They were silent the rest of the ride home. Exhausted, Gretchen leaned way back in her seat, picking at her hair, her mud-caked legs stretched out in front of her. The closer they got to Mt. Pleasant, the happier Abby felt. They were headed up onto the first span of the bridge when Bobby McFerrin started whistling; Abby turned up the volume on “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and mellow radio reassurance filled the car. Everyone was in church, so there was no bridge traffic. The sun was sparkling off the waves in the harbor, and there wasn’t a thing in the world that couldn’t be fixed by a good night’s sleep.
Where the Oasis gas station split Coleman Boulevard in two, Abby hung a right and rolled through the Old Village at a stately twenty-five miles per hour. Live oaks formed tunnels over every street, occassionally exploding out of the middle of the road and forcing the the asphalt to split around them. There was nothing suburban about the neighborhood; it felt as if they were driving through a forest full of farmhouses. They passed the brick Sweet Shoppe with its basketball courts, then the mossy Confederate cemetery on the hill, the pinprick police station, the tennis courts. They drove past house after house, and every one of them comforted and calmed Abby.
There were red houses with white trim. Magnolia yellow Southern mansions with wraparound porches and giant white columns. Neat little saltbox cottages with mossy slate roofs. Rambling two-story Victorians wreathed in drooping verandas. Looking up, you couldn’t see the sky, just the underside of an endless green and silver canopy of leaves dripping Spanish moss. Every lawn was clipped, every house was freshly painted, every power walker waved hello and Abby always waved back.
The only flaw in the Old Village’s perfection were big orange stains splashed up the sides of houses where the sprinklers hit. City water was expensive and, even worse, full of fluoride. That might be fine for your children, but God forbid you use it to hydrate your Alhambra Hall Yard-of-the-Month flowerbeds. So everyone sunk wells for their outdoor hoses and (because the Mt. Pleasant water table was loaded with iron) the sprinklers stained everything orange: driveways, sidewalks, porch railings, wood siding. After enough years of sprinkler splash, your property looked jaundiced, and then the neighbors complained, and then you had to repaint your house. But that’s the price you paid to live in paradise.
The Dust Bunny rumbled onto Pierates Cruze, where live oak branches raced low over lawns and hung close enough to the road to scrape the Bunny’s roof. Rocks pinged off the undercarriage as they rolled down the dirt road, the tires kicking up a lazy beige cloud as Abby pulled to a stop in front of Gretchen’s house, which sat close to the street with only a square of asphalt for parking. She yanked the emergency brake (the Bunny had a tendency to roll) and turned to give Gretchen a hug.
“Are you okay?” Abby asked.
“I’m in so much trouble,” Gretchen said.
Abby looked at the digital clock glued to her dashboard: 10:49. Gretchen’s parents were usually home from church by 11:30 these days. There was plenty of time for her to hose off her shoes, get inside, clean herself up, and get her head together but she needed to start moving. Instead, she sat there staring out the windshield. She needed a pep talk.
“I know you’re seriously freaked out,” Abby said. “But I promise you that things are not as bad as they seem. Nothing you’re feeling right now is permanent. But you have to get inside and get cleaned up and get normal or your parents are going to kill you.”
She leaned over and gave Gretchen a hug.
“Eye of the Tiger,” Abby said.
Gretchen looked down at the gearshift and nodded. Then she nodded again, more definitely. “Okay,” she said. “Eye of the Tiger.”
She pushed open the door with her shoulder, then heaved herself up out of the car, slamming the door behind her and stumbling up the driveway to her house. Abby hoped she remembered to leave her shoes outside.
Gretchen was cold. Gretchen was tired. Gretchen had spent all night alone in the woods. They’d hang out later that night, Abby told herself. They’d rent a movie or something. Nothing was wrong here. Don’t worry. Be happy.
The Old Village was in Abby’s rearview mirror as she crossed back over Coleman Boulevard and headed up Rifle Range Road, driving toward a neighborhood where no one ever told you to repaint your trim. In Abby’s neighborhood, telling someone their trim looked a little orange could get you shot.
She passed the Kangaroo gas station across the street from the guy who sold boiled peanuts and garden statuary out of a shack surrounded by hundreds of concrete birdbaths. Then she passed the Ebenezer Mount Zion A.M.E. church, which marked the boundary of Harborgate Shores, a bland cookie-cutter subdivision that ran for miles; after that, the houses got smaller and the yards were mostly full of boat trailers and dirt. Abby passed a thicket of brick ranchers with fake colonial columns holding up vestigial front porches, then it was all roadside shacks, tin-roofed cinderblock bunkers, and, finally, Abby’s driveway.
She pulled up in front of her sad, sagging house, with its broken spine and huffing window-unit air conditioners and the army of busted lawn mowers sprouting from the weeds, which were the only things growing in their yard. Despite owning close to three hundred lawn mowers, Abby’s dad never cut the grass.
When Abby entered Gretchen’s house, it was like opening the pressurized airlock of a gleaming spaceship and walking into a sterile environment. When she entered her own house, it was like forcing open the waterlogged door of a hillbilly’s shack and walking into a moldy cave. Boxes were still piled along the walls and pictures were stacked down the hall because even four years after the move from the larger Creekside house, Abby’s mom still hadn’t unpacked.
Mr. Lang sat on the worn couch, shirt off, hairless belly resting in his lap, holding a Styrofoam cereal bowl, his feet resting on their scratched-up coffee table. He had the TV on.
“Hey, Dad,” Abby said, crossing the living room and kissing him on the cheek.
His eyes didn’t move from the screen.
“Mm,” he said.
“What’re you watching?” Abby asked.
“Gobots,” he said.
Abby stood to the side and watched mopeds transform into grinning robots, and fighter jets shoot lasers out of their tires. She waited for a conversation to materialize. It didn’t.
“What’re you doing today?” she asked.
“Fixing mowers,” he said.
“I’ve got TCBY,” Abby said. “I might go over to Gretchen’s after. What time’s Mom home?”
“Late,” he said.
“You want me to get you a real bowl?” she tried.
“Mm,” he shrugged.
Based on past experience, this was about all she could expect from him, so Abby headed into the kitchen, grabbed a green apple, and walked quickly through the drab house to her bedroom. She opened and closed her door as fast as possible, so that none of the poison gas that made her parents so depressing could follow her.
No one was allowed inside Abby’s room. It belonged to a different house, one she’d built herself, with her own money and hard work. Diagonal pink and silver wallpaper lined the walls, and a carpet of black and white circles with a large red triangle cutting across them covered the floor. There was a JC Penney two-deck stereo sitting on a milk crate she’d draped in silver shimmer fabric, the touch-tone Mickey Mouse phone she’d gotten one Christmas sat next to her bed, and her 19-inch Sampo color TV sat on a glass coffee table.