My Best Friend's Exorcism

by Grady Hendrix

  “Exorcism girl,” he finished.

  Now they were both nodding. Abby was prepared for him to storm away, chew her out; to drop her hand and disappear.

  “Come on,” he said. “I have a break until Low Impact Aqua Dynamics at four. Let’s get a smoothie.”

  That’s how she found herself sitting at Tasti Bites and Blends while the exorcist drank a large Green Dragon Juice with a double wheatgrass shot and she sipped a bottled water.

  “I came to say thank you,” Abby said. “For what you did. The way you came forward. You don’t know how good your timing was. They were about to ship me away to Southern Pines.”

  “Your folks wouldn’t have let that happen,” he said. “Besides, it was the right thing to do. How’s your friend?”

  “Gretchen,” Abby said. “She’s good. It . . . worked. Not the way I thought it would, but it worked.”

  “That’s good,” he said.

  The exorcist took a long pull on his straw.

  “I don’t think you’ll be too happy though,” Abby said, filling the pause. “She doesn’t go to church or anything. I don’t either, really.”

  “Who cares where you sit on Sunday mornings?” Brother Lemon said, and smiled. “I tried to come see you, after I got out, but I heard you’d moved. And with everything that went on, it didn’t seem like a good idea to write you. But it’s a blessing to see you again. To see that you’ve moved on, grown up. Where do you live now?”

  “New York,” she said.

  “My life partner can’t get enough of that Broadway,” he said. “We saw Phantom when it came through here, and The Lion King. They’re only the road companies, but they’re still pretty good. Still waiting for Mamma Mia! Have you seen it?”

  “The music’s great,” Abby said, not quite sure why she was sitting here talking about ABBA with Chris Lemon.

  “Well,” he said. “Maybe Barbara and I will get up there someday.”

  “I’m sorry,” Abby said. “I’m so sorry you went to jail. I’m sorry I never said thank-you.”

  Brother Lemon met her eyes for a moment, then bowed his head, took a long sad drag of his juice, and lifted his face to hers.

  “The reason it’s a blessing to see you again,” he said, “is that I owe you an apology. I am sorry for what I did, what I said to you, how I acted, the choices I made. . . . I’m sorry for all of it. I think about us in that house, and the way I lost control and laid hands on your friend. I trained for two years to place third at the Myrtle Beach Perfect Muscle competition, and I can’t even remember what song was playing when I posed. But I close my eyes and I can remember exactly how it felt, standing over that bed, hurling salt at that girl like I was some kind of tough guy, thinking I was a vessel of God’s wrath. Those six months I spent in Sheriff Al Cannon’s detention center were no man’s idea of a party, but they were my atonement for being possessed by the demons of pride, and vanity, and egotism. And seeing you now, sitting here, I know I did the right thing.”

  “How did it happen?” Abby asked. “I’m a nice girl, you’re into musicals, Gretchen ran our school’s recycling club. So how did we all end up in that room? How did we end up almost killing one another? How did that happen?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” he said. “But what I do know is that we don’t get to choose our lives. I’ve got Aqua Dynamics in fifteen; let me give you a ride back to your car.”

  They wheeled out in his pickup truck, and on the way back he made banal chitchat about New York and Abby gave banal answers. As they stood saying their goodbyes in the Franke Home parking lot, Abby tried one last time.

  “You don’t hate me?” she asked. “For getting you sent to jail?”

  “If you forgive me, I forgive you,” he said.

  “That’s it?” she asked. “It’s kind of . . . anticlimactic. I was hoping you’d yell at me or something.”

  Brother Lemon stepped in close, his shadow blocking the sun.

  “Abby,” he said, “it wasn’t a coinicidence that my brothers and I performed at your school that day. It is no coincidence that you and Gretchen love each other. And it was no coincidence that my daddy and I chose the moment we did to turn myself in at the city courthouse. The devil is loud and brash and full of drama. God, he’s like a sparrow.”

  They stood for a minute in the early afternoon sun.

  “You go on home now,” Brother Lemon said. “They dock my pay if my students drown. I’ll see you in New York sometime.”

  Abby watched him go, and when she turned around she saw a brown VW Rabbit parked at the end of the row of cars. Her heart didn’t leap, she didn’t scream excitedly, she just had a single practical thought:

  “The poor Dust Bunny really needs a bath.”

  Then sunlight flashed off the rearview mirror of a closing car door, and it wasn’t the Dust Bunny after all. It was just somebody’s Subaru. She never told Gretchen about the trip.

