“It’s Julie Slovitch,” Margaret said during lunch. “God, that pig is delusional. She fantasizes about humping him all the time.”
Christ, Laura Banks agreed, Julie Slovitch was so gross. She’s definitely the person who must have had that bouquet of white roses delivered to Wallace during fourth-period break that morning.
“Now look at him,” Margaret said. “Acting like he’s King Stud.”
Abby sat with her back against the lamppost on the Lawn, next to the dark green Charleston bench where Margaret was ranting at Laura Banks. Glee didn’t sit with them anymore. At lunch she went to Chapel and took Communion instead. Gretchen was spending her lunches on the benches outside the now-shuttered Senior Hut with all the upperclassmen. Margaret dismissed Glee as a “Jesus freak” and ignored her defection, but she couldn’t ignore the fact that she was losing Wallace. It ate away at her from the inside.
Indian summer was making everyone slap-happy. Wallace worked the Lawn, passing out his white roses to all the girls, bestowing them with courtly bows and kissing their hands. Eventually, he wandered over to Margaret, Laura, and Abby and offered Margaret a rose.
“Here,” he said. “You looked so lonely, and you know, I have so many flowers because I’m such a stud.”
Margaret regarded him for a moment.
“Why don’t you shut up about your fucking flowers?” she finally suggested.
“Jealous much?” Wallace asked.
“I feel sorry for you,” Margaret snapped. “Julie Slovitch is a dog. If you loved me, you’d dump those in the trash.”
Abby knew exactly what Wallace was going to say before he said it.
“Who says I love you?” he asked.
Then he realized what he’d said. A single second of silence passed, and then Margaret laughed, harsh and braying. The sound echoed to the breezeway.
“You did,” she said. “When I almost dumped you and you begged me on the phone to stay with you.”
“I never begged shit,” Wallace said.
“You begged me like a little girl,” Margaret said, darting her face forward.
Her cheeks were bright red and the tendons in her neck popped. Her forehead was bony, bisected by a single pulsing vein, and the muscles along her jaw twitched beneath her translucent skin. Her knuckles were huge. On the volleyball court it was clear that her knees were wider than her thighs. The flesh was melting from her bones.
“You’re a bitch,” Wallace said. “Even Julie Slovitch has a better body than you. My dog has a better body than you.”
“Then why don’t you fuck your dog,” Margaret snapped.
That’s when Gretchen appeared, and instead of sitting with them, she put her hand on Wallace’s shoulder.
“Come on, Wallace,” she said. “You’re just chapping Margaret’s rooster. Why don’t you go?”
To Abby’s surprise, he left.
But not before getting in the final word.
“Fucking Skeletor,” he said.
Then he was off, high-fiving Owen Bailey, handing out the rest of his roses. The next afternoon it was written on one of the mirrors in the girl’s upper school bathroom:
“Skeletor gives good bone.”
Margaret had a new nickname.
There was one last person Abby hadn’t tried. As much as she hated to admit it, one other person might know Gretchen the way she did. So on Saturday night she finished her TCBY shift, and the second she got home she slammed her bedroom door, laid the pink blanket along the bottom, and opened Gretchen’s daybook. There was Andy’s phone number. She reached for Mickey Mouse and dialed.
The phone rang, short and shrill, twice, three times, then the click of someone picking up.
“Hello?” Abby said.
Silence. Outside her bedroom window, a moth batted against the screen.
“Is this Andy?” Abby asked. “I’m Abby Rivers. I’m a friend of Gretchen Lang?”
Silence. The fiber-optic ball on her dresser faded from purple to red.
She heard a mechanical echo down the line, wind blew static through a metal pipe. Her digital clock read 11:06.
“Abby?” a faint voice said.
Even furred with distortion, Abby recognized it instantly. This was the voice that reached down her throat and wrapped its fingers around her heart.
“Gretchen?” Abby said.
There was a series of clicks as solenoids snapped into place somewhere in the darkness of the phone company switching center. Deep space pops flew down trunk lines buried underground.
