Then she punched Abby in the stomach.
Abby had never been hit, and it took her by surprise. All the air whooshed out of her lungs, and she dropped to her hands and knees on the carpet. Gretchen kicked her in the stomach, digging the toe of her sneaker deep into Abby’s solar plexus. Abby whimpered. Gretchen kicked her again in the side. Abby’s body reflexively curled around itself.
Gretchen crouched down, grabbed a handful of Abby’s moussed hair, and yanked her head up.
“You’ve been begging for this for ages,” Gretchen said. “Okay, well, now you have my full and undivided attention. Do you like it? Does this feel good?”
Abby wept. Gretchen snaked her fingers tighter into Abby’s hair and twisted.
“Stay out of my way,” she said. “You’re finished.”
She gave Abby’s head a final, furious shake, then bounced it off the carpet and straightened up. She put the sole of her shoe against Abby’s cheek and ground it into the floor.
“Stay down,” she said. “Play dead. Good dog.”
Then she picked her daybook up off the bed and strolled out of Abby’s room, taking her shopping bag with her. There was the sound of opening and closing doors in the hall, then something fell over in the living room, and after a minute Abby heard the front door slam.
Abby leapt to her feet and ran to the front door and shot the deadbolt home. Then she ran into her bedroom, slammed her door, and moved her desk chair under the handle. She felt so sick, she wanted to laugh. From the photographs around her mirror, Gretchen grinned at her, braces shining, Gretchen laughed at her, Gretchen stuck out her tongue at her and Abby looked at the clock and the time said 11:11 and in eight hours Father Morgan would arrive and she didn’t have the daybook. She didn’t have anything. She couldn’t save Margaret, she couldn’t save Glee, she couldn’t stop Gretchen, she couldn’t save herself.
She looked around her room and wanted to scream. How did she ever think she could do this? This was a little girl’s room, this wasn’t the room of a grown-up. This was the room of a child.
She ripped down her E.T. poster, yanking the brittle paper off the wall and pulling it to pieces; then she took Tommy Cox’s Coke and pegged it into the corner. She clawed the photos out from around her mirror, shredding Gretchen’s face and her face, screaming profanities as she reduced their years together to glossy confetti on the floor. She yanked No Jacket Required out of her tape deck, the black magnetic ribbon spilling like streamers, then she unspooled one mix tape after another: Awesome Summer Mix 88, Halley Comet Beach Party, From Gretchen to Abby IV.
It wasn’t enough. The sight of her stuffed animals made her want to puke. They belonged to a stupid little girl. She turned her nails into claws and dug them into Geoffrey the Giraffe’s face and tore out his shiny black eyes, then split the stitching down his back and turned him inside out. She twisted off Cabbage Head’s skull and took a pair of scissors and slashed open Wrinkles the Pound Puppy’s belly. She felt sick because she knew what she was doing was wrong, but she couldn’t stop herself. She was tired of being stupid, she was tired of Gretchen laughing at her, she was tired of losing. She was so tired.
When Abby woke up, full sunlight was flooding through her window, and someone had just stopped screaming. Abby sat bolt upright in the wreckage of her room, heart pounding, scalp prickling. She’d overslept. The house was silent. Abby listened, hoping it had all been a bad dream.
The woman screamed again. It was her mother.
Abby threw her desk chair aside and opened the bedroom door. Three enormous police officers were waiting in the hallway. Abby’s mom was down at the other end of the hall, crying, held back by a female officer.
“Mom?” Abby shouted. “What’s wrong?”
“You need to come with us,” the larger officer said.
“Why?” Abby asked.
“We need to know what you can tell us about this,” he said, holding up a brown paper bag.
It was Gretchen’s bag. The one she’d had the night before.
“What is it?” she asked.
“You tell us,” a shorter cop said.
Before they could stop her, Abby snatched the bag and it tore open. Something boneless slithered to the floor with a meaty thump. It was gray, like a skinned cat. Its eyes were closed, its mouth was open, and its hands were balled into little fists. It landed on the tips of the shorter cop’s feet. He covered his mouth and nose and turned away.
They’d found the missing baby.
Harden My Heart
After Abby was taken into custody, identified, advised of her rights, questioned, given an intake screening, interviewed again by a member of the Department of Juvenile Justice, and assigned a date for a detention hearing forty-eight hours away, it was made clear that she could be released to her parents or spend the next two days in the juvenile detention center. Mr. Rivers wanted to leave her there to teach her a lesson, but Mrs. Rivers wasn’t about to let her daughter spend the night in juvie, so they brought her home.
Abby would have had an easier time in the detention center. Her dad drove, staring straight ahead through the windshield, not saying a word. Her mom wept the entire time. Whenever it seemed like she was about to stop, she started up again. When they got home, she went to her bedroom and slammed the door. Abby could hear her crying through the walls.
Her dad poured himself a Diet Pepsi over ice, then sat down carefully at the kitchen table, sipping it and staring at the wall.
“Dad?” Abby said, getting up off the sofa and creeping toward him. “You know I didn’t do that, right? You know I would never do anything like that. Someone put that here to make me look bad. You believe me, don’t you?”
He turned and looked at her, blinking calmly.
“I don’t know what I believe,” he said.
Abby backed away from him, stumbled down the hall, and locked herself in her bedroom. She had forgotten she’d destroyed it and wasn’t prepared for the wreckage. Her stomach hollowed out when she stepped on one of Geoffrey’s black eyes, which she’d ripped from his face. She wanted to cry. She didn’t even have a past anymore.
They had already taken the keys to the Dust Bunny, but that was all right. It would mean that her parents couldn’t be blamed for what was about to happen. It wasn’t much, but it gave Abby some small comfort. Because she was about to break their hearts.
She took a shower and put on her face. It took forever because her skin was a suppurating mess. When she finally finished, she put her makeup in her gym bag along with a change of underwear and socks, a clean bra, a sweatshirt, and another pair of pants; then she turned on her TV and sat on her bed, watching through the back window as the sun went down.
She wished there was another way, but she was out of options. Maybe if she were smarter, she could have come up with a better solution, but this was all she could think of right now, and she had to do something. She looked out the back window and watched the light turn the long grass and abandoned lawn mowers first golden, then orange, then lavender, and finally black.
Abby listened for sounds of movement in the house. Hearing none, she slid her window open and popped the screen. Something caught her eye in the ocean of garbage strewn across her bedroom floor, one piece of her past that had escaped destruction: Tommy Cox’s can of Coke from the fifth grade. She picked it up and slid it into her gym bag, then zipped it up and snuck out of the house.
When she reached the Kangaroo gas station, she made a call on the payphone. Then she waited inside as if she was browsing magazines until the white van pulled up to the pumps. She ran outside and knocked on the passenger side window. Brother Lemon opened the door.
“Do you have it?” she asked, getting in.
He opened the glove compartment and showed her a plastic sandwich bag wrapped around a few tablespoons of gray powder. Right next to it was an identical baggie.