  Abby and Gretchen still kept up, but it was phone calls and letters, then postcards and voicemail, and finally emails and Facebook likes. There was no falling-out, no great tragedy, just a hundred thousand trivial moments they didn’t share, each one an inch of distance between them, and eventually those inches added up to miles.

  But there were moments when they had no time for distance. When Gretchen’s dad had a stroke and she got the call to come home. When Abby’s daughter was born and she named her Mary after her mom, and Abby’s dad and Gretchen were the only two people who knew that whatever war the two of them had been fighting had finally ended in surrender. When Gretchen had her first solo exhibition. When Glee reappeared in their lives and things got messy for a while. When Abby filed for divorce. When those things happened, they learned that although those inches may add up to miles, sometimes those miles were only inches after all.

  After Abby’s divorce, no matter how hard she tried to hold everything together, it all kept falling apart. Mary wouldn’t sleep and kept pulling out her hair and Abby couldn’t get her to stop, and in the middle of everything Gretchen showed up at her front door a couple weeks before Christmas and moved in. That didn’t fix everything, but now there were two of them, and Abby thought it was better to be miserable together than to be miserable alone.

  On Christmas Eve, after Mary had screamed herself to sleep yet again, Gretchen poured them water glasses of wine and they sat in the living room feeling broken, knowing they had to wrap Mary’s presents, lacking the energy to move.

  “I hope you don’t take this personally,” Gretchen said after a while, “but I really hate your kid.”

  Abby was too exhausted even to turn her head. “Will you call the police if I murder her?”

  “I’ve been saving something for you,” Gretchen said.

  Abby sat watching the Christmas tree lights while Gretchen went into the kitchen and came back with a can of Coke and two glasses.

  “You left it in your gym bag,” Gretchen said. “At the beach house way back when. My parents threw it out, but I snagged it from the trash. It’s the one Tommy Cox gave you, isn’t it?”

  Abby’s eyes focused on the red and white can, frosted with condensation, sitting on her coffee table—an artifact washed up from some ancient shipwreck.

  “I can’t believe it,” Abby said. “You’ve been saving it?”

  “Merry Christmas,” Gretchen said, and popped the top.

  It gave a crisp hiss and she poured it into two glasses, raising hers in a toast.

  “To 1982,” she said.

  Abby picked up her glass and they clinked them together. She took a sip and was a little disappointed. She’d expected it to taste like magic, but it only tasted like Coke.

  “Sometimes I wonder what keeps us together,” said Gretchen, considering her glass. “Do you? Like when it got hard, there were times we didn’t talk, and I always wondered why we kept on trying.”
>
  Abby took a long sip from her glass. She didn’t want to say anything, but she had thought the same thing, too.

  “I think for me,” Gretchen said, “it’s Max.”

  Her comment caught Abby off guard.

  “The dog?” she asked. “Good Dog Max?”

  “Max is still what hurts most,” Gretchen said. “Isn’t that crazy? He was just a dog, and not even a very smart one—and I’ve been engaged, almost had a baby, I’ve had friends die, and the few times I’ve run into Margaret, she’s made it pretty clear that we’re never going to be okay again. But I actually have dreams about Max, and you’re the only person who knows that wasn’t me. Everyone else thinks I killed my dog, even my parents, and the one person who knows I didn’t do it is you.”

  Abby thought for a moment. “That’s why I don’t go back to Charleston,” she said. “Everybody remembers me as the devil worshipper who stole the fetus from the medical university. I didn’t tell Devin about it, and I don’t know if I’ll ever tell Mary.”

  They were quiet for a few minutes, watching the lights change on the Christmas tree.

  “Halley’s Comet is coming around again in forty-six years,” Gretchen said. “Do you think we’ll still be friends?”

  Abby watched the red lights fade to green to yellow to blue.

  “We’ll be almost ninety years old,” she said. “I can’t think that far ahead.”

  Because in her heart, Abby didn’t want to give the real answer. She loved Gretchen, but what really lasted? Nothing was strong enough to stand against the passage of time.

  But Abby was wrong.

  When she died at the age of eighty-four, there was one person holding her hand. There was one person who sat with her every day. Who made Glee leave when she got too loud and who made Devin, Abby’s ex-husband, visit even though he hated sickness with a phobic intensity. There was one person who read to her when she could no longer see the pages of her book, who fed her pumpkin soup when she got too weak to feed herself, who held up a glass of apple juice when she could no longer raise it to her mouth, and who moistened her lips with a sponge when she lost the ability to swallow. There was one person who stayed by her side even after Mary got too upset and had to leave the room. There was one person with her, all the way down the line.

