My Best Friend's Exorcism

by Grady Hendrix

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.