My Best Friend's Exorcism

by Grady Hendrix

  “Dear Jesus,” one of the ladies said.

  The two owls cornered the pelican, which put up a fight until a third owl dove out of the shadows, talons pinning the pelican’s neck to the ground. It tried to get away, thrashing its wings, but the owls were pulling it to pieces. One of its wings streaked blood onto the huge window.

  A scream ripped loose, high pitched and pained, making the air in the stairwell vibrate, drowning out the sound of birds hitting the house. As it drilled into Abby’s eardrums, she looked up to see Gretchen on her knees at the top of the stairs, clutching both sides of her head, digging her fingers into her frizzy hair, screaming, “Make it stop! Make it stop! Make it stop!”

  It didn’t.

  Paranoimia

  The next morning was so dark that the streetlights were still on when Abby got in the Dust Bunny and drove to Gretchen’s. She’d raced through putting on her face because she needed to hear what happened after Mr. Lang had limped up the stairs and pulled Gretchen’s hands away from her ears. After he’d wrapped his arms around her. After he’d muffled her screams against his chest. After the book club ladies had run for their cars. After Mrs. Lang had noticed that Abby was still there and rushed her out of the house.

  “Please,” she’d said, closing the door in Abby’s face. “We need some time.”

  Abby pulled onto Pierates Cruze, and the Bunny’s headlights swept over three bulging trash bags piled at the end of the Langs’ driveway. A whirl of stray feathers blew around them. The bags were lumpy and dimpled with talons and beaks.

  Gretchen was waiting on the side of the driveway closest to Dr. Bennett’s house, shoulders hunched, wind tossing around the stiff ends of her frizzy hair. She was wearing the same skirt from the day before. Abby pulled up and Gretchen slammed into the Bunny, and they took off.

  “Are you okay?” Abby asked. “What happened? Did you get in trouble?”

  Gretchen shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “But you pushed your dad!” Abby said, pulling onto Pitt Street. “I saw you.”

  Gretchen shook her head.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “My head was killing me. I just remember getting angrier and angrier and then my brain went white. I tried to tell them how I can’t sleep, but they never listen.”

  She started to gnaw on her nails.

  “Did your dad have to clean up all the birds?” Abby asked.

  Gretchen nodded, miserable.

  “Dr. Bennett came over to help but they wound up fighting,” Gretchen said. “My dad says there were more than a hundred. Every time I started to fall asleep, I heard them again.”

  They were driving on Coleman Boulevard now, approaching the last traffic light before the bridge.

  “How much trouble are you in?” Abby asked, stopping as the light turned red.

  Gretchen shrugged.

  “We’re going to have a ‘family meeting’ tonight,” Gretchen said, making quote marks with her fingers. “I’m supposed to sit and listen while they tell me what my problems are.”

  Before Abby could ask anything else, the light changed and the Bunny shifted into the lane that went over the old bridge. The old bridge—a two-lane tightrope with no sidewalks—stretched over the Cooper River for three miles before dropping cars onto the crosstown express, which ran along the trashy northern edge of downtown, where all the fast food restaurants were.

  It made everyone nervous. The lanes were too narrow; one four-inch drift and you’d knock off your side mirror on the steel rails that whipped past your ears. A newer, wider bridge ran parallel to the old one, with three lanes and actual shoulders and sidewalks, but only one of its lanes ran downtown, so it was bumper-

  to-bumper this early. Every morning you had to pick your poison: new and slow or old and fast. Today, Abby went with old and fast.

  The wind howled, trying to shove the Dust Bunny into the other lane as Abby held on to the wheel for dear life. They were roaring down the backside of the first span, cars screaming by close enough to swap paint.

  “I hear voices,” Gretchen said.

  “What?”

  “They tell me things.”

  “Okay.”

  Abby couldn’t say any more because they had reached the long curve at the bottom of the first span, where the worst accidents happened.

  “They won’t leave me alone,” Gretchen said. “Someone’s always whispering in my ear. It’s worse than the touching.”

