My Best Friend's Exorcism(9)
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, filling Abby’s ear with her hot breath. “I’m the stupid one. You’re the cool one. Please don’t be mad at me, Abby. You’re my best friend.”
Seventh grade was the year of their first slow-dance make-out party, and Abby tongue-kissed Hunter Prioleaux as they rocked back and forth to “Time after Time.” His enormous stomach was harder than she thought it would be and he tasted like Big League Chew and Coke, but he was also really sweaty and smelled like burps. He followed Abby around for the rest of the night trying to get to third base, until she hid in the bathroom while Gretchen ran him off.
Then came a day that changed Abby’s life forever. She and Gretchen were returning their lunch trays, talking about how they needed to stop getting hot lunch like little kids and start bringing healthy food to school so they could eat outside with everyone else, when they saw Glee Wanamaker standing by the tray window, hands twisting, her fingers squirming and pulling at each other, eyes red and shining, staring into the big garbage can. She’d put her retainer on her tray and then dumped it in the trash, and now she wasn’t sure which garbage bag it was in.
“I’ll have to look in all of them,” she sobbed. “This is my third retainer. My dad’s going to kill me.”
Abby wanted to go but Gretchen insisted they help, and so William, the head of the lunch room, took them out back and showed them the eight bulging black plastic bags full of warm milk, half-eaten pizza squares, fruit cocktail, melted ice cream, wet shoestring fries, and curdled ketchup. It was April and the sun had been cooking the bags into a rank stew. It was the worst thing Abby had ever smelled.
She didn’t know why they were helping Glee. Abby didn’t have a retainer. She didn’t even have braces. Everyone else did, but her parents wouldn’t pay for them. They wouldn’t pay for much of anything, and she had to wear the same navy corduroy skirt twice a week, and her two white shirts were turning transparent because she washed them so much. Abby did her own laundry because her mom worked as a home nurse.
“I do laundry for other people all day,” Abby’s mom told her. “Your arms aren’t broken. Pull your weight.”
Her dad had been working as the dairy department manager at Family Dollar, but they let him go because he accidentally stocked a bunch of expired milk. He’d put up a sign at Randy’s Model Shop to do small engine repairs on people’s remote control planes, but after customers complained that he was too slow, Randy made him take down the sign. Now he had a sign up at the Oasis gas station on Coleman Boulevard saying he’d fix any lawn mower for $20. He had pretty much stopped talking, and he’d started filling their yard with broken lawn mowers.
Abby was beginning to feel like everything was too much. She was beginning to feel like nothing she did made any difference. She was beginning to feel like her family was sliding down a hill and they were dragging her down after them and at the bottom of that hill was a cliff. She was beginning to feel like every test was a life-or-death challenge and if she failed even one of them, she’d lose her scholarship and get yanked out of Albemarle and never see Gretchen again.
And now she stood behind the cafeteria in front of eight steaming bags of fresh garbage, and she wanted to cry. Why was she the one helping Glee, whose dad was a stockbroker? Why wasn’t anyone helping her? She never knew what caused it, but at that moment, Abby changed. Something inside her head went “click” and the next second she was thinking differently.
She didn’t have to be poor. She could get a job. She didn’t have to help Glee. But she could. She could decide how she was going to be. She had a choice. Life could be an endless series of joyless chores, or she could get totally pumped and make it fun. There were bad things, and there were good things, but she got to choose which things to focus on. Her mom focused only on the bad things. Abby didn’t have to.
Standing there behind the cafeteria in the stink of an entire school’s worth of putrid garbage, Abby felt the channels change, the world brighten as the sunglasses came off her brain. She turned to Gretchen and said, “Mama’s got supper in the oven!”
Then she untied the nearest bag, took out a slice of half-chewed pizza, and frisbeed it onto the roof before plunging elbow-deep into an ocean of greasy, slimy, used food. By the time they found Glee’s retainer, strings of congealed cheese stuck in their hair, gobs of fruit cocktail stuck to their shirts, they were laughing like maniacs,
throwing handfuls of limp lettuce at one another and flicking French fries against the wall.
Eighth grade was the year of Max Headroom and Spuds Mackenzie. The year that Abby’s dad started watching Saturday morning cartoons for hours and sleeping on a cot in his shed in the backyard. It was the year that Abby got Gretchen to sneak out of her house so they could ride bikes across the Ben Sawyer Bridge to Sullivan’s Island. Halley’s Comet was passing and everyone had gone to the beach in the middle of the night to see it. They found a deserted spot and lay on their backs in the cold sand, looking up at millions of stars.
“So let me get this straight,” Gretchen said in the dark. “It’s a dirty snowball shaped like a peanut floating through space and that’s why everyone’s so excited?”
Gretchen was not very romantic about science.
“It only comes around once every seventy-five years,” Abby said, straining to see if the speck of light she saw was moving or if she was only imagining it. “We might never see it again.”