It didn’t come easy. They cared hard. They cared about their clothes, they cared about their hair, they cared about their makeup (Abby especially cared about her makeup), and they cared about their grades. Abby, Gretchen, Glee, and Margaret were going places.
Margaret was sitting in the driver’s seat, legs up on the hydroslide, blowing out big plumes of mentholated smoke, rich as shit, loaded with old Charleston money, American by birth, Southern by the grace of God. She was Maximum Margaret, a giant blond jock whose sprawling arms and legs took up half the boat. Everything about her was too much: her lips were too red, her hair was too blond, her nose was too crooked, her voice was too loud.
Glee yawned and stretched. The total opposite of Margaret, she was a tiny, tanned girl version of Michael J. Fox who still had to buy her shoes in the children’s department. In the summer her skin turned chestnut and her belly button darkened to black. Her hair was highlighted seven different shades of brown, and despite having a koala nose and sad puppy-dog eyes, she always attracted too much male attention because she’d developed early, and way out of proportion to her height. Glee was also scary smart, a baby yuppie down to the bone. Her little red Saab wasn’t from her daddy: she’d made the down payment with money she’d earned on the stock market. The only thing daddy did was put in her trades.
Gretchen lifted her head from where she was lying facedown on a towel in the prow and took a sip of her Busch. Gretchen: treasurer of the student vestry, founder of the Recycling Club, founder of the school’s Amnesty International chapter, and, if the bathroom walls were to believed, the hottest girl in tenth grade. Long, lean, lanky, and blond, she was a Laura Ashley princess in floral print dresses and Esprit tops—a stark contrast to Abby, who barely reached Gretchen’s shoulders and whose big hair and thick makeup made her look like she should be waiting tables in a truck-stop diner. Abby tried very hard not to think about the way she looked, and most days, especially days like this, she succeeded.
As they lit their cigarettes, as they opened their beers, as they came blinking back into the world, Margaret pulled a black plastic film canister out of her bag, held it up, and asked:
“You guys want to freak the fuck out?”
“What is it?” Abby asked.
“Acid,” Margaret said.
Bob Marley suddenly sounded very mellow, indeed.
Gretchen twisted around on her towel. “Where’d you get it?”
“Stole it from Riley,” Glee lied.
Margaret was the only girl in her enormous family, and her second-oldest brother, Riley, was a notorious burnout who alternated between doing semesters at the College of Knowledge and rehab at Fenwick Hall, where Charleston’s richest alcoholics went to rest. He was famous for slipping drugs into girls’ drinks at the Windjammer, and then, after they passed out, he’d have sex with them in the backseat of his car. It came to an end when one of the girls woke up, broke his nose, and ran down the middle of Ocean Boulevard with no top on, screaming her lungs out. The judge encouraged the girl’s parents not to press charges because Riley came from a fine family and had his whole future ahead of him. Ultimately, all that happened was he was required to live at home for a year. So now he moved between different Middleton houses—from Wadmalaw, to Seabrook, to Sullivan’s Island, to downtown—staying out of reach of his dad, supposedly going to AA meetings but mostly selling drugs.
That said, Riley was a known quantity. If Margaret and Glee told Gretchen where they’d really gotten the acid, she’d never ingest it; and if these girls were going to trip, it would be all of them at once or nobody at all. That’s how they did everything.
“I don’t know,” Gretchen said. “I don’t want to wind up like Syd Barrett.”
Syd Barrett, the original lead singer for Pink Floyd, had done so much acid in the sixties that his brain melted, and now, twenty years later, he lived in his mom’s basement and sometimes, on good days, managed to ride his bike to the post office. He collected stamps. Gretchen believed that if she did acid, it was one hundred percent guaranteed she’d pull a Syd Barrett and never be normal again.
“My brother said Syd put out an album last year but all the songs were about stamp collecting,” Glee said.
“What if that’s me?” Gretchen asked.
