My Best Friend's Exorcism

by Grady Hendrix

Don’t You Forget about Me

This book is deeply personal for me, and that’s why it has a happy ending. Abby and Gretchen are people I know, they grew up where I grew up, they go to the school I attended, they drive over the same bridge every day that I drove over every morning, they have the same friends, the same habits, everything. But they’re also bigger than me, with lives of their own. There are two other drafts of this book that are radically different, and one of them follows them into their later years, moving between the present and the past, and I got to see them live through all their ups and downs over the decades, all the way to the end of their lives. So just for the record, they both turn out okay. I couldn’t have it any other way. I like them too much to cheat them of their happiness.

“Wasting food is no joke!” he’d shout. “That’s how Karen Carpenter died!”

Since the dawn of time, parents have told their kids to finish everything on their plates. Back in the Eighties, we were told not to waste food because of “starving children in Africa” which actually seemed reasonable since the Ethiopian famine was on the news every night and “We Are the World” was on the radio 24/7. On the other hand, drug stores had an aisle marked “Diet Aids” where they sold what was essentially speed that made you hyper and killed your appetite. It was a mixed message, to say the least, and I can’t imagine how much it messed with your head if you were a young woman. Karen Carpenter was America’s sweetheart — squeaky clean, wholesome, talented, and a real girl next door until her anorexia killed her. That threw a lot of people for a genuine loop because they couldn’t get their heads around the fact that this girl who seemed so perfect could be so broken. Mr. Lang’s terror that his daughter might be anorexic is sweet, and misplaced, but that’s parents, right? They’re always protecting us, but usually from the wrong thing.

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.

By the time I was 15, I felt totally and completely trapped. Sometimes I felt so paralyzed that I couldn’t breathe. I was already a crappy student and I’d been tagged a “troublemaker.” My teachers had stamped my file “class clown” and told me at every opportunity that I was “wasting my potential,” whatever that was. Every adult around me figured they had my number, and I had no reason not to believe them. My life would had already been set in stone: just a long march down a hall with no doors to a room with no windows where I’d wind up getting some office job if I was lucky. Then I got into the theater program at South Carolina’s Governor’s School for the Arts and I went away for 6 weeks to live with a bunch of strangers and I realized I could reinvent myself. I shut up. I listened more. I didn’t feel a need to fight with everyone in authority. I was still myself, but better. It changed my life because I realized that I didn’t have to live up to, or down to, anyone’s expectations, including my own. I could just decide to be someone new. That’s the joy of moving, it’s the thrill of starting over, the way you can leave everything someone’s decided about you behind and reinvent yourself. It’s the same impulse that turns Laura Ashley girls into goths, or jocks into Juggalos, or dentists into drag queens. It’s one of the best parts of being alive: if you don’t like who you are, you can become someone different overnight just by deciding to do so.

“DBNQ,” Abby replied. It was their shorthand for “I love you.” Dearly But Not Queerly.

When I was in Cub Scouts, our favorite game was Smear the Queer where someone would throw a football into a pack of kids, whoever caught it was “the queer,” and everyone would try to “smear” them. Thinking about it today, I’m mortified, but it was just another one of those cruel things kids said and did without a second thought (see also, The Lord of the Flies). We knew gay people, many of them were our friends, and we were ferociously protective of them, but we never made the connection between saying “DBNQ” or playing Smear the Queer and our friends. We couldn’t see how our words created an environment that might make someone feel alienated and unwelcome. Also, we were idiots. To drive that point home, another favorite game we played was Fireworks War where we’d run around in the woods and shoot bottle rockets and Roman candles at each other. I wound up blowing off two fingernails and getting third degree burns down my right thigh doing that, and my biggest regret while I was recovering? That I couldn’t go out and play Fireworks War. Like I said: idiots.

Where everyone was desperate to be an individual, but they all were terrified to stand out.

I wrote the first draft of this book and gave it to my wife to read, then sat back and waited for her to fall over in awe of my genius. Instead, she waited until we were on the subway to tell me it was a dumpster fire. It was all clichés and stereotypes. The characters felt thin, the situations were predictable, the emotions felt second hand. When I finished having my little man tantrum, I realized she was right. Everything in that draft was lifted from a John Hughes movie or a horror flick. I’d regurgitated tropes from the high school books and movies I’d been consuming all my life. I had been playing with someone else’s toys. What I hadn’t done was the hard work of actually remembering what high school in the Eighties had felt like. So I sat down with all her journals and letters and photos from back then, and all my journals and letters and photos, and spent a few weeks just reading them. I copied letters over again to remember how it felt to write them. I did that so much my handwriting changed. And, finally, after a couple of weeks, I remembered what it felt like to sit on the Quad at lunch on a Spring day. I heard the seagulls and the conversations, I remembered what the wet grass felt like, and how I wanted to be seen, and who I was talking to, and what I wanted them to think about me. It was a perfect memory of a few seconds, but that memory led to another, then another, and pretty soon I had the beginnings of this book. That sentence about being an individual? That’s word-for-word right out of the diary I kept in 1990 when I was 17.

