My Best Friend's Exorcism

by Grady Hendrix

Without even realizing it, she’d committed the greatest sin of all and made Mr. Lang look like a Democrat.

“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.

“Eight-one-three is Tampa,” the librarian said.

“By the power of The Thorn Birds,” she cried, “by the sacred strength of My Sweet Audrina and Forever . . . I deny and rebuke you, Andras. By the power of lost retainers and Jamaica and bad cornrows and fireflies and Madonna, by all these things I rebuke you.”

“By the mysteries and the power of Good Dog Max, and E.T. the Extra-terrible, and Geraldine Ferraro the first lady vice president ever, by the Eye of the Tiger, the Love Cry of the Koala Bear, by the passion and redemption of Bad Mama Jama, who will always have supper in the oven. In the name of Glee and Margaret and Lanie Ott, I command you to depart. By the power of the Dust Bunny and in the name of the Go-Go’s I compel you, begone!”

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.

When those things happened, they learned that although those inches may add up to miles, sometimes those miles were only inches after all.

Abby Rivers and Gretchen Lang were best friends, on and off, for seventy-five years, and there aren’t many people who can say that. They weren’t perfect. They didn’t always get along. They screwed up. They acted like assholes. They fought, they fell out, they patched things up, they drove each other crazy, and they didn’t make it to Halley’s Comet. But they tried.