  Abby powered the Dust Bunny up the second span, wondering if this would be the day its engine finally exploded. Her foot mashed the accelerator all the way to the floor, but other cars kept passing them.

  “What do they say?” Abby asked, shouting over the noise of the engine as they crested the peak of the second span.

  The Bunny was in the homestretch, with Abby riding the brakes down the final drop onto the crosstown.

  “They tell me things,” Gretchen said. “About people. About Glee and Margaret. About Wallace and my parents. And you.”

  They leveled out on the crosstown, their speed dropping from fifty to thirty-five, and Abby was able to stop thinking about sudden death and focus on what Gretchen was saying.

  “You already know everything about me,” she said. “I’m stupid, Gretchen. I don’t understand all these hints and riddles. If you want to tell me something, just say it.”

  Abby shifted gears. Gretchen dropped back in her seat.

  “They told me you wouldn’t understand,” she said.

  And that was the moment Gretchen started to pull away, and there wasn’t a thing Abby could do to stop her.

  It wasn’t that Abby didn’t try. She had three classes with Gretchen: Intro to Programming, U.S. History, and Ethics. She saw her at lunch. She saw her at fourth-period break. And every time, she made sure she told a funny story about a lame customer at TCBY or about something ridiculous that Hunter Prioleaux said in class. Anything to distract Gretchen, to get her mind off home, to make her laugh.

  Nothing worked.

  At lunch she tried to convince Glee and Margaret to sit with them.

  “We’re not talking to Gretchen,” Margaret said.

  “Anymore or right now?” Abby asked.

  Margaret rested her shoulder blades against the wall as Glee rooted around inside her locker, hunting for her lunch.

  “She’s spastic,” Margaret said. “You know that, right? She’s gone fucking schizo.”

  Abby was shaking her head before Margaret even finished.

  “There’s something wrong with her,” she said. “Like, for real. We can’t ditch her now.”

  “We aren’t ditching her,” Margaret said. “She ditched us.”

  Margaret talked in a way that made Abby feel helpless. Everything was the way Margaret said it was, and if you didn’t agree you were a moron. Arguing was useless.

  “But we’re her friends,” Abby said.

  “We’re taking a Gretchen vacation,” Margaret said. “So you can hang with us or hang with her. Come on if you’re coming.”

  Then she pushed herself off the lockers and headed toward the Lawn.

  Abby turned to Glee, who was pulling out her Tupperware lunchbox.

  “She’s your friend, too,” Abby said.

  “Sophomore year is the most important one on your transcript,” Glee said. “So that’s cool if you want to stick with Gretchen, but I’m staying out of it. I’ve got too much on my plate.”

  She closed her locker and spun the combination.

  “You’re already in it,” Abby said.

  “Not if I don’t want to be,” Glee said, and then she followed Margaret.

  Abby couldn’t entirely blame them. It was getting harder and harder to be seen with Gretchen. At first she’d just recycled the same calf-length gray skirt that she wore too often
anyways because some senior once said it made her look hot. Then Abby noticed that Gretchen wasn’t wearing makeup anymore. Her nails were always dirty and she was chewing them again.

  Plus, she was starting to smell. This was no simple whiff of bad breath; it was a constant sour stink, like the boys after PE. Every morning Abby wanted to crack her window, but they had a rule: the Bunny’s windows stayed up on school days. Otherwise, she’d have to respray her hair when they got to Albemarle.

  “Did you step in something?” Abby asked one morning, trying to drop a hint.

  Gretchen didn’t answer.

  “Can you check your shoes?” Abby said.

  Gretchen was silent. It had gotten to the point where Abby wondered if she spoke at a pitch Gretchen couldn’t hear. Some mornings Gretchen would pull out her daybook and scribble in it, not saying a word all the way to school. Other mornings she would pull it out and let it sit unopened in her lap. This morning was a scribbling day, and Abby was grateful to pull onto the old bridge so she could focus on something besides the sound of Gretchen scratching away in her book.

