Abby couldn’t move. Outside, a customer walked up and dumped videotapes into the Blockbuster return slot, sending them rattling down the chute.
“I put it in my mouth,” Gretchen said. “It tasted like poison, and I was so scared, and I had to pee so bad, and I had my finger on the trigger and I could feel exactly how much pressure I needed so I could stop feeling this way all the time. Then I realized you’d think it was all your fault, because you always think everything is all your fault, and I knew I had to explain to you that I was pulling the trigger because I was a fuck-up, not because of anything you’d done. So I decided to write a note telling you that it wasn’t your fault, and then the note turned into a letter, and somewhere between pages five and eight I didn’t want to kill myself anymore.”
Gretchen shoved her hands into Abby’s. They were warm and wet.
“You keep rescuing me and I don’t know why,” Gretchen said. “But every day I tell myself my life must be worth something because you keep saving it. They can’t keep us apart. I don’t care what happens. You never stopped trying to save me.
“I love you, Abby. You’re my best friend, and my mirror, and my reflection, and you are me, and you are everything I love and everything I hate, and I will never give up on you.”
Behind them, a police car cruised by slow. Gretchen stopped talking while they watched it pass.
“Do you remember fourth grade?” Abby asked. The words felt awkward in her mouth. “My birthday party at Redwing Rollerway?”
Gretchen thought for a minute.
“My mom made me give you a Bible,” she said.
“No one came,” Abby said. “I was so humiliated. Then you showed up at the last minute and saved the day.”
The cop made a second pass and this time stopped behind them, his engine idling.
“What happened in the beach house?” Abby asked. “It all feels so real, but everyone keeps saying I made it up. I need to know if it really happened or if it was all just unicorns.”
Gretchen put a hand on either side of Abby’s face and pulled them together until their foreheads were touching.
“It wasn’t unicorns,” Gretchen said. “I need you to tell me everything. Because you’re the only person I can hear it from without going insane. I need to know it all.”
Abby started to talk. She was still talking when a second police car showed up, and she didn’t stop when they put the two of them in the backseat. She kept on talking while they waited for her mom to show up at the police station, and she was still talking when they got home.
After some arguing, Abby’s mom called the Langs, and Mr. Lang bought a ticket to fly up the next day. That night Abby and Gretchen slept in Abby’s bedroom and kept talking all night.
They stopped briefly when an exhausted Mr. Lang arrived the next morning and launched into a tirade about what was going to happen to Gretchen and Abby if he had anything to say about it. Abby’s dad waited until he ran out of steam and said:
“I think enough harm’s been done, Pony. Why don’t we leave it here. Let the girls write. If they can pay the bill, let them call. Can’t you see this is tearing them up inside?”
Abby and Gretchen kept talking all the way to the airport, and then Abby went home and wrote Gretchen a letter, and that night at 11:06 her phone rang. They kept on calling, and writing letters, and making each other mix tapes with ornate covers they drew in silver and gold paint pens or made out of wrapping paper, recording messages to each other between the songs, mailing each other their high school yearbooks to sign, mailing each other rolls of toilet paper with stamps on the wrappers to see if the postal service would deliver them (they did), sending each other giant birthday cards, collages, weird candy, squirt bottles of Bartender’s Friend artificial foam, ridiculous keychains, inappropriate Hallmark condolence cards for no good reason, and Abby sent Gretchen a corny postcard whenever the Cherry Hill West volleyball team went out of town.
They kept talking for years.
And She Was
The exorcist wound up sitting in jail for eight months, but ultimately no one would testify, so they threw a bunch of minor charges at him and commuted his sentence to time served. He walked out and disappeared. Abby always meant to write him a letter. She started a few, but she never knew where to send them; and after a while, like it always does, life happened, and the fall of 1988 began to fade.
It was little things at first. Abby missed a phone call because she had an away game. Then one time Gretchen didn’t write back and never made up for the missing letter. They got busy with SATs and college applications, and even though they both applied to Georgetown, Gretchen didn’t get in, and Abby wound up going to George Washington anyways.
At college they went to their computer labs and sent each other emails, sitting in front of black and green CRT screens and pecking them out one letter at a time. And they still wrote, but calling became a once-a-week thing. Gretchen was Abby’s maid of honor at her tiny courthouse wedding, but sometimes a month would go by and they wouldn’t speak.
Then two months.
Then three.
They went through periods when they both made an effort to write more, but after a while that usually faded. It wasn’t anything serious, it was just life. The dance recitals, making the rent, first real jobs, pickups, dropoffs, the fights that seemed so important, the laundry, the promotions, the vacations taken, shoes bought, movies watched, lunches packed. It was a haze of the everyday that blurred the big things and made them feel distant and small.
Abby returned to Charleston only one time. The year she landed her first real job, she got the call everyone gets twice in their lives, and she packed a dress and drove out to New Jersey and sat in the church and stood in the graveyard and wished that she felt something besides tired.
The plan was to stay with her dad for a couple of days, but the first night she woke up from a dream she couldn’t remember, and she knew she had to see Charleston again. She bought a ticket before her dad was even out of bed.
It wasn’t until she was checking into the Omni downtown (now called Charleston Place) that she realized why she’d come. From there it was just a couple of phone calls before she was pulling her rental car up in front of the Franke Home visitors entrance, and a perky girl was telling her that he was leading a tai chi class in the Wellness Center. Abby walked over and looked through the window and waited for the exorcist to finish teaching repulse monkey pose to a roomful of eighty-somethings.
After class he helped his elderly students pick their bones up off the floor and then he was standing in front of Abby again for the first time in over ten years. He looked the same, only now he sported a hard little pot belly and wore a baseball cap to hide that he was balding. He was wearing baggy Joey Buttafuoco pants and a tank top.
Abby stepped forward and stuck out her hand.
“Hi, Chris,” she said. “I don’t know if you remember me.”
Reflexively he stuck out his hand, but clearly he didn’t.
“Did I teach one of your parents?” he asked.
“I’m Abby Rivers,” she said. “I came here to apologize for ruining your life.”
He looked confused for a minute, and just as she was about to fill him in, he remembered.
“I was the—” she began.
“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.”