Parents Just Don’t Understand

One thing people say to me after reading this book is, “Gretchen’s parents are horrible.” And they’re right, because this book is written from a teenaged point of view and when you’re a teenager your parents are horrible. But there’s another version of this story, one from the Lang’s perspective, and it’s about their daughter, and something’s seriously wrong with her, and every time she sees her best friend it gets worse, and they don’t know what to do, and no one can help them, and they are terrified out of their minds. As a parent, you have one job: keep your kid safe. Of course you want them to get into a good school and not belch at the table, but really the job boils down to: keep them breathing. And that’s harder than it seems. As I got to know my parents as adults, I knew I had to tell a story like this but from their point of view because as annoying as I found them growing up, they kept me from getting killed in any number of ways (see, Fireworks War). So I’ve written a book that comes out this year called The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. It’s set in this neighborhood (it’s where I grew up) and it’s set a few years later in the early Nineties (it’s when I grew up) and although none of the same characters appear, it’s a spiritual sequel to My Best Friend’s Exorcism, only instead of being about teenaged friendship it’s about adult friendship and that turns out to be a very different thing.

Five years later, Slave Day was gone as if it had never existed, but in 1988 no one dreamed that it could possibly be offensive. It was a tradition.

A friend of mine from high school called in disbelief after reading this book and said, “We didn’t have Slave Day, did we?” I sent him the pictures. The school I attended in South Carolina gave me a great education, but it existed in a bubble. We had a handful of minority students among our 1,200 strong student body so thinking about things like diversity and representation just never occurred to anyone. In 1988, to upper middle class white people living in Charleston, those didn’t seem like urgent ideas. It’s easy to judge from the perspective of the present, and it may even be right to judge, but my job writing this book was to show how alien and strange even the recent past can be and that means I needed to present the facts, warts and all, without giving my opinion. And the fact is, we had Slave Day, and no one thought twice about it. Now I look back on it with a great deal of cringe and a great deal of joy. I cringe when I realize that none of us thought there was anything wrong with it. But I’m filled with joy when I realize that this could not possibly happen today without a dozen people raising red flags, pulling the emergency stop cord, and slamming on the brakes. It’s nice to know that sometimes things change for the better.

Abby looked down and nearly tripped over a white plastic ten-gallon bucket. It was sitting on the floor and overflowing with gray fetuses. They were pressed from the same mold: skin smooth, eyes closed, mouths open, tiny hands bunched into fists. Piled in the bucket without rhyme or reason, they looked like hairless kittens, heavy and sleek.

When we were in tenth grade our biology class took a field trip to the gross anatomy lab at the local medical school. I’m not sure who thought this was a good idea, but we loaded up in buses and before you knew it we were standing in a room with 14 partially dissected human cadavers on tables listening to an old doctor make cracks about peeling off faces and fiddling around with corpse fingers. It was intense. At one point, I backed up to put a little distance between myself and the guy laid open from his chin to his pubic bone in front of me because it’s one thing to see a dead body in a movie and another thing to see their thick toenails and the hair in their nostrils up close, and I tripped over something on the floor. It was one of those ten gallon plastic buckets and inside were about a dozen fetuses. That moment always stuck with me, and when I got to the part of the book where Gretchen had to do something to frame Abby and discredit her in front of everyone, my editor and I got in a fight. At first I had Gretchen use a severed arm stolen from a grave, then I tried a head, and a few other bits and pieces. I had a great, and sick, idea about desecrating the corpse of Major’s mother and using it as part of a Halloween display on his front yard, but my editor kept rejecting it. “These aren’t right,” he told me, over and over again. “It needs something better. I’ve seen this all before.” I got pissed off and I thought, “You want something you haven’t seen before? How about a bucket of dead babies?” He loved it. That’s when I realized he was the right editor for me.

“Demons are ideas made flesh,” Brother Lemon said. “Bad ideas. The one inside your friend is discord, anger, and rage. He is the bringer of storms with a smile like lightning, brother of owls and giver of nightborn intelligence. He is the cleaving that can never be healed.”

A book is only as good as its bad guy, and the problem with most demons is that they’re stupid. Why possess a 12-year-old girl instead of the President of the United States? Why possess some mom living off in the middle of nowhere instead of someone capable of causing a nuclear power plant to melt down? In Christian theology, demons are there to test the faith of the exorcist, the person they possess (the demoniac) is irrelevant, they’re just the battlefield for the war between the priest and the demon. I wanted my demoniac to matter, but that meant I needed my demon to have an agenda beyond simply possessing Gretchen and waiting for an exorcist to show up. I was reading the Lesser Key of Solomon, a 17th century grimoire, as you do, when I came across Andras. Not only did this demon have a rocking look (naked lady with an owl’s head riding a wolf and carrying a sword) but it hated friendship, it hated love, it hated people getting along. Being possessed sucks, but being possessed by something that wants to alienate everyone around you? That’s a very particular kind of high school nightmare.