  There were no more 11:06 phone calls because Gretchen never called anymore. Abby still called Gretchen’s house, but Gretchen was always taking a nap or doing homework. Mrs. Lang would keep Abby on the phone, asking if Gretchen was seeing someone, or if she’d said she was feeling sick, or if she’d seemed a little funny recently. She burbled and chirped, circling around the question she couldn’t bring herself to ask: What was wrong with her daughter? Abby wanted to ask the same thing: What were they doing to Gretchen? After the doctor, after the book club, Abby had a good idea that whatever was making Gretchen lose her mind was happening at home, behind closed doors. She was too polite to hang up on Mrs. Lang, so she faked conversation; when that got too hard, she stopped calling altogether.

  PSATs were coming up, and Kaplan books started appearing underneath everyone’s arms. Glee had already taken them once the year before, and Margaret had a tutor; normally, Abby would be studying with Gretchen, but now she sat alone in her room every night, burying herself in test prep, unable to focus on the practice questions; she was trying to think of how to get through to Gretchen.

  Gretchen was still wearing the same skirt, and by the second week she had started recycling her blouse, too. It was a plaid Esprit top in electric blue, belted at the waist. After a few days, she stopped wearing the belt, which made it look like a shapeless sack. Worst of all, her skin started breaking out. Tiny inflamed pimples appeared all around her nose.

  One morning while they were waiting at the stoplight on the crosstown, the minor-key piano opening of “Against All Odds” started playing on 95SX. They had a rule that whenever Phil Collins came on the radio, they had to stop everything and sing along. This morning, Abby was ready.

  “Cow Chicken is eating all my hay,” Abby sang to Gretchen, replacing the lyrics with rhyming nonsense. This never failed to crack Gretchen up. “And she’s pecking at my face/I can’t take this pecking anymore . . . can you . . . oooOOO/She’s the only one/Who ever pecks me at all.”

  Gretchen was supposed to pick up the second verse, but as the synthesizers swelled and the traffic light changed, no one was singing in the car except Phil. Abby couldn’t stand it.

  “Come on, ladies,” she said, calling out like a cheesy piano player. “You know the words.”

  Gretchen looked out her window at the passing fast-food restaurants. Abby had no choice but to jump in on the chorus.

  “So take a look at my cow/She’s got a chicken face/And there’s no one left here to remind me/That she comes from outer space.”

  Once Abby started she couldn’t stop, so she kept up with the song all the way through the chorus, feeling like a dweeb for singing her heart out and being completely ignored. Then she stopped abruptly, as if she was never really planning to get much into the second verse anyway. The rest of the drive passed in silence.

  Gretchen kept her sleeves rolled down no matter how warm the weather was. Some mornings she showed up with filthy Band-Aids on her fingertips. Her breath got worse. Her tongue became coated in a thick white film. The crimping had turned her hair into a frizzy nest barely controlled by a scrunchie, and her lips were always chapped. She looked beaten, exhausted, hunched over, wrung dry. Abby wondered how she made it past her mom every morning.

  The first teacher to say something was Mr. Barlow. After Gretchen fell asleep twice in first period, he held her back after class. Abby waited until she came slouching out of his office.

  “What’d he say?” she asked as Gretchen brushed past her.

  Before she could answer, Mr. Barlow called Abby into his tiny office. The room reeked of Gretchen’s sour sweat. Mr. Barlow was pounding on his window with the heel of his hand, trying to get it open.

  “I don’t know what’s going on with Gretchen,” he said, giving up on the window and turning on a desk fan. “But if you care about your friend, you need to get her off whatever she’s on.”

  “What?” Abby asked.

  “What?” Mr. Barlow mimicked. “I’m not an idiot. I know what drugs are. If you’re really her friend, get her to stop.”

  “But, Mr. Barlow—” Abby said.

  “Save it,” he snapped, dropping into his chair and picking up a stack of test papers. “I said my piece, you heard me, and the next person I’ll tell is Major. I’m giving you a chance to help your friend. Now get to class.”

