My Best Friend's Exorcism(68)

“Abby,” Brother Lemon said, “do you know how this ends?”

Abby shook her head.

“It ends when your friend is crazy and in Columbia State Mental Hospital,” he said. “It ends with her smearing poop on the walls to make occult symbols of devil worship. Or it ends when she takes pills and dies, or eats a shotgun. And she will take people down with her. You told me a little bit about this Gretchen, and it sounds like she was a good friend. Well, if you’re her good friend, you can’t abandon her now. I know all the stuff I’m saying sounds pretty gnarly, but your friend is no longer in that body. She is somewhere else, lost and scared and alone. It’s up to us to save her.”

“How do we get her to the place?” Abby asked after a moment. “You know, if she won’t come?”

“GHB,” Brother Lemon said. “Weightlifters use it all the time. It’s a dietary supplement, but it knocks you right out if you take too much. Hard to get, though, and tricky to use. Demons may be evil little suckers, but they have to eat and drink just like the rest of us. Slip some in her drink, then we’ll take her to the car and convey her to the site of deliverance.”

“I don’t know . . . ,” Abby said.

“Well,” Brother Lemon said, shrugging his massive shoulders, “you think about it, and when you do know, you give me a call. But don’t wait too long. Your friend is probably still alive somewhere, but who knows for how long.”

They walked out to the parking lot together, and on the way Brother Lemon said:

“Want to see something?”

Abby hesitated.

“Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something in my car.”

Abby followed but hung a few steps behind, remembering all the stories about men in white vans stealing girls from mall parking lots who were never seen again.

Sure enough, Brother Lemon drove a white minivan, which set off alarm bells inside Abby’s brain. She looked around to see if anyone was watching as she followed him around to the back. He opened the door, and she checked to make sure she had a clear escape route. Just in case.

“I thought you might have your friend here with you,” he said. “When you called? So I got all loaded up and ready to rock and roll if needed.”

He unzipped two electric blue surfboard bags. Inside were nylon straps, handcuffs, a straitjacket, duct tape, ball gags, chains, collars, a leash and muzzle, a leather hood, shackles.

“It’s for our safety, of course,” he said. And then he laughed and clapped his hands. “Hot darn, I’m excited,” he said, hopping from one foot to the other.





Beds Are Burning


“I’m ruined,” Glee sobbed.

It was later that evening, and Abby had just answered the phone.

“I can only talk for a minute,” Glee continued, her voice drunk with tears. “You have to know it wasn’t me.”

That “me” turned into a keening whine and more crying.

“It’s going to be okay, Glee,” Abby said.

“No,” Glee said, suddenly clear-headed. “It’s never going to be okay again. We’re leaving. But someone has to know it wasn’t my fault.”

“What happened?” Abby asked.

“He sent me those letters,” Glee said. “All those letters saying he loved me and he’d never felt this way before and that he’d wait until I graduated and then quit his job and move to be near me wherever I went to college. He said that. And she said I had to talk to him, and when I did, he acted like he’d never noticed me before.”

“Who said?” Abby asked.

“I was humiliated,” Glee said, not stopping. “And I remember drinking orange juice and she said she’d put a little virtue in it, and then I remember being at the copy shop and then the sky was spinning all around me and then this.”

“Who said?” Abby repeated. But she knew.

“You know exactly who it was,” Glee said. “It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t . . . I have to go.”

Abby called back but the phone was off the hook, and the next day Glee had disappeared; her family swept her out of sight and swallowed her up. But Abby knew she was broken in a way that might never be repaired.

Of course she knew the name that Glee didn’t say. It was Gretchen.

Abby couldn’t stop her alone, but who was going to help? Not Brother Lemon. No one carrying handcuffs and duct tape in their trunk was a real solution. Not Glee. Not Father Morgan, because he was gone, too. So Abby went to the toughest person she knew: Margaret.

Margaret had been out of school for weeks; probably being treated for anorexia privately in her home, where the Middletons could keep an eye on her. Before going to her house, Abby stopped by the Market and picked up a bunch of red carnations. On the way out, she spotted a pint of Frusen Gl?djé pralines and cream—Margaret’s favorite, but was that the sort of thing you took someone with anorexia? Abby wasn’t sure but decided to get it anyway. By now Margaret was probably bouncing back; nothing kept her down for long.

The Middletons had houses all over Charleston, but their downtown house was an enormous wooden pile on Church Street with the roots of a live oak busting up the sidewalk out front, cracking the first two brick steps that led to the door. It was an old Charleston single house, so it had two columned porches stacked up on the side, pulling the massive wooden wreck slowly to the right, collapsing gracefully in a two-hundred-year swoon.