult,” Mrs. Spanelli said. “Especially after Geraldo.”

“That’s okay,” Abby said. “I might go home early.”

Instead she went to the downtown library.

“I’m trying to find out where this area code is,” she asked the librarian, showing her Andy’s number. Abby felt very mature asking for help tracking down a phone number.

“Eight-one-three is Tampa,” the librarian said.

“Do you have any Tampa phone books?” Abby asked.

The librarian jerked her thumb over her shoulder.

“Back wall,” she said.

Abby walked over to a a dimly lit section of shelves that stank of newsprint and found a broken-spined Tampa phone book on top of a pile of worn directories. It felt greasy and used. She flopped it onto a table and flipped through until she found three Solomons. She wrote down their names, street addresses, and phone numbers, and that night she closed herself in her room and started dialing.