My Best Friend's Exorcism(73)

“These are serious crimes,” Father Morgan said. “There will be serious consequences.”

After they hung up, Abby couldn’t sleep. She turned on the TV, but Moonlighting felt loud and coarse and obvious, so she switched it off and put on No Jacket Required, letting Phil Collins’s soft, reassuring voice fill the room while she sat on her bed, the daybook at the other end. She was exhausted and relieved and scared, and her veins hummed with adrenaline, and then they ran empty and she pulled Geoffrey the Giraffe and Cabbage Head into her lap and laid her head against the wall and slept.

In her dream she wasn’t alone anymore. In her dream, nothing had happened that couldn’t be fixed. In her dream, everything was back to the way it was and she and Gretchen were driving out to Wadmalaw to go waterskiing with Margaret and Glee, and they had a case of Busch in the Bunny’s trunk, and George Michael was on the radio, and the wind was in their hair and nothing smelled like United Colors of Benetton and she looked over and smiled and Gretchen smiled back, but there was a roach on her face, sitting on one cheek, and when Gretchen opened her mouth she said, “Hi! I’m Mickey!” and Abby told her to stop doing that, and Gretchen did it again and again until Abby opened her eyes and her light was still on and her phone was ringing.

“Hi! I’m Mickey!” it chirped. “Hi! I’m Mickey!”

She looked at her digital clock: 11:06. Abby snatched the phone off the cradle and heard a great, roaring wall of black static.

“Abby?” Gretchen said over the long-distance lines.

“Gretchen!” Abby shouted. “I’m doing it. Tomorrow. I’m going to make it stop.”

The static cut out and the phone line was a vast gulf of darkness.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Gretchen said, her voice swimming up out of the void. “You shouldn’t have told.”

“This has to stop,” Abby said. “She’s hurting everyone!”

“You’d better lock up all your windows and close all your doors,” Gretchen echoed on the line. “She’s coming.”

The urgency in Gretchen’s staticky voice alarmed Abby but she shook her head.

“No one’s coming,” she said.

“You don’t understand . . . ,” Gretchen began.

“I’m sick and tired of people telling me what I don’t understand,” Abby yelled at the phone. “This is over! It’s ending!”

“It’s over,” Gretchen moaned down the phone line. “It’s too late.”

Abby’s bedroom door swung open to reveal Gretchen standing there holding a shopping bag and grinning.

“Hi, Abby-Normal,” she said.

“It’s too late, it’s too late, it’s too late,” sing-songed the voice on the phone.

“Is that little ghost still talking?” Gretchen asked.

She set her brown paper shopping bag next to the door, then she took the phone from Abby and hung it back on Mickey’s arm with a terminal, plastic clack. Instinctively, Abby slid off her bed and stood up.

“I think it’s bad luck to talk to yourself, don’t you?” Gretchen asked.

Then she punched Abby in the stomach.

Abby had never been hit, and it took her by surprise. All the air whooshed out of her lungs, and she dropped to her hands and knees on the carpet. Gretchen kicked her in the stomach, digging the toe of her sneaker deep into Abby’s solar plexus. Abby whimpered. Gretchen kicked her again in the side. Abby’s body reflexively curled around itself.

Gretchen crouched down, grabbed a handful of Abby’s moussed hair, and yanked her head up.

“You’ve been begging for this for ages,” Gretchen said. “Okay, well, now you have my full and undivided attention. Do you like it? Does this feel good?”

Abby wept. Gretchen snaked her fingers tighter into Abby’s hair and twisted.

“Stay out of my way,” she said. “You’re finished.”

She gave Abby’s head a final, furious shake, then bounced it off the carpet and straightened up. She put the sole of her shoe against Abby’s cheek and ground it into the floor.

“Stay down,” she said. “Play dead. Good dog.”

Then she picked her daybook up off the bed and strolled out of Abby’s room, taking her shopping bag with her. There was the sound of opening and closing doors in the hall, then something fell over in the living room, and after a minute Abby heard the front door slam.

Abby leapt to her feet and ran to the front door and shot the deadbolt home. Then she ran into her bedroom, slammed her door, and moved her desk chair under the handle. She felt so sick, she wanted to laugh. From the photographs around her mirror, Gretchen grinned at her, braces shining, Gretchen laughed at her, Gretchen stuck out her tongue at her and Abby looked at the clock and the time said 11:11 and in eight hours Father Morgan would arrive and she didn’t have the daybook. She didn’t have anything. She couldn’t save Margaret, she couldn’t save Glee, she couldn’t stop Gretchen, she couldn’t save herself.

She looked around her room and wanted to scream. How did she ever think she could do this? This was a little girl’s room, this wasn’t the room of a grown-up. This was the room of a child.

She ripped down her E.T. poster, yanking the brittle paper off the wall and pulling it to pieces; then she took Tommy Cox’s Coke and pegged it into the corner. She clawed the photos out from around her mirror, shredding Gretchen’s face and her face, screaming profanities as she reduced their years together to glossy confetti on the floor. She yanked No Jacket Required out of her tape deck, the black magnetic ribbon spilling like streamers, then she unspooled one mix tape after another: Awesome Summer Mix 88, Halley Comet Beach Party, From Gretchen to Abby IV.