“I do laundry for other people all day,” Abby’s mom told her. “Your arms aren’t broken. Pull your weight.”
Her dad had been working as the dairy department manager at Family Dollar, but they let him go because he accidentally stocked a bunch of expired milk. He’d put up a sign at Randy’s Model Shop to do small engine repairs on people’s remote control planes, but after customers complained that he was too slow, Randy made him take down the sign. Now he had a sign up at the Oasis gas station on Coleman Boulevard saying he’d fix any lawn mower for $20. He had pretty much stopped talking, and he’d started filling their yard with broken lawn mowers.
Abby was beginning to feel like everything was too much. She was beginning to feel like nothing she did made any difference. She was beginning to feel like her family was sliding down a hill and they were dragging her down after them and at the bottom of that hill was a cliff. She was beginning to feel like every test was a life-or-death challenge and if she failed even one of them, she’d lose her scholarship and get yanked out of Albemarle and never see Gretchen again.
And now she stood behind the cafeteria in front of eight steaming bags of fresh garbage, and she wanted to cry. Why was she the one helping Glee, whose dad was a stockbroker? Why wasn’t anyone helping her? She never knew what caused it, but at that moment, Abby changed. Something inside her head went “click” and the next second she was thinking differently.
She didn’t have to be poor. She could get a job. She didn’t have to help Glee. But she could. She could decide how she was going to be. She had a choice. Life could be an endless series of joyless chores, or she could get totally pumped and make it fun. There were bad things, and there were good things, but she got to choose which things to focus on. Her mom focused only on the bad things. Abby didn’t have to.
Standing there behind the cafeteria in the stink of an entire school’s worth of putrid garbage, Abby felt the channels change, the world brighten as the sunglasses came off her brain. She turned to Gretchen and said, “Mama’s got supper in the oven!”
Then she untied the nearest bag, took out a slice of half-chewed pizza, and frisbeed it onto the roof before plunging elbow-deep into an ocean of greasy, slimy, used food. By the time they found Glee’s retainer, strings of congealed cheese stuck in their hair, gobs of fruit cocktail stuck to their shirts, they were laughing like maniacs,
throwing handfuls of limp lettuce at one another and flicking French fries against the wall.
Eighth grade was the year of Max Headroom and Spuds Mackenzie. The year that Abby’s dad started watching Saturday morning cartoons for hours and sleeping on a cot in his shed in the backyard. It was the year that Abby got Gretchen to sneak out of her house so they could ride bikes across the Ben Sawyer Bridge to Sullivan’s Island. Halley’s Comet was passing and everyone had gone to the beach in the middle of the night to see it. They found a deserted spot and lay on their backs in the cold sand, looking up at millions of stars.
“So let me get this straight,” Gretchen said in the dark. “It’s a dirty snowball shaped like a peanut floating through space and that’s why everyone’s so excited?”
Gretchen was not very romantic about science.
“It only comes around once every seventy-five years,” Abby said, straining to see if the speck of light she saw was moving or if she was only imagining it. “We might never see it again.”
“Good,” Gretchen said. “Because I’m freezing and I have sand in my underwear.”
“Do you think we’ll still be friends the next time it comes around?” Abby asked.
“I think we’ll be dead,” Gretchen said.
Abby did the math in her head and realized they’d be eighty-eight years old.
“People are going to live longer in the future,” she said. “We might still be alive.”
“But we won’t know how to set the clocks on our VCRs and we’ll be old and hate young people and vote Republican like my parents,” Gretchen said.
They had just rented The Breakfast Club, and turning into adults felt like the worst thing ever.
“We won’t wind up like them,” Abby said. “We don’t have to be boring.”
“If I stop being happy, will you kill me?” Gretchen asked.
“Totally,” Abby said.
“Seriously,” Gretchen said. “You’re the only reason I’m not crazy.”
They were quiet for a moment.
“Who said you’re not crazy?” Abby asked.
Gretchen hit her.
“Promise me you’ll always be my friend,” she said.
“DBNQ,” Abby replied.
It was their shorthand for “I love you.” Dearly But Not Queerly.
And they lay there on the freezing sand and felt the earth turn beneath their backs, and they shivered together as the wind blew off the water, and a frozen ball of ice passed by their planet, three million miles away in the cold distant darkness of deep space.
Party All the Time
“You guys want to freak the fuck out?” Margaret Middleton asked.
Blood-warm water slopped against the hull of the Boston Whaler. It had been quiet for almost an hour as the four girls drifted in the creek; Bob Marley played low on the boombox, their eyes closed, legs up, sun warm, heads nodding. They’d been waterskiing on Wadmalaw, but after Gretchen wiped out hard, Margaret cruised them into an inlet, cut the engine, dropped the anchor, and let them float. For an hour, the loudest sounds were the occasional spark of a lighter as someone lit a Merit Menthol or the ripe pop as someone cracked a lukewarm Busch. Underneath it all was the endless hiss of marsh grass rustling in the wind.
Abby faded up from her nap to see Glee rattling a beer out of the cooler. Glee made her “Want one?” face and Abby stretched out an arm, dried salt cracking on her skin, and took a slug of the warm watery wonderful Busch. It was their drink of choice, mostly because the old lady who ran Mitchell’s would sell them a case for forty dollars without asking for ID.
Abby was overflowing with a sense of belonging. Out here, there was nothing to worry about. They didn’t have to talk. They didn’t have to impress anyone. They could fall asleep in front of one another. The real world was far away.
The four of them were best friends, and while some of the kids called them bops, or mall maggots, or Debbie Debutantes, the four of them didn’t give a tiddly-fuck. Gretchen was number two in their class, and the other three were in the top ten. Honor roll, National Honor Society, volleyball, community outreach, perfect grades, and, as Hugh Horton once said with great reverence, their shit tasted like candy.
It didn’t come easy. They cared hard. They cared about their clothes, they cared about their hair, they cared about their makeup (Abby especially cared about her makeup), and they cared about their grades. Abby, Gretchen, Glee, and Margaret were going places.
Margaret was sitting in the driver’s seat, legs up on the hydroslide, blowing out big plumes of mentholated smoke, rich as shit, loaded with old Charleston money, American by birth, Southern by the grace of God. She was Maximum Margaret, a giant blond jock whose sprawling arms and legs took up half the boat. Everything about her was too much: her lips were too red, her hair was too blond, her nose was too crooked, her voice was too loud.