“When I was your age, I trusted the wrong people,” she said. “I was silly when I should have been serious. I let myself get in over my head. Those girls are not the same as you. If they make a mistake, their parents can buy their way out of it. But people like us? We take one wrong step and it haunts us forever.”
Abby wanted to say that her mom was wrong. She wanted to force her to see that they were nothing alike; but she was so angry, her throat couldn’t form the words.
“I never should have talked to you!” she shouted and stormed off to her room.
On Monday, Abby pulled up in front of the Langs’ house and saw that Max had knocked over the garbage cans again and pulled a bag into the center of Dr. Bennett’s yard, where he was ripping it apart. When Abby pulled the emergency brake, Max yanked his nose out of the white plastic and ran away. That’s when Abby saw that the bag was full of used Maxipads and tampons, a whole pile of them, saturated with clotted black blood.
Abby was debating whether to clean up the mess or honk the horn when Dr. Bennett came around the Cruze from the opposite direction. He was returning from his morning walk, swinging the cane he’d made out of a sawed-off broomstick, a rubber cap nailed to one end.
He saw the bloody garbage strewn across his grass at the exact moment Gretchen emerged from her house, looking dazed and still wearing the same outfit as the day before. From inside the Dust Bunny with the windows rolled up, the whole scene was like a silent movie, with Dr. Bennett shouting at Gretchen, punctuating his sentences by whacking the garbage bag with his stick. Gretchen replied by raising her middle finger, and Abby read her lips:
“Fuck you.”
Abby’s spine stiffened; she didn’t know what to do. Get out? Stay in the car? Dr. Bennett was coming at Gretchen faster than Abby had ever seen him move, passing in front of the car’s hood and swinging his stick at Gretchen’s legs. Gretchen hit him with her bookbag, knocking him against Mrs. Lang’s Volvo. He was shouting again, and then Mr. Lang was running out of the house, with Mrs. Lang right behind him in a pink sweatsuit.
Abby watched Mr. Lang mouth the words “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” as he put himself between Dr. Bennett and his daughter, and then the two men were tussling, grabbing each other’s shirt collars.
Gretchen, forgotten for the moment, ran around the back of the Dust Bunny and yanked open the door, shouts filling the car as she dropped into her seat in a nostril-searing cloud of United Colors of Benetton.
“Go,” she said.
Abby hit the accelerator, sending rocks spraying from underneath her tires. They flew through the Old Village. At the first stop sign Abby really looked at Gretchen, trying to see who was there, not just who had always been there before. Angry pimples were smeared across Gretchen’s chin, infected whiteheads grew in the creases next to her nostrils, dry scabs were encrusted on her forehead. Her breath smelled bad. Her teeth were yellow. Crust was caked in the corners of her eyes. She stank of perfume.
Someone had to do something. Someone had to say something. Teachers weren’t doing it. Her mom wasn’t going to do it. The Langs wouldn’t do it. That left Abby.
Traffic on the bridge was light because they were running late, so Abby veered left onto the new bridge. As they started to climb the first span, with the Bunny’s engine having a heart attack underneath the hood, she finally said it.
“What’s happening to you?” Abby asked.
At first she thought Gretchen wasn’t going to say anything, but then she spoke, her voice hoarse.
“I need you to help me,” Gretchen said.
Abby levitated.
“Anything,” she said.
“You have to help me . . .” Gretchen repeated, her voice trailing off. She chewed her fingernails.
“Help you what?” Abby asked, riding the brakes downhill.
“You have to help me find Molly Ravenel,” Gretchen said.
Abby’s heart sank and then shattered into pure rage. She’d spent weeks worrying about what to do, and now Gretchen was talking about a stupid urban legend?
“I don’t care about Molly Ravenel!” Abby shouted. “Why are you acting this way?”