  Abby realized that no one was going to do anything. For five years, Gretchen had been the perfect Albemarle student, and the faculty still saw what they were used to seeing—not what was really happening. Maybe they chalked it up to PSAT stress or problems at home. Maybe they figured that tenth grade was a tough transition. Maybe they were caught up in their own divorces and career dramas and problem kids, and if she still wasn’t turning things around on Monday they’d say something. Or maybe the following Monday. Or the Monday after that.

  Something was changing inside Gretchen. Maybe it was the acid, maybe it was Andy, maybe it was her parents, maybe it was something worse. Whatever it was, Abby had to keep trying. She couldn’t abandon her friend because soon Gretchen would be ready to talk. Any minute now she’d look up from her daybook and say, “I have to tell you something serious.”

  The next day was Wednesday, and when Gretchen got into the Dust Bunny, Abby was relieved: she was still wearing the same clothes but didn’t smell bad. Maybe Mr. Barlow had gotten through to her after all.

  Then a new smell hit her: United Colors of Benetton perfume. Gretchen was drenched in it. She’d gotten a bottle from her parents two years ago, and it quickly became her signature scent. That morning, Gretchen reeked of it. Abby’s eyes were still burning when she walked into first period.

  Later that day, Abby went against her better judgment and appealed to a higher authority. She came back from TCBY and found her mother balancing the checkbook at the dining room table. Abby’s mom took every shift that came her way, sleeping at patients’ houses three times a week in case they woke up in the middle of the night and needed someone to change their Depends. Abby mostly saw her in passing or asleep on the sofa, or she heard her coughing behind a closed bedroom door. Clueless as to how to start a conversation, she hovered awkwardly by the couch until her mom noticed.

  “What?” Mrs. Rivers said without looking up.

  Abby dove in before she could second-guess herself.

  “Do you ever have patients who hear voices?” she asked. “Like voices that talk to them all the time and tell them things?”

  “Sure,” her mom said. “Nutjobs.”

  “Well,” Abby said, forging ahead, “how do they get better?”

  “They don’t,” her mom said, tearing up a stack of voided checks. “We put them on pills, send them to the nuthouse, or hire someone like me to make sure they don’t chug-a-lug the Drano.”

  “But there has to be
something you can do,” Abby said. “To make them like they used to be.”

  Abby’s mom was exhausted but she wasn’t stupid. She took a sip of her Diet Pepsi and looked at her daughter.

  “If this is about Gretchen, and it usually is,” she said, “then it’s none of your beeswax. You worry about you and let Gretchen’s parents worry about Gretchen.”

  “Something’s wrong with her,” Abby said. “You could talk to her parents, or we could go over there together. They’d listen to you.”

  “Families like that don’t listen to other people,” Mrs. Rivers said. “You get in the middle of whatever this is and you’ll be giving them an excuse to blame you for everything.”

  Abby was reeling. Deep down she thought that, too, but it sounded so unfair coming out of her own mother’s mouth. Her mom didn’t know anything about the Langs.

  “You’re just jealous that I have friends,” she shot back.

  “I see the friends you have,” Abby’s mom said. “And they’re of no consequence. You’ve got big things ahead of you, but these girls will wear you out and drag you down.”

  Abby’s chest prickled with heat. Her mom had never expressed an opinion about Abby’s friends—and she was horrified to hear how twisted and misguided it was. Her mom didn’t know anything about her friends.

  “You don’t even have friends,” Abby said.

  “Where do you think they went?” Abby’s mom asked. “Charleston people like the Langs, they only want easy times. The minute it rains, watch them run.”

  Words could not express the frustration Abby felt.

  “You don’t understand anything,” she said.

  Her mother looked genuinely surprised.

  “Good God, Abby. Where do you think I grew up? I understand these people better than you.”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything,” Abby said.

  Her mom massaged the bridge of her nose. She started talking while her eyes were still closed.