“I love you,” Abby shouted into the storm. “I love you, Gretchen Lang. You are my reflection and my shadow and I will not let you go. We are bound together forever and ever! Until Halley’s Comet comes around again. I love you dearly and I love you queerly and no demon is bigger than this! I throw my pebble and its name is Gretchen Lang and in the name of our love, BEGONE!!!”

From the moment I started writing this book, I knew the ending would come when Abby stopped trying to exorcize Andras with other people’s faith, and embraced her own — a faith in friendship and a faith in she and Gretchen’s unshakable, unbreakable love. Once I had that, the rest was easy. I just had to write a book that delivered readers to this moment in a way that felt earned and not like a cheat. It turned out to be as easy as falling off a log, hitting a bunch of other logs on the way down, landing on a conveyor belt that took me through a gauntlet of stabby knives, dumped me into a wood chipper, shot my mutilated chunks into an incinerator, and then doused me with a shower of hydrochloric acid. Also, at some point my wife had to tell me my book sucked. Good times.

The devil is loud and brash and full of drama. God, he’s like a sparrow.”

I love Gretchen and Abby, but in my mind Brother Lemon is the hero of this book. In an earlier version, his death is what reconnects G&A after not speaking for 20 years, but even in the version you’re reading he’s the one who sacrifices himself for absolutely no personal gain. Yes, he cowards out when the going gets tough, but he repents and returns and takes the rap so that Abby doesn’t have her life ruined. When I was a kid, more than once an adult took a bullet and saved me from the exact same fate. One of them, Erica Lesesne, my high school English teacher, passed away recently and I regret that I was never able to convince her that she kept me from going down in flames. To her, she was just doing her job, but she saved me from getting expelled, and she kept me from ruining my own life, and it meant everything. We’ve all had those people in our lives, and Brother Lemon is that person for Abby. It’s a quiet kind of salvation, it doesn’t come with a swell of intense music or loud dramatics, but that’s how the things that save our lives happen sometimes. Why a sparrow? Fortunately or unfortunately, my Dolly Parton fandom keeps inserting itself, most notably in my 2018 novel, We Sold Our Souls, but also here. Her song, “Little Sparrow” is full of sadness and hope and yearning and tragedy, so…sparrows, they seem so small and helpless and fragile, but they’re resilient and can take whatever’s thrown at them. That’s the Gospel according to Dolly and I believe.

Abby and Gretchen still kept up, but it was phone calls and letters, then postcards and voicemail, and finally emails and Facebook likes. There was no falling-out, no great tragedy, just a hundred thousand trivial moments they didn’t share, each one an inch of distance between them, and eventually those inches added up to miles.

This book is dedicated to a few of my high school friends who got me through the hard times not because they were superheroes but because that’s what you do in high school: you take care of each other. Those six years (I hated 7th and 8th grade, too) felt like a war, and we refused to leave anyone behind on the battlefield. Some of the most shallow and annoying kids showed extraordinary courage by putting themselves in the line of fire to help their wounded friends make it to safety. They were the friends I needed, the ones who I thought about constantly, the ones who I got out of bed in the morning to see, and I can only hope that I did right by them, because they took care of me. And today? I’ve fallen out of touch with most of them. It wasn’t a great tragedy, it just happened slowly once we left that pressure cooker. It doesn’t change how important those friendships were, but that’s just the way life happens. The people we need are there when we need them, and then they just fade away.

although those inches may add up to miles, sometimes those miles were only inches after all.

I love the scene at the end of The Exorcist when Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair say goodbye to Father Dyer and drive away, leaving town. It’s delivered like this happy ending but I always watch it and think, “That’s going to be an awkward road trip.” Like, I bet Linda Blair gets to listen to whatever she wants to on the radio. Endings in horror are tough, because what’s more interesting to me is how people live after they survive something terrible. I feel like the traditional bleak horror ending just means the writer has ended the story too soon. Life goes on. Everyone has to get up the next day, shampoo the ectoplasm out of the carpets, and paint over the blood on the walls. Someone who lost a child once told me, “The hardest thing is that life goes on.” Eventually that exorcism becomes a distant memory, that time Jason killed everyone at Camp Crystal Lake except you becomes a story for your Tinder date, that haunted house turns into a life lesson you tell your kids. All you have to do is stick with it for long enough and the worst horror story just becomes another anecdote. If you let your characters live beyond that supercool, edgelord twist ending you came up with, their lives continue, and to me that’s when it gets interesting.