“We have to dig her up and give her a Christian burial,” Gretchen gabbled, leaning close. “She’s underneath the blockhouse on Margaret’s land in Wadmalaw, rotting in the dirt because Satan put her there, because he ate her soul. But if we can bury Molly, save Molly, if we can get Molly out—”
“Shut up!” Abby screamed as the Bunny wheezed up the second span. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! I’m the only friend you have left and I have stuck by you even though everyone says I shouldn’t, and you finally talk to me and it’s this crazy kindergarten junk? I don’t know who you are anymore!”
“I’m me,” Gretchen said. “Am I? Maybe I’m someone else? No, I’m still me; it hasn’t happened yet, it can’t have happened yet. I’m still me, I’m still myself. You have to believe I’m still me.”
Abby decided that Gretchen needed a dose of reality. Everyone was tiptoeing around her and acting like nothing was wrong. Someone had to confront her.
“If you don’t start talking normally,” Abby said, “I will ditch you and I will never talk to you again, and then you’ll be all alone and—”
Gretchen lunged across the gearshift and grabbed the wheel. They were in the downtown lane and Gretchen jammed the wheel hard to the left, sending the Bunny careening into oncoming traffic, steering straight into the grill of a navy-blue pickup truck.
“No!” Abby screamed.
Her instinct was to jam on the brakes, but the pickup was too close. Abby could see the driver: no shirt, mullet rippling in the wind, his cigarette falling out of his mouth, grabbing the top of his wheel with both hands. The car behind them laid on its horn. Abby cranked the wheel to the right, but Gretchen fought her. The Bunny’s tires flickered and wobbled, and then Abby elbowed Gretchen hard in the ear. Gretchen snapped back in her seat, her head knocking into the window, and Abby hauled hard to the right, praying there wasn’t a car where she wanted to go.
The Bunny dipped its hood dangerously low to the asphalt, then swerved back into the right-hand lane with a sickening lurch. Abby had overcorrected, and now she heard that sound in movies when tires squeal; she smelled burning rubber. The Bunny flew at the side of the bridge with its thin steel railing, and Abby saw the hood hitting the metal and her rear end lifting, and then the Bunny flipping end over end into space, falling, falling, hitting the water eighty feet below, hard as concrete.
And then they were back in their lane like nothing had happened, the Bunny doing a cool fifty-five miles per hour. A Creekside mom in a freshly washed station wagon honked as she flew past on the left. The back end of the navy-blue pickup was in the rearview mirror, disappearing toward Mt. Pleasant; Gretchen was leaning against her door, cradling one ear.
Abby’s heart was banging against her ribcage as they rode over the next span and then got off the bridge. She took a left and pulled into the parking lot outside the old cigar factory and pried her hands off the wheel, one cramped finger at a time. Then she screamed so loudly, her voice bounced off the ceiling.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
Gretchen buried her face in her hands and unleashed huge wracking sobs that made her shoulders twitch. Maybe she was crying, maybe she was laughing. Abby didn’t care anymore. Her anger made her incandescent, screaming, jabbing her finger at Gretchen’s shaking back.
“I’m done with you!” she shouted. “You just tried to kill us! I’m done! I’m never talking to you again!”
Gretchen’s hand shot out and twisted itself in the sleeve of Abby’s shirt.
“Don’t,” she begged. “Please don’t leave me alone. If you leave, I can’t do it anymore.”
“Then tell me what’s happening,” Abby said, feeling the adrenaline drain, leaving her hungry and sick.
> “I’m so tired,” Gretchen said, leaning back in her seat, eyes closing. “I just want to sleep.”
“Don’t,” Abby warned.
“You want to know what’s happening?” Gretchen asked. “You want to know what’s really happening?”
“What do you think?” Abby asked.
They sat in the Bunny for a long time without talking, and then Gretchen finally told Abby the truth.
King of Pain
“You can’t be involved,” Gretchen said. “This can’t touch you.”
“I’m already involved. You almost killed us,” Abby said, feeling her stomach tighten and her heart beat faster.
Gretchen wasn’t listening. She was looking at Abby pleadingly.
“Can you promise me?” she asked. “Can you promise me that when this is all over, everything will go back to normal?”
“If you don’t tell me what’s going on right now, then no more phone calls,” Abby said. “No more rides to school. Maybe later, after Christmas vacation, but right now I need a break.”
