My Best Friend's Exorcism(74)

It wasn’t enough. The sight of her stuffed animals made her want to puke. They belonged to a stupid little girl. She turned her nails into claws and dug them into Geoffrey the Giraffe’s face and tore out his shiny black eyes, then split the stitching down his back and turned him inside out. She twisted off Cabbage Head’s skull and took a pair of scissors and slashed open Wrinkles the Pound Puppy’s belly. She felt sick because she knew what she was doing was wrong, but she couldn’t stop herself. She was tired of being stupid, she was tired of Gretchen laughing at her, she was tired of losing. She was so tired.

When Abby woke up, full sunlight was flooding through her window, and someone had just stopped screaming. Abby sat bolt upright in the wreckage of her room, heart pounding, scalp prickling. She’d overslept. The house was silent. Abby listened, hoping it had all been a bad dream.

The woman screamed again. It was her mother.

Abby threw her desk chair aside and opened the bedroom door. Three enormous police officers were waiting in the hallway. Abby’s mom was down at the other end of the hall, crying, held back by a female officer.

“Mom?” Abby shouted. “What’s wrong?”

“You need to come with us,” the larger officer said.

“Why?” Abby asked.

“We need to know what you can tell us about this,” he said, holding up a brown paper bag.

It was Gretchen’s bag. The one she’d had the night before.

“What is it?” she asked.

“You tell us,” a shorter cop said.

Before they could stop her, Abby snatched the bag and it tore open. Something boneless slithered to the floor with a meaty thump. It was gray, like a skinned cat. Its eyes were closed, its mouth was open, and its hands were balled into little fists. It landed on the tips of the shorter cop’s feet. He covered his mouth and nose and turned away.

They’d found the missing baby.





Harden My Heart


After Abby was taken into custody, identified, advised of her rights, questioned, given an intake screening, interviewed again by a member of the Department of Juvenile Justice, and assigned a date for a detention hearing forty-eight hours away, it was made clear that she could be released to her parents or spend the next two days in the juvenile detention center. Mr. Rivers wanted to leave her there to teach her a lesson, but Mrs. Rivers wasn’t about to let her daughter spend the night in juvie, so they brought her home.

Abby would have had an easier time in the detention center. Her dad drove, staring straight ahead through the windshield, not saying a word. Her mom wept the entire time. Whenever it seemed like she was about to stop, she started up again. When they got home, she went to her bedroom and slammed the door. Abby could hear her crying through the walls.

Her dad poured himself a Diet Pepsi over ice, then sat down carefully at the kitchen table, sipping it and staring at the wall.

“Dad?” Abby said, getting up off the sofa and creeping toward him. “You know I didn’t do that, right? You know I would never do anything like that. Someone put that here to make me look bad. You believe me, don’t you?”

He turned and looked at her, blinking calmly.

“I don’t know what I believe,” he said.

Abby backed away from him, stumbled down the hall, and locked herself in her bedroom. She had forgotten she’d destroyed it and wasn’t prepared for the wreckage. Her stomach hollowed out when she stepped on one of Geoffrey’s black eyes, which she’d ripped from his face. She wanted to cry. She didn’t even have a past anymore.

They had already taken the keys to the Dust Bunny, but that was all right. It would mean that her parents couldn’t be blamed for what was about to happen. It wasn’t much, but it gave Abby some small comfort. Because she was about to break their hearts.

She took a shower and put on her face. It took forever because her skin was a suppurating mess. When she finally finished, she put her makeup in her gym bag along with a change of underwear and socks, a clean bra, a sweatshirt, and another pair of pants; then she turned on her TV and sat on her bed, watching through the back window as the sun went down.

She wished there was another way, but she was out of options. Maybe if she were smarter, she could have come up with a better solution, but this was all she could think of right now, and she had to do something. She looked out the back window and watched the light turn the long grass and abandoned lawn mowers first golden, then orange, then lavender, and finally black.

Abby listened for sounds of movement in the house. Hearing none, she slid her window open and popped the screen. Something caught her eye in the ocean of garbage strewn across her bedroom floor, one piece of her past that had escaped destruction: Tommy Cox’s can of Coke from the fifth grade. She picked it up and slid it into her gym bag, then zipped it up and snuck out of the house.

When she reached the Kangaroo gas station, she made a call on the payphone. Then she waited inside as if she was browsing magazines until the white van pulled up to the pumps. She ran outside and knocked on the passenger side window. Brother Lemon opened the door.

“Do you have it?” she asked, getting in.

He opened the glove compartment and showed her a plastic sandwich bag wrapped around a few tablespoons of gray powder. Right next to it was an identical baggie.

“Why two bags?” she asked.

“Always bring a backup, just in case,” he said. “Like astronauts in NASA.”