“Abby?” Gretchen said again, clearer. “Please?”
“Where are you?” Abby asked, her voice dry. “What number is this?”
A wall of static washed across the line. When it had passed, Gretchen was already talking.
“. . . need you,” Abby heard her say.
“I can fix this,” Abby said. “All you have to do is talk to me. Tell me how to fix this.”
“It’s too late,” Gretchen said, and her voice peaked and distorted. “I think? What time is it?”
“Are you home?” Abby asked. “I’ll meet you at Alhambra.”
“It’s dark,” Gretchen said, her voice drifting away. “He tricked me . . . he switched places with me and now I’m here and he’s there.”
“Who?” Abby asked.
“I think I’m dead,” Gretchen said.
Abby was suddenly very aware of the phone in her hand, her body on the bed, the thinness of the walls, how her window wasn’t locked, of the darkness pressing against the glass.
She imagined the phone lines running underground, through the dirt, past Molly Ravenel’s grave. She knew it was an urban legend but she imagined Molly hugging the Southern Bell cable tightly to her bony chest, clutching it with her hard fingers, throwing one leathery leg around it and drawing it close to the dry, insect-heavy center of herself, pressing her skeleton lips to the line, the clips and clicks echoing behind her grinning teeth.
“This is me,” Gretchen said, suddenly loud and clear. Then the sound of a tuning radio buzzed in Abby’s ear. “That isn’t me. That’s . . .” Metal crunched hard around the next few words. “You have to stop her. I mean me. I mean her. This is so hard, Abby. I can’t think clearly and it hurts to do this for long, but you have to stop her. She’s going to hurt everybody.”
“Who?” Abby asked.
“What time is it there?” Gretchen asked.
“11:06,” Abby said.
“What time?” Gretchen repeated with idiotic simplicity. “What time is it there? What time is it there? What time is it there?”
Abby tried to appease her.
“It’s Thursday night,” she said. “October 27.”
“Halloween is coming,” Gretchen said. “You have to be careful, Abby. She’s been planning something for you. She wants to hurt you most of all.”
“Why?” Abby asked.
“Because you’re my only friend,” Gretchen said.
The last word dissolved into a metallic echo, and then something thick and plastic snapped in Abby’s ear and the line was clear.
“Gretchen?” Abby whispered into the receiver.
Gretchen was gone.
Abby called the number back but the phone just rang.
Monday was the start of the blood drive, and during fourth-period break Margaret went out to the Red Cross Winnebago parked in front of the school to give blood. When she got up off the couch afterward, she seemed unsteady, then she said, “Mom?” and passed out. It happened all the time, but the Red Cross nurse was alarmed at how thin Margaret was and insisted they send her home.
Something was happening. Abby thought about the phone call with Gretchen, and how she was putting Glee in vestry and helping Margaret lose weight, and how she seemed to be dating Wallace. Something was going on, and Abby nee
ded to stop it, but she couldn’t do it alone.
She would find a way to talk to Glee, even if it meant going to Communion during lunch, because Glee was spending all her time doing vestry, which was a very un-Glee thing to do. She’d talk to Margaret, too. Maybe even Father Morgan. If they didn’t believe her, she had the daybook, but that was a last resort. A school administrator would see that and put Gretchen directly in Southern Pines. She couldn’t show it to anyone until she was sure.
But first, there were the dead bodies.
She Blinded Me with Science
Abby had been dreading this moment since ninth grade. Everyone knew it was coming, and the only thing you could do was pray it wasn’t as bad as you’d heard.
On Thursday morning, the school loaded all the tenth graders onto Albemarle’s one yellow school bus, put the ones who couldn’t fit inside the red sports van, and carted them over the West Ashley Bridge to downtown Charleston. It was time for that most feared and anticipated rite of passage: the gross anatomy lab field trip.