“Promise me?” Gretchen demanded, tears slipping out of one eye. The other eye was pink and infected. “Promise me it’s not too late for everything to go back to the way it was.”
“Then tell me what’s happening,” Abby said.
Gretchen smeared her shirtsleeve across her face. It came away snotty.
“I’ve been having my period for two weeks,” she said. “I think I’m bleeding to death but my mom won’t listen. She buys me pads and I go through five or six a day.”
“You have to go to the doctor,” Abby said.
“I’ve been,” Gretchen said.
“A different doctor,” Abby said. “A real doctor. You could have a disease.”
Gretchen’s hollow laugh echoed in the Bunny.
“A disease,” she repeated. “It’s like a disease, sure. I caught it that night at Margaret’s.”
Abby felt her heart slow, her fists unclench. They were finally getting somewhere.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I’m not a virgin anymore,” Gretchen said.
The statement hung in the air between them. It wasn’t just that Gretchen had lied to her in front of chapel when she’d asked, but that they had promised not to do this without talking to each other; now Gretchen had crossed a threshold and left Abby behind with the little kids. On the heels of that thought came a more serious one. That night at Margaret’s. Gretchen hadn’t just lost her virginity. This was worse.
“Who was in the woods?” Abby asked.
Abby had read the stories in Sassy, she’d seen The Burning Bed, she and Gretchen had gone to The Accused. If this could happen to Gretchen . . . the thought couldn’t fit inside her head. Who would hurt Gretchen? Who would twist her and tear her up and then dump her in the woods like garbage?
“I can’t,” Gretchen said.
The pieces fit. These were the warning signs in the Cosmo features. And if Gretchen couldn’t say the name, then it was someone they knew.
“Who was it?” Abby asked.
Gretchen closed her eyes and dropped her chin to her chest. Abby reached out and rubbed her arm. Gretchen flinched. Faces from the yearbook flicked through Abby’s head.
“Who?” Abby asked again. “Tell me his name.”
“Every night,” Gretchen said. “Again and again. He sits on my chest and I can’t move. He watches me, and then he hurts me.”
“Who?” Abby asked.
“I can’t change clothes,” Gretchen said. “I have to stay covered. I have to sleep in my clothes and I can’t shower because when he sees my skin, he tears it. I can’t give him a way in. I have to keep him out. Do you understand?”
Abby was lost. Everything was coming too fast.
“If you tell me his name, we can go to the police,” she said.
“Every night . . . ,” Gretchen began, then she unbuttoned her left sleeve and rolled it up over her elbow. Three deep vertical slashes ran down her forearm, from her elbow to her wrist. Abby had heard that this was the right way to slit your wrist if you wanted to kill yourself: up and down, not side to side.
She grabbed Gretchen’s hand: her skin was ice cold. Abby turned Gretchen’s arm backward and forward, then lifted it and looked close. These weren’t cuts, they were gouges. Thick, black scabs scaled her skin, surrounded by yellow bruises. Something had dug in and torn out three trenches of flesh.
“What did you do?” Abby asked.
“I can make him stop,” Gretchen said. “But I don’t want to.”
“Why?”
“Because what comes next is worse,” Gretchen said, then she pulled her arm away and rolled down her sleeve.
“We need to call the police,” Abby said.
“It was in the woods,” Gretchen said. “He was waiting for me. It was dark and he was so much bigger . . . he was bigger than a person should be . . .”
So it was true. Someone had been in the woods and attacked Gretchen, and now she was hurting herself again and again as she relived the trauma, punishing herself just like Seventeen said. It all made so much sense that, insanely, Abby felt proud for having figured it out.
“We have to tell someone,” she said.
Gretchen yawned, a big jaw-cracker, and shook her head.
“No one will believe me,” she said.
“They’ll believe both of us,” Abby said.
Gretchen leaned back against the window, her eyelids heavy. She had delivered her secret to Abby, and now she was drained.