Margaret blew out a dramatic plume of smoke.
“And you don’t collect stamps,” she said. “What the fuck are you going to sing about?”
“I’ll do it if you promise to drive all the recycling club’s cans to the recycling center,” Gretchen said to Margaret.
Margaret flicked her butt into the creek.
“Recycle that, you hippie.”
“Glee?” Gretchen asked.
“Those bags leak,” Glee said. “I get wasps in my car.”
Gretchen stood up, raised her arms over her head, and her fingertips brushed the sky.
“As always,” she said. “Thank you for your support.”
Then she stretched out one long leg, stepped off the prow, and dropped into the water without a splash. She didn’t come back up. Big whoop. Gretchen could hold her breath forever and she liked to wallow in the freezing cold at the bottom of the river. That was the good thing about Gretchen. As much as she wanted to save the planet, she was pretty casual about it.
“Tell her where we got it and I’ll break your face,” Margaret said to Abby.
Summer of ’88 had been the most amazing summer ever. It was the summer of “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” and all of Abby’s money went for gas because she’d finally gotten her license and could drive after dark. Every night at 11:06, she and Gretchen popped their screens, slipped out of their windows, and just cruised around Charleston. They went night swimming at the beach, they hung out with the James Island kids at the Market, they smoked cigarettes in the parking lot in front of the Garden and Gun club and watched Citadel ca-dicks pick fights. One night they’d just driven north on 17, making it almost all the way to Myrtle Beach, smoking an entire pack of Parliaments and listening to Tracy Chapman sing “Fast Car” and “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution” over and over before heading home just as the sun was coming up.
Meanwhile, most of Margaret and Glee’s summer had been spent sitting in Glee’s car waiting for drug deals to materialize. No one except the most maximum mutants in their class had ever done acid, so it was important to Margaret that they be the first normal people to trip; the same as they were the first girls to bring a note to sit out gym class because of their periods, the same as they were the first four to go to a live concert (Cyndi Lauper), the same as they were the first four to get their driving permits (except for Gretchen, who had problems telling her left from her right).
Margaret and Glee spent months on the acid project, but every single deal fell apart. Abby started feeling sorry for Glee, and she offered to employ the Dust Bunny on yet another of Margaret’s long drug drives to nowhere. Abby’s offer infuriated both Glee and Margaret.
“Hell, no,” Margaret said. “You are not driving. We went to lower school in a building named after my granddaddy.”
“My father’s firm manages the school’s portfolio,” Glee added.
“If we get busted, we’ll get suspended,” Margaret said. “That’s a free fucking vacation. If you get busted, you’ll get expelled. I’m not being friends with a high school dropout who works at S-Mart.”
As far as Abby was concerned, that was a needlessly negative view of the situation. Yes, she had stayed in school by getting a scholarship that came with dozens of strings attached, but Albemarle Academy was definitely not looking for an excuse to get rid of her. Her grades were totally awesome. But you couldn’t argue with Margaret, so instead Abby offered to pay for Glee’s gas and was secretly relieved when Glee turned her down.
Their most recent drug safari had taken Glee and Margaret to the parking lot of a bait shop on Folly Beach,
where they sat in Glee’s car for two hours in the pouring rain before Margaret got on the pay phone and discovered that their connection was not simply waiting a crazy long time to signal them. He’d been busted. They went to his room at the Holiday Inn, because what else were they going to do, and discovered that the cops not only had left the door wide open but had also totally failed to find his stash hidden underneath the mattress. Margaret and Glee did not make the same mistake.
Now there’s always a chance that if you find acid hidden underneath a mattress in a Holiday Inn, left there by two guys you’ve never met, who were hiding it from the police and who are now in jail, it might be spiked with strychnine or something worse. But there was also a chance that it might not be spiked with strychnine or something worse, and Abby preferred to look on the bright side.
Gretchen popped up out of the water and spat Margaret’s cigarette butt into the boat. It stuck to Margaret’s massive thigh.