  Abby Rivers and Gretchen Lang were best friends, on and off, for seventy-five years, and there aren’t many people who can say that. They weren’t perfect. They didn’t always get along. They screwed up. They acted like assholes. They fought, they fell out, they patched things up, they drove each other crazy, and they didn’t make it to Halley’s Comet.

  But they tried.

  BOOSTERS

  Copyright © 2016 by Grady Hendrix. All rights reserved. Except as authorized under U.S. copyright law, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission fromthe publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Number: 2015947003.

  ISBN: 978-1-59474-862-2.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-59474-863-9.

  Typeset in Futura, Sabon and ITC Benguiat.

  Designed by Timothy O’Donnell.

  Cover photography by Jonathan Pushnik.

  Cover model: Alina Grabowski.

  All interior photos © the photographer as follows: ii-iii, Terrance Emerson/Shutterstock; iv, David Prasad, Timothy O'Donnell, Jennifer Boyer, Rob Ireton, Todd Ehlers; v, Rob Ireton, Jared Eberhardt, Rob Ireton, Tara Hunt. Additional elements by Alexandra Villasante, Sarah Kearney, Suzanne Foster, Mary Olson, Kelli Harris, Karen Bates, Andie Reid, Molly Murphy, Mandy Sampson, Rick Chillot, Tiffany Hill, Blair Thornburgh, and Emma Flint.

  Production management by John J. McGurk.

  I Think We’re Alone Now: Words and Music by Ritchie Cordell. Copyright © 1967 EMI Longitude Music. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  Like A Virgin: Words and Music by Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly. Copyright ©1984 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All Rights Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  Quirk Books, 215 Church Street,

  Philadelphia, PA 19106. quirkbooks.com

  Grady Hendrix

  Drama Club 1, 2, 3, 4; Thespian Society 3, 4; Art Council 2, 3, 4; PAVAS 4; J.V. Football 1, 2; Bocce Club 2; Marbles Club 2; Horrorstör 3.

  Likes Most: the VW Bus, Little Mouse Boy, the beach and having the def tan.

  Dislikes Most: Posers, fakes, Preps, Snobs.

  Can Be Found: Forging in the Smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

  Ambition: To be totally rich and own a red Porsche.

  TAKING A BOW . . .

  It’s hard to believe that the time has come to write the final copy for the 1989 Yearbook. After at least a million jobstamps, five deadlines, six unused dummies, and 200 full-fledged nervous break-downs, it’s ready to meet the public. I never would have made it without the help of my staff who deserve to be excused from all exams for the rest of the year.

  First off, Faculty Advisor Mr. Rekulak deserves 12 all-expense-paid vacations to Fiji for his patience and concern for the staff when we had to stay at school until all hours of the night (and morning).

  I truly appreciate the hard work of Rick Chillot in identifying stacks of nameless Middle School faces and making sure club listings matched the photos, which is harder than you’d think.

  Nicole De Jackmo, our Business Manager, Julie Leung, and Valerie Howlett have kept me sane with their organizational skills and mastery of the ads section.

  The eye-popping visuals are easy to take for granted, but there wouldn’t be a single photo or image in this yearbook without the hard work of Art Department head Tim O’Donnell.

  Mary Ellen Wilson and Jane Morley have spent hundreds of hours in front of the computer typing in all the copy and formatting uncountable floppy disks.

  Every morning Mr. Barlow turned on the lights in his Computer Room to find Moneka Hewlett and Katherine McGuire already there, writing hundreds of photo captions.

  The only person who truly understood the mysteries of Aldus PageMaker was Shari Smiley who rescued the yearbook from digital disaster more than once.

  And a huge thank you to our Section Heads who have gone above and beyond the call of duty: Brett Cohen, David Borgenicht, John McGurk, Mandy Dunn Sampson, Andie Reid, Blair Thornburgh, Megan DiPasquale, Tiffany Hill, Kate Brown, and Molly Murphy.

  Because of everyone’s invaluable help, and the support of all our friends and family, I am proud to present the

  Albemarle Academy 1989 Yearbook.

  At Quirk, our strikingly unconventional titles include best-selling fiction, award-winning craft books and cookbooks, irreverent reference guides, wall-enhancing poster books, and plenty of titles in a category all their own (you try to explain The Resurrectionist). But we’re not just book creators, we’re also a community of book lovers. Join us for literary pub crawl suggestions, Worst Case Wednesday survival advice, love letters to libraries, plus announcements about contests, giveaways, book release events, and author signings. We’re seekers of all thing awesome, and since you are awesome, isn’t it time we talked?

  Horrorstör

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  Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge

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