“This family is loyal to the president,” Mr. Lang said. “You’d better hope no one saw that . . . thing on your mother’s car. You’re too young for politics.”
He made Gretchen take a razor blade and peel off the rest of the sticker while Abby watched, terrified she was going to get in trouble. But Gretchen never told. It was the first time Abby had ever seen her fight with her parents.
Then came the Madonna Incident.
For the Langs, Madonna was totally and completely out of the question. But when Gretchen’s dad was at work and her mom was taking one of her nine billion classes (Jazzercise, power walking, book club, wine club, sewing circle, women’s prayer circle), Gretchen and Abby would dress up like the Material Girl and sing into the mirror. Gretchen’s mom had a jewelry box devoted entirely to crosses, so it was basically like she was inviting them to do it.
With dozens of crosses strung around their necks, they stood in front of Gretchen’s bathroom mirror and teased their hair big, tying huge floppy bows in it, cutting the arms off of T-shirts, painting their lips bright coral, shadowing their eyes bright blue, dropping makeup on the white wall-to-wall carpet and accidentally stepping on it, holding up a hair brush and a curling iron as microphones and singing along to the “Like a Virgin” Cassingle on Gretchen’s peach boombox.
Abby had just decided to draw on a beauty spot and was hunting for eyeliner in the makeup carnage on the counter while Gretchen was singing “Like a vir-ir-ir-ir-gin/With your heartbeat/Next to mine . . .” when suddenly Gretchen’s head was yanked backward and Mrs. Lang was between them, tearing the bow out of her daughter’s hair. The music was so loud, they hadn’t heard her come home.
“I buy you nice things!” she screamed. “This is what you do?”
Abby stood there stupidly while the Cassingle looped and Gretchen’s mom chased her daughter between the twin beds, hitting her with a hairbrush. Abby was terrified that Mrs. Lang would notice her, and a part of her brain knew she should hide, but she simply stood there like a dummy as Mrs. Lang followed Gretchen down to the ground between the two beds. Gretchen curled up on the carpet, making a high-pitched sound, while Madonna sang, “You’re so fine, and you’re mine/I’ll be yours/Till the end of
time . . .” and Mrs. Lang’s arm worked up and down, raining blows on Gretchen’s legs and shoulders.
“Make me strong/Yeah, you make me bold . . . ,” Madonna sang.
Gretchen’s mom walked to the boombox and jammed down on the buttons, prying open the door and yanking out the Cassingle while it was still playing, leaving big loops of magnetic tape drooling everywhere. In the sudden silence, Abby heard the motor whine as the gears jammed. The only other sound was Mrs. Lang breathing hard.
“Clean up this mess,” she said. “Your father will be home.”
Then she stormed out and slammed the door.
Abby crawled across the bed and looked down on the floor at Gretchen. She wasn’t even crying.
“Are you okay?” Abby asked.
Gretchen raised her head and looked at her bedroom door.
“I’m going to kill her,” she whispered. Then she wiped her nose and looked up at Abby. “Don’t ever tell I said that.”
Abby remembered a day the summer before when she and Gretchen had tiptoed into Gretchen’s parents’ room and opened the drawer on her dad’s bedside table. Lying inside, under an old issue of Reader’s Digest, was a stubby black revolver. Gretchen took it out and pointed it at Abby and then at the pillows on the bed, first one, then the other.
“Bang . . .” she whispered. “Bang.”
Abby remembered those whispered “bangs,” and now she looked at Gretchen’s dry eyes and she knew that something was happening that was truly dangerous. But she never told. Instead, she helped Gretchen clean up, then she called her mom and asked her to come pick her up. Whatever else happened that night when Gretchen’s dad got home, Gretchen never talked about it.
A few weeks later it had all blown over, and the Langs took Abby with them to Jamaica for a ten-day vacation. She and Gretchen got cornrows in their hair that clicked everywhere they walked. Abby got sunburned. They played Uno every night and Abby won almost every game.
“You’re a card sharp,” Gretchen’s dad said. “I can’t believe my daughter brought a card sharp into our family.”
Abby ate shark for the first time. It tasted like steak made out of fish. They had their first big fight because Abby kept playing Weird Al’s “Eat It” on the cassette player in their room, until the second to the last day when she found pink nail polish spilled all over her tape.
“I’m sorry,” Gretchen said, enunciating each word like she was royalty. “It was an accident.”
“It was not,” Abby said. “You’re selfish. I’m the fun one, and you’re the mean one.”
They were always trying to figure out which one of them was which. Recently, Abby had been designated the fun one and Gretchen the beautiful one. Neither of them had ever been the mean one before.
“You just tag along with my family because you’re poor,” Gretchen snapped back. “God, I’m sick of you.” Gretchen’s braces
hurt all the time and Abby’s braids were too tight and gave her headaches. “You know which one you are?” Gretchen asked. “You’re the dumb one. You play that stupid song like it’s cool, but it’s for little kids. It’s immature, and I don’t want to hear it anymore. It’s stupid. It makes YOU stupid.”
Abby locked herself in the bathroom, and Gretchen’s mom had to coax her out for supper, which she ate alone on the balcony while the bugs chewed her up. That night, after the lights went out, she felt someone crawl into her bed, and Gretchen slid up next to her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, filling Abby’s ear with her hot breath. “I’m the stupid one. You’re the cool one. Please don’t be mad at me, Abby. You’re my best friend.”
Seventh grade was the year of their first slow-dance make-out party, and Abby tongue-kissed Hunter Prioleaux as they rocked back and forth to “Time after Time.” His enormous stomach was harder than she thought it would be and he tasted like Big League Chew and Coke, but he was also really sweaty and smelled like burps. He followed Abby around for the rest of the night trying to get to third base, until she hid in the bathroom while Gretchen ran him off.
Then came a day that changed Abby’s life forever. She and Gretchen were returning their lunch trays, talking about how they needed to stop getting hot lunch like little kids and start bringing healthy food to school so they could eat outside with everyone else, when they saw Glee Wanamaker standing by the tray window, hands twisting, her fingers squirming and pulling at each other, eyes red and shining, staring into the big garbage can. She’d put her retainer on her tray and then dumped it in the trash, and now she wasn’t sure which garbage bag it was in.
“I’ll have to look in all of them,” she sobbed. “This is my third retainer. My dad’s going to kill me.”
Abby wanted to go but Gretchen insisted they help, and so William, the head of the lunch room, took them out back and showed them the eight bulging black plastic bags full of warm milk, half-eaten pizza squares, fruit cocktail, melted ice cream, wet shoestring fries, and curdled ketchup. It was April and the sun had been cooking the bags into a rank stew. It was the worst thing Abby had ever smelled.
She didn’t know why they were helping Glee. Abby didn’t have a retainer. She didn’t even have braces. Everyone else did, but her parents wouldn’t pay for them. They wouldn’t pay for much of anything, and she had to wear the same navy corduroy skirt twice a week, and her two white shirts were turning transparent because she washed them so much. Abby did her own laundry because her mom worked as a home nurse.