“Oh my God,” Margaret said. “How did you even know that’s mine? AIDS!”
Gretchen sprayed a mouthful of water into the boat.
“That’s not how you get AIDS,” she said. “As we all know, you get AIDS by sucking face with Wallace Stoney.”
“He does not have AIDS,” Margaret said.
“Duh!” Glee said. “You get cold sores from herpes.”
Margaret looked pissed.
“What does it taste like?” Gretchen asked, grabbing onto the side of the boat and chinning herself up to look into Margaret’s eyes. “Do his herp lips taste like true love?”
The two of them stared at each other.
“For your information, they’re not cold sores, they’re zits,” Margaret said. “And they taste like Clearasil.”
They laughed and Gretchen pushed herself away from the boat and floated on her back.
“I’ll do it,” she said to the sky. “But you have to promise I won’t get brain damage.”
“You’ve already got brain damage,” Margaret said, jumping into the water, almost flipping the boat, and landing on Gretchen, one arm around her neck, dragging her beneath the surface. They came up sputtering and laughing, hanging onto each other. “Killer!”
They piloted the boat back to Margaret’s dock, the air getting colder as the sun set. Abby wrapped a flapping towel around her shoulders and Gretchen let the wind catch her cheeks and blow them out like a balloon. Three dolphins breached off to port and paced them for a couple hundred yards, then peeled away and headed back out to sea. Margaret made gun fingers and pretended to shoot them. Gretchen and Abby turned and watched them dive and rise, flickering through the waves, disappearing in the distance, as gray as the chop.
They tied up at Margaret’s dock and started lugging the skis up into the backyard, but Gretchen lingered with Abby down by the boat, cupping her elbows.
“Are you going to do it?” she asked.
“Hell, yeah,” Abby said.
“Are you scared?” she asked.
“Hell, yeah,” Abby said.
“So why?”
“Because I want to know if Dark Side of the Moon is actually profound.”
Gretchen didn’t laugh.
“What if it opens the doors of perception and I can’t get them closed again?” Gretchen worried. “What if I can see and hear all the energy on the planet, and then the acid never wears off?”
“I’d visit you in Southern Pines,” Abby said. “And I bet your parents would get, like, the lobotomy wing named after you.”
“That would be choice,” Gretchen agreed.
“It’ll be crazy fun,” Abby said. “We’ll stick together like swim buddies at camp. We’ll be trip buddies.”
Gretchen pulled some strands of hair around to her mouth and sucked salt water off the tips.
“Will you promise to remind me to call my mom tonight?” she asked. “I have to check in at ten.”
“I will make it my mission in life,” Abby vowed.
“Cool beans,” Gretchen said. “Let’s go fry my brains.”
Together the four of them heaped all their gear into a big pile in the backyard and hosed it down. Then Abby sprayed the hose up Margaret’s butt.
“Cleansing enema!” she yelled.
“You’re confusing me with my mother,” Margaret shouted, running for the safety of the house.
Abby turned on Glee, but Gretchen was crimping the hose. Things were devolving rapidly when Margaret came out on the back porch carrying one of her mother’s silver tea trays.
“Ladies,” she sing-songed. “Tea time.”
They gathered around the tray underneath a live oak. There were four china saucers, each with a little tab of white paper in the middle. Each tiny tab was stamped with the head of a blue unicorn.
“Is that it?” Gretchen asked.
“No, I decided to bring you guys some paper to chew on,” Margaret said. “Doy.”
Glee reached out to poke her tab, but pulled her finger back before she made contact. They all knew you could absorb acid through your skin. There should have been more of a ceremony; they should have showered first or eaten something. Maybe they shouldn’t have been out in the sun all day drinking so much beer. They were doing this all wrong. Abby could feel everyone losing their nerve, herself included, so just as Gretchen was taking a breath to make an excuse, Abby grabbed her tab and popped it in her mouth.
