Gretchen stood up and got right in Wallace’s face. He looked like he wanted to grab her, but even Wallace knew you didn’t hit a girl in the middle of the Lawn.
“You aren’t good enough for Margaret,” Gretchen said. “You cheat, you lie, you say you love her but only so she’ll do you. And you know what’s most pathetic? The way you keep hitting on me. I’m not interested, Wimpy.”
Gretchen’s jaw was sticking out, her neck was corded, and her eyes were so wide you could see white all the way around. Abby felt like she should stop her, but things had gone too far. They were in a new territory that she didn’t know how to navigate.
“Margaret should dump your ass,” Gretchen said, “because—”
Then she leaned forward and threw up. Abby and Glee scuttled backward as a gallon of hot milky liquid spewed from Gretchen’s mouth in a high-pressure stream, hosing the grass between Wallace’s feet. Abby was barely out of the blast radius when Gretchen’s stomach flexed again, pumping out another gallon of thick white fluid. In it were black strands that looked like worms. Abby leaned closer and realized they were feathers.
Wallace leapt backward, shrieking like a girl.
“These are new shoes!” he shouted.
He noticed that everyone was watching and stuck his chest out, pushing Margaret behind him like a real man, protecting his woman from the horrible threat of girl vomit. Gretchen stood there, bent over at the waist, hands on her knees, breathing hard. Everyone could hear the seagulls, creaking and wheeling overhead, flocking around this sudden abundance of food.
“Oh. My. God,” Glee said.
“I—” Gretchen started, then she fell to her knees and unleashed another blast of white barf; when she’d finished, some of the feathers clung to her lower lip like spider legs. Abby saw Mr. Barlow running across the grass toward them; people were starting to move, and far off someone was giving a slow clap and whistle. Noise was breaking out across the Lawn, but Abby only had eyes for Gretchen. She raised her head and their eyes met. It looked like Gretchen was mouthing the words “help me.”
Then Mr. Barlow was there, and everyone was talking, and he was pulling Gretchen up and leading her to the front office, handling her carefully. Wallace was going back to his friends, getting away from the scene of the crime, pulling Margaret along behind him.
People started approaching the site of the disaster, but before they could get close, Abby snatched the volleyball shirt out of her bag and covered the pile of throw up. As she dropped her jersey over the white puddle, she could have sworn she saw some of the black feathers squirming slowly and unfolding, curling around each other as if they were alive.
Parents Just Don’t Understand
When Gretchen got mono at the end of eighth grade, taking care of her was a team effort. Abby, Margaret, and Glee had all her classes covered. Every day Abby would drop off Gretchen’s homework. On weekends the three of them would get together at Margaret’s downtown house and call Gretchen, sharing the phone, two ears pressed to the receiver at a time, as they told her how unfair Mr. Vikernes’s algebra exam was, and how all the seniors got in trouble for Senior Cut Day, and how Naomi White failed all her classes and was going to be held back.
That was the year Abby started weekday shifts at TCBY, and Mrs. Lang used to pick her up in the afternoon when she was finished. Abby would bring Gretchen vanilla in a cup with rainbow sprinkles and Oreo cookie crunch (once Gretchen’s throat could handle it) and sit on the other bed in Gretchen’s dark room and they’d do magazine quizzes and Abby would read to her: horrifying accounts of skiing accidents from Mrs. Lang’s copies of The Upper Room, gruesome stories of ballet dancers disfigured in house fires from her copies of Guideposts, and the “It Happened to Me” columns from Sassy with titles like “My Mom’s a Drug Addict” and “I Was Raped.”
That was the year Abby and Margaret lobbied Mr. Lang to start paying for cable. When they all pulled together for six weeks to get Gretchen better.
This time, Abby was doing it alone.
Gretchen wasn’t in school Thursday or Friday. Abby knew she hated skipping, so she kept calling Gretchen’s house, desperate to find out what was wrong, but Gretchen could never come to the phone. Over the weekend, Abby tried to convince Margaret and Glee to drive over with her, but Margaret wasn’t having it.
“She can call me and apologize or she can kiss my rooster,” Margaret said. “Did you hear what she said about Wallace? Who even thinks shit like that?”
Also, she was going out in the boat that weekend.
“I can’t come over,” Glee said. “It’s too upsetting.”
“And you’re going out in Margaret’s boat this weekend,” Abby said.
There was a long silence.
“Well, what am I supposed to do?” Glee asked. “Stay home?”
Abby kept calling Gretchen’s house until finally Mrs. Lang got sick of it.
“Honestly, Abby, you have to stop calling. It’s becoming inappropriate.”
After that, she let the machine pick up.
On Monday morning, Mrs. Lang called Abby’s house and explained that she would be driving Gretchen to school because they had a doctor’s appointment. Abby was tempted to ask what kind of doctor but didn’t want to be called inappropriate again—it was a polite way of saying she was tacky—so she kept her mouth shut.
A tropical storm was clawing its way up the coast, pushing massive thunderstorms toward Charleston. It was so dark that Abby drove to school with her headlights on. An angry gray wind ripped down the breezeway, and during first-period Intro to Programming it rattled the door all through class, then changed direction and started screaming through the cracks.
It wasn’t until fifth-period Ethics that Gretchen finally arrived. Father Morgan taught the class and he was way too young and looked way too much like a blandly handsome TV weatherman to be taken seriously. So when Gretchen straggled in well after the second bell, holding a late slip, Abby had no problem waving to her while Father Morgan was talking.
“Every week for fourteen years,” Father Morgan was saying, “we’ve been taken on a wonderful journey to a place called Lake Wobegon, a little town of five hundred souls somewhere in Minnesota.”
Gretchen looked dully around the room, and Abby waved again.
“Gretchen!” she whisper-hissed.
“It’s a town with—yes, Abby?” said Father Morgan.
Abby wilted under the attention of an interrupted teacher, even a lightweight like Father Morgan. “I saved Gretchen a seat,” she explained.
“Wonderful,” he said, grinning. “Now, while Lake Wobegon feels as real as Charleston, some of you will be surprised to discover that it exists only in the imagination of Garrison Keillor . . .”
Gretchen looked up and down the rows, and Abby waved again.
“Abby?” Father Morgan grinned. “Is this about Lake Wobegon?”
“No, sir,” Abby said, dropping her hand.
Gretchen took an empty desk by the door. While Father Morgan went on about Lake Wobegon and the power of storytelling, and the wind rattled the windows, Abby tried to figure out what was wrong. Gretchen looked pale, her hair was lank, and she wasn’t even wearing lip gloss. Something white and crusty was caked in the corner of her mouth. Abby worried she had mono again.
Thirty-nine interminable minutes later, the bell rang and everyone ran for the door, shoving their desks back and grabbing their books, overjoyed that they didn’t have to listen to Father Morgan anymore. Abby caught up with Gretchen in the crush by the door as the class spilled out into the breezeway.
“What happened?” she asked. “I’ve been calling you all weekend.”
Gretchen shrugged and tried to push her way through the bodies, but Abby would not be denied. She pulled Gretchen up the breezeway, past the waist-high brick wall and into the garden in front of the auditorium. The ground was paved in dark brown brick; the garden was screened from the breezeway by a wall of trees and scattered with benches for private reflection and making out. A cold wind rattled the crepe myrtle branches.