“I know how to stop it,” Gretchen said, eyelids drooping. “But if it stops, that’s when it starts. If it stops, you’ll never see me again.”
“I can fix this,” Abby said. “I can make it stop. Do you trust me?”
Gretchen nodded, eyes closed.
“I’m so tired,” she mumbled. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”
“I’ll make it stop,” Abby said. “And when it’s over, I promise, things will go back to the way they were, okay?”
Gretchen was silent for a long time.
“Okay,” she finally said. Then, in a little girl’s voice: “I want to go home.”
Abby turned the Bunny around and headed back over the bridge. They weren’t skipping school; she was taking a sick friend home. She could tell Mrs. Lang what had happened and together they could figure out what to do. This was bad, but nothing was ruined.
She drove into Mt. Pleasant and through the Old Village, never going over twenty-five, her head buzzing with what she would say to Gretchen’s mom. By the time they pulled up in front of the Langs’ house, she was as ready as she’d ever be, but then she came up short. The driveway was empty.
“Where’s your mom?” Abby asked.
“Supposed to be here,” Gretchen mumbled.
Abby parked on the street. She grabbed Gretchen’s bookbag and led her inside.
Gretchen’s house was freezing. The cold cut through Abby’s clothes and made her skin ripple with gooseflesh. The refrigerated air stank of Glade, and Lysol disinfectant, and potpourri, and Stick-Ups. Abby saw three Magic Mushroom air fresheners on the hall table, and underneath the chemical scent was something sour and earthy.
She helped Gretchen upstairs. As they neared the second floor, the stench of rotten meat overpowered the air fresheners. When she opened the door to Gretchen’s room, Abby stopped in shock. The air fresheners didn’t work in here. The stench oozed down the walls, raw and uncut, seeping up from the floor, coating Abby’s tongue with grease, soaking into her clothes, burrowing into her hair. She breathed through her mouth and it turned her saliva rancid, dripping thick down the back of her throat. But it wasn’t the smell that stopped her.
“Did your mom stop coming in here?” Abby asked.
Every other week, Gretchen’s mom waited f
or her to go to school and then cleaned Gretchen’s room, hunting for notes, digging through trash, searching the underwear drawer, hauling away big black garbage bags full of everything she’d decided Gretchen didn’t need, leaving the space as sterile and impersonal as a furniture display in a department store. But now, Gretchen’s room was a wreck.
Clothes drooled from open drawers, neither of the twin beds were made, the trash can was on its side, and a Diet Coke can lay in the middle of the wall-to-wall white carpet. The walls were scored with black marks. Through the open bathroom door Abby could see the counter thick with balls of used Kleenex, spilled hair product, scrunchies, Band-Aids, Maxipads.
Gretchen squirmed out of Abby’s arms and collapsed on one of the unmade beds. She wrapped the comforter around herself and pulled it tight until only her face was showing. She yawned again.
The cold was seeping into Abby’s bones. Her arms were shaking.
“Do you have a sweater?” she asked.
Gretchen nodded at her closet.
“There’s some in there that he hasn’t ruined,” she said, thick-tongued.
Abby rumbled open the closet doors and pulled out a red Fair Isle sweater that was cleanish. She pulled the sleeves over her hands like gloves, then sat on the end of the bed, staring at three jagged furrows gouged into the drywall; they extended from just beneath the ceiling all the way down to the headboard. Abby couldn’t believe something like that had been allowed to mar Mrs. Lang’s perfect house.
Gretchen’s eyes were closed, her breathing deep and regular. One filthy hand snaked out from beneath the blanket and clutched Abby’s wrist in an ice-cold grip.
“Don’t leave me,” she mumbled.
After a few minutes, Gretchen’s hand opened and fell away. Abby stood up, causing Gretchen’s eyes to flicker open and then immediately droop closed again. Abby knew what she had to do. It was going to be the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life, but because it was so hard, it felt right.
She found Mr. Lang’s office number on the contact cube next to the kitchen phone.
“Thurman, O’Dell, Huggins, and Krell,” a woman said.
My Best Friend's Exorcism Page 12