Gretchen and Glee made sure they were in the red van because it was being driven by Father Morgan, but Abby didn’t even try to join them. She sat on the big yellow bus with everyone else, crammed against the rear window next to Nikki Bull. All around her, students were nervous or scared or excited, and they talked nonstop. Mostly they were talking about Geraldo Rivera.
His two-hour special Exposing Satan’s Underground had aired the night before during prime time on NBC. It sent Geraldo up against the forces of satanism, talking to serial killers (and Ozzy Osbourne) as he proved (or strongly implied) that a secret network of over one million satanists was responsible for murdering fifty thousand children a year. The special made Abby feel corroded. It was streaked with dirt from shallow graves, smeared with blood from crime scene photos, splattered with hot saliva from possessed men in white sweaters foaming at the mouth as they snarled “Get out of here” at crosses being waved in their faces during exorcisms. Geraldo stood in front of a wall of TV screens, sickened by what he heard: women identified as “breeders” calmly explaining that their babies were born to be eaten in satanic communions, their tiny corpses burned, buried in concrete, hacked into pieces, and scattered at sea.
The next day, satanism was all anyone could talk about.
“There was a senior last year,” Nikki Bull said, “she had a baby, and devil worshippers made her drown it behind the school. The marsh is full of dead babies. Sometimes their bones wash up but the administration says they’re seagull bones, and the maintenance staff burns them in the incinerator.”
“The custodians know what’s going on, but they’re too scared to say anything,” Eric Frey added.
“My uncle’s in law enforcement and he says you couldn’t pay him a million dollars to go to Northwoods Mall this time of year,” Clyburn Perry said. “Right before Halloween, they walk around with a needle hidden under their watchbands, and it’s got a tiny bit of AIDS blood on it. They scratch the back of your hand as you walk by and you don’t think it’s a big deal but then six months later you’ve got AIDS.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Dereck White asked, turning around in his seat. “Who’s this mysterious ‘they’ doing all these terrible things?”
Everyone felt sorry for him because it was so obvious.
“Satanists,” Nikki Bull said. “It was on TV.”
The bus rumbled into downtown Charleston and cars stacked up behind it, the drivers too polite to honk their horns. Abby listened to low-hanging branches scrape the roof as they pulled into the medical university’s parking lot. As they were packed into the enormous elevator to go up to the fifth floor, Nikki Bull was still talking about satanists.
“So the last headmaster? Some satanists broke into the graveyard and stole his mom’s body. Then they went to the haunted house he always put up in his front yard at Halloween, and they dressed her corpse up as a witch and hung it from a tree by a noose. He thought it was one of his decorations and left it up there for three days. When he went to take it down, he saw that it was his mom and he went insane.”
“Can it, Bull,” Mrs. Paul said from the other side of the elevator.
The elevator cage rattled once, hard, and then the doors slammed open and the students spilled out on a floor that was cold and smelled like pickle juice. Up ahead was the first bunch of kids, giggling and nervous and jostling one another. Abby’s group got sandwiched between the students ahead and those coming in behind as more kids piled off the elevator and squeezed into the narrow corridor, trying to stay as far away as possible from the door to the gross anatomy lab. Now that the hall was full, they all lapsed into expectant silence. Everyone knew what was coming next.
“Hello,” the doctor said. He had a chicken-skin neck and a vulture’s bald head covered with liver spots. He wore a white lab coat with loaded pockets that sagged halfway down his thighs, and he was thrilled to be there. “I’m Dr. Richards and I run the Medical University of South Carolina’s Gross Anatomy Lab. Today, you are about to see what’s eventually going to happen to every single one of you. So let’s dive right in and meet your future.”
The students shuffled and pushed and shoved through the double doors after him, flooding into the vast room; then they saw what lay inside and jammed up in the doorway, pressing themselves to the wall. The room stretched into the distance, with green marbled linoleum on the floor and plastic tiles on the walls. Down the center were sixteen steel tables, each one a hard bed on which lay a single partially peeled cadaver.