“What’s it taste like?” Gretchen asked.
“Nuttin’ honey,” Abby said.
Margaret took hers, and so did Glee. Then, finally, Gretchen.
“Do we chew it?” she lisped, trying not to move her tongue.
“Let it dissolve,” Margaret lisped back.
“How long?” Gretchen asked.
“Chill, buttmunch,” Margaret lisped around her paralyzed tongue.
Abby looked out at the bright orange sunset burning itself off over the marsh and felt something final: she’d taken acid. It was irreversibly in her system. No matter what happened now she had to ride this out. The sunset glowed and throbbed on the horizon, and Abby wondered if it would look so vivid if she hadn’t just dropped acid. Reflexively she swallowed the little bit of paper, and that was that: she’d done something that couldn’t be undone, crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed. She was terrified.
“Is anyone hearing anything?” Glee asked.
“It takes hours to kick in, retard,” Margaret said.
“Oh,” Glee said. “So you normally have a pig nose?”
“Don’t be mean,” Gretchen said. “I don’t want to have a bad trip. I really don’t.”
“Do y’all remember Mrs. Graves in sixth grade?” Glee asked. “With the Mickey Mouse stickers?”
“That was so bone,” Margaret said. “Y’all got that, right? Her lecture about how, at Halloween, Satan worshippers drive around giving little kids stickers with Mickey Mouse on them, and when the kids lick the stickers they’re coated in LSD and they have bad trips and kill their parents.”
Gretchen covered Margaret’s mouth with both hands.
“Stop . . . talking . . . ,” she said.
So they laid around the backyard as it got dark, smoking cigarettes, talking about nice things, like what was up with Maximilian Buskirk’s weird butt and that year’s volleyball schedule, and Glee told them about some new kind of VD she’d read about that Lanie Ott almost definitely had, and they discussed whether they should get Coach Greene an Epilady for her upper lip, and if Father Morgan was Thorn Birds hot, regular hot, or merely teacher hot. And the whole time, all of them were secretly trying to see if their smoke was turning into dragons or if the trees were dancing. None of them wanted to be the last one to hallucinate.
Eventually, they lapsed into a comfortable silence, with only Margaret humming some song she’d heard on the radio while she cracked her toe knuckles.
&nb
sp; “Let’s go look at the fireflies,” Gretchen said.
“Cool,” Abby said, pushing herself up off the grass.
“Oh my God,” Margaret said. “You guys are so queer.”
They ran through the yard and into the long grass in the field between the house and the woods, watching the green lightning bugs hover, butts glowing, as the air turned lavender the way it does when it gets dark in the country. Gretchen ran over to Abby.
“Spin me around,” she said.
Abby grabbed her hands and they spun, heads tipped back, trying to make their trip happen. But when they fell into the grass, they weren’t tripping, just dizzy.
“I don’t want to see Margaret pinch off firefly butts,” Gretchen said. “We should buy the plot next door and turn it into a nature preserve so no one else can ruin the creek.”
“We totally should,” Abby said.
“Look. Stars,” Gretchen said, pointing at the first ones in the dark blue sky. “You have to promise not to ditch me.”
“Stick with me,” Abby said. “I’ll totally be your lysergic sherpa. Wherever you go, I’m there.”
They held hands in the grass. The two of them had never been shy about touching, even though in fifth grade Hunter Prioleaux had called them homos, but that was because no one had ever loved Hunter Prioleaux.
“I need to tell you—” Gretchen started to say.
Margaret loomed up out of the dark, pinched-off firefly butts smeared into two glowing lines underneath her eyes.
“Let’s go in,” she said. “The acid’s coming up!”
The Number of the Beast
Four hours later, Abby watched the digits on the clock radio flip from 11:59 to 12:00, and the acid was definitely not coming up. Spread out across Margaret’s massive bedroom, they weren’t tripping. They were bored.
My Best Friend's Exorcism Page 4