Margaret looked pissed.
“What does it taste like?” Gretchen asked, grabbing onto the side of the boat and chinning herself up to look into Margaret’s eyes. “Do his herp lips taste like true love?”
The two of them stared at each other.
“For your information, they’re not cold sores, they’re zits,” Margaret said. “And they taste like Clearasil.”
They laughed and Gretchen pushed herself away from the boat and floated on her back.
“I’ll do it,” she said to the sky. “But you have to promise I won’t get brain damage.”
“You’ve already got brain damage,” Margaret said, jumping into the water, almost flipping the boat, and landing on Gretchen, one arm around her neck, dragging her beneath the surface. They came up sputtering and laughing, hanging onto each other. “Killer!”
They piloted the boat back to Margaret’s dock, the air getting colder as the sun set. Abby wrapped a flapping towel around her shoulders and Gretchen let the wind catch her cheeks and blow them out like a balloon. Three dolphins breached off to port and paced them for a couple hundred yards, then peeled away and headed back out to sea. Margaret made gun fingers and pretended to shoot them. Gretchen and Abby turned and watched them dive and rise, flickering through the waves, disappearing in the distance, as gray as the chop.
They tied up at Margaret’s dock and started lugging the skis up into the backyard, but Gretchen lingered with Abby down by the boat, cupping her elbows.
“Are you going to do it?” she asked.
“Hell, yeah,” Abby said.
“Are you scared?” she asked.
“Hell, yeah,” Abby said.
“So why?”
“Because I want to know if Dark Side of the Moon is actually profound.”
Gretchen didn’t laugh.
“What if it opens the doors of perception and I can’t get them closed again?” Gretchen worried. “What if I can see and hear all the energy on the planet, and then the acid never wears off?”
“I’d visit you in Southern Pines,” Abby said. “And I bet your parents would get, like, the lobotomy wing named after you.”
“That would be choice,” Gretchen agreed.
“It’ll be crazy fun,” Abby said. “We’ll stick together like swim buddies at camp. We’ll be trip buddies.”
Gretchen pulled some strands of hair around to her mouth and sucked salt water off the tips.
“Will you promise to remind me to call my mom tonight?” she asked. “I have to check in at ten.”
“I will make it my mission in life,” Abby vowed.
“Cool beans,” Gretchen said. “Let’s go fry my brains.”
Together the four of them heaped all their gear into a big pile in the backyard and hosed it down. Then Abby sprayed the hose up Margaret’s butt.
“Cleansing enema!” she yelled.
“You’re confusing me with my mother,” Margaret shouted, running for the safety of the house.
Abby turned on Glee, but Gretchen was crimping the hose. Things were devolving rapidly when Margaret came out on the back porch carrying one of her mother’s silver tea trays.
“Ladies,” she sing-songed. “Tea time.”
They gathered around the tray underneath a live oak. There were four china saucers, each with a little tab of white paper in the middle. Each tiny tab was stamped with the head of a blue unicorn.
“Is that it?” Gretchen asked.
“No, I decided to bring you guys some paper to chew on,” Margaret said. “Doy.”
Glee reached out to poke her tab, but pulled her finger back before she made contact. They all knew you could absorb acid through your skin. There should have been more of a ceremony; they should have showered first or eaten something. Maybe they shouldn’t have been out in the sun all day drinking so much beer. They were doing this all wrong. Abby could feel everyone losing their nerve, herself included, so just as Gretchen was taking a breath to make an excuse, Abby grabbed her tab and popped it in her mouth.
“What’s it taste like?” Gretchen asked.
“Nuttin’ honey,” Abby said.
Margaret took hers, and so did Glee. Then, finally, Gretchen.
“Do we chew it?” she lisped, trying not to move her tongue.
“Let it dissolve,” Margaret lisped back.
“How long?” Gretchen asked.
“Chill, buttmunch,” Margaret lisped around her paralyzed tongue.
Abby looked out at the bright orange sunset burning itself off over the marsh and felt something final: she’d taken acid. It was irreversibly in her system. No matter what happened now she had to ride this out. The sunset glowed and throbbed on the horizon, and Abby wondered if it would look so vivid if she hadn’t just dropped acid. Reflexively she swallowed the little bit of paper, and that was that: she’d done something that couldn’t be undone, crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed. She was terrified.
“Is anyone hearing anything?” Glee asked.
“It takes hours to kick in, retard,” Margaret said.
“Oh,” Glee said. “So you normally have a pig nose?”
“Don’t be mean,” Gretchen said. “I don’t want to have a bad trip. I really don’t.”
“Do y’all remember Mrs. Graves in sixth grade?” Glee asked. “With the Mickey Mouse stickers?”
“That was so bone,” Margaret said. “Y’all got that, right? Her lecture about how, at Halloween, Satan worshippers drive around giving little kids stickers with Mickey Mouse on them, and when the kids lick the stickers they’re coated in LSD and they have bad trips and kill their parents.”
Gretchen covered Margaret’s mouth with both hands.
“Stop . . . talking . . . ,” she said.
So they laid around the backyard as it got dark, smoking cigarettes, talking about nice things, like what was up with Maximilian Buskirk’s weird butt and that year’s volleyball schedule, and Glee told them about some new kind of VD she’d read about that Lanie Ott almost definitely had, and they discussed whether they should get Coach Greene an Epilady for her upper lip, and if Father Morgan was Thorn Birds hot, regular hot, or merely teacher hot. And the whole time, all of them were secretly trying to see if their smoke was turning into dragons or if the trees were dancing. None of them wanted to be the last one to hallucinate.
Eventually, they lapsed into a comfortable silence, with only Margaret humming some song she’d heard on the radio while she cracked her toe knuckles.
“Let’s go look at the fireflies,” Gretchen said.
“Cool,” Abby said, pushing herself up off the grass.
“Oh my God,” Margaret said. “You guys are so queer.”
They ran through the yard and into the long grass in the field between the house and the woods, watching the green lightning bugs hover, butts glowing, as the air turned lavender the way it does when it gets dark in the country. Gretchen ran over to Abby.
“Spin me around,” she said.
Abby grabbed her hands and they spun, heads tipped back, trying to make their trip happen. But when they fell into the grass, they weren’t tripping, just dizzy.
“I don’t want to see Margaret pinch off firefly butts,” Gretchen said. “We should buy the plot next door and turn it into a nature preserve so no one else can ruin the creek.”
“We totally should,” Abby said.
“Look. Stars,” Gretchen said, pointing at the first ones in the dark blue sky. “You have to promise not to ditch me.”
“Stick with me,” Abby said. “I’ll totally be your lysergic sherpa. Wherever you go, I’m there.”
They held hands in the grass. The two of them had never been shy about touching, even though in fifth grade Hunter Prioleaux had called them homos, but that was because no one had ever loved Hunter Prioleaux.
“I need to tell you—” Gretchen started to say.
Margaret loomed up out of the dark, pinched-off firefly butts smeared into two glowing lines underneath her eyes.
“Let’s go in,” she said. “The acid’s coming up!”
The Number of the Beast
Four hours later, Abby watched the digits on the clock radio flip from 11:59 to 12:00, and the acid was definitely not coming up. Spread out across Margaret’s massive bedroom, they weren’t tripping. They were bored.