“The first class that new medical students take is Gross Anatomy,” Dr. Richards said, grinning. “They’re split into groups of four and assigned a donor. The donor is anonymous, and while in the old days we might get the occasional uncle or friend of the family popping up on the table, we haven’t had a surprise like that since 1979. All the donors are carefully screened. In the spring, when class is over, the students gather at the chapel and have a memorial service for their donors, because it is a great thing to leave your body to science. I hope some of you will choose to do so after today. It would be a pleasant change to get some younger donors into the rotation.”
The doctor was relaxed and easy around these jigsaw bodies. They made him happy.
“But between the first day of class and the memorial service,” Dr. Richards continued, “the students work each donor down to the bone and learn what makes them tick.”
Kids were giggling and shoving each other, and the smell of pickles drove all the oxygen out of the room. Abby forced herself to look at the dead bodies. Their skin was covered in bristles and their toenails were thick and yellow. Their dusty gray skin was peeled back to reveal layers of beef jerky muscles and a fruit basket of internal organs. Mottled gray lungs, dark red hearts, glistening links of lavender intestines, brown livers, a cornucopia of meaty fruit piled up inside.
Dr. Richards kept talking, full of macabre observations and corny jokes. When a cadaver’s hand slipped off a table and dropped into his pocket, he mugged a startled reaction.
“Get out of there,” he said, chuckling, and he plucked out the dead hand by its hairy wrist and dropping it back on the table. Everyone laughed too hard as he said, “I think he was going for my wallet.”
Dr. Richards was eager to give the students his best stories: a balloon of cocaine found inside a stomach cavity, a donor whose feet were mysteriously crossed every morning when they opened the lab, a donor who was the class valedictorian’s long-lost aunt. Abby saw Gretchen and Glee standing behind Father Morgan on the other side of the circle, whispering to each other. Before she could start to feel left out, Dr. Richards changed the subject.
“And this,” he said, leading them to the wooden shelves in the back of the room, “this is our little cabinet of curiosities.”
It was exactly as Wallace had advertised. Floating inside jars of yellow pickle juice were a disembodied breast, a two-headed baby
with its sternum laid open so they could see its bifurcated spinal column, a tongue distended by a tumor the size of a baseball, a severed hand with six fingers.
“Hey, Abby,” Hunter Prioleaux said over her shoulder, “you dropped your lunch.”
Abby looked down and nearly tripped over a white plastic ten-gallon bucket. It was sitting on the floor and overflowing with gray fetuses. They were pressed from the same mold: skin smooth, eyes closed, mouths open, tiny hands bunched into fists. Piled in the bucket without rhyme or reason, they looked like hairless kittens, heavy and sleek.
Abby swore she wouldn’t be the first one to go out to the hall. Her vision swam and blurred around the edges. She looked up and locked eyes with Gretchen. They stared at each other for a second and then Gretchen smiled, and though Abby thought the smile looked mean, she instinctively smiled back. She couldn’t help it. Gretchen stopped smiling and whispered something in Glee’s ear and the two of them giggled. Abby flicked her eyes away. All she could think was, Why on the floor? Couldn’t they at least put them on a table?
On the drive back to school, Abby could still smell pickles clinging to her clothes. In front of her, Dereck White and Nikki Bull continued talking about some kid named Jonathan Cantero who’d stabbed his mom to death in Tampa. Abby couldn’t stop seeing their muscles moving beneath their skin as they talked. She imagined what their mouths would look like with no lips.
“He was a Dungeons and Dragons geek,” Nikki said. “That’s why he killed his mom. The game made him do it.”
“You’re insane,” Dereck said. “A game can’t make anyone do anything.”
“It’s a satanic game,” Nikki said, and she rolled her eyes. “You’re so naive.”
Abby peeled the skin back from everyone on the bus, which became a metal can on wheels full of wide-eyed skeletons with clacking jaws. Their muscles jerked and danced like puppet strings, raising and lowering their arm bones and leg bones, and they were all just bones and meat and they all looked exactly the same.
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