“But she remembers when the word “friend” could draw blood. She and Gretchen spent hours ranking their friendships… buzzed on the dopamine high of belonging to someone else, having a total stranger choose you, someone who wanted to know you, another person who cared that you were alive.”
Abby and Gretchen have been the best of friends ever since Gretchen was the only person to show up to Abby’s E.T. themed birthday party, so when Gretchen and Abby held hands on that skating rink, they metaphorically did not let go. Their transition into high school came with new friends, Margaret and Glee, and a whole slew of high school difficulties that are basically the end of the world at 16. Riding around in Abby’s dust bunny, the 4 girls were a tight knit group that did everything together. They stayed super close until their sophomore year, the year when Gretchen started to act… differently. It could be normal high school changes, or it could be because of what happened the night they decided to drop acid together. That was also the same night Gretchen decided to strip down naked and dive head first into Margaret’s family’s lake when the water was dangerously low. After searching all night, they found a very dirty, very rattled Gretchen the next morning. Little did the girls know that it was a night that would change everything.
Over time, things within the friend group begin to get tense. Gretchen was no longer the sweet, hard-working girl she once was, for she is now filthy, wearing the same clothes, and clearly hasn’t showered in weeks. She is shunned by her classmates, even Margaret and Glee at times, and no one seems to truly understand what is happening with Gretchen. But then one day Gretchen seemed to get better, seemed to get perfectly fine, actually, but Abby quickly realizes that this person is not the real Gretchen. Is there something really wrong with Gretchen, or is Abby just afraid of losing her friends as they go through high school? Either way, Abby refuses to give up and is determined to get her best friend back.
To begin, I have to express how much I enjoyed following this friend group. The friend group is not the main point of the novel, but it was just so high school. I was immediately brought back to being 16 and thinking that maybe some of my friends were actually demons in disguise. The group of friends consist of Abby, Margaret, Glee, and Gretchen. Although they are all very close, Gretchen and Abby are the closest to one another. Abby’s character is very sweet, riddled with the same anxieties high schoolers face, and branded as the kid on scholarship at their school. Gretchen, Margaret, and Glee all come from wealthy families, and the types of families that heavily contribute to the girls’ school in the form of sizable donations.
It’s important to note the class difference between Abby and the rest of the girls simply because when things start to go wrong with Gretchen, the “poor” kid is the first to blame. It was craftily done by Hendrix, making Abby the scapegoat and making her of a lower class, as that is something that is seen every single day in real life. Not only does it make Abby the perfect scapegoat, it also makes her an even stronger protagonist. The helpless feeling the reader gets as they watch Abby get blamed time after time builds a combination of both pity for Abby and a connection to her character, for me, at least. If Abby was just as privileged as the other girls, she would be a much less sympathetic character in my opinion because, as reality has shown us numerous times, mommy and daddy’s bank account could easily come to the rescue and save Abby from any and all punishment.
I can’t review this book without talking about Gretchen. Gretchen’s “transition” is one that Hendrix does a good job of paralleling with the typical coming-of-age puberty that young girls go through during high school. Even without puberty, high school is difficult, but adding sudden bodily changes and a spectrum of raging hormones to the mix creates a whole other kind of bad. Speaking as someone who was once a teenage girl, I can confidently say that sometimes girls can become insecure as they are changing, and from that insecurity breeds certain types of meanness. If we were to compare Gretchen to a typical mean girl, readers are going to see several similarities. After she magically becomes a perfect student and friend again, which is what readers can assume is the the peak of Gretchen’s possession, her character aims low and hits hard, destroying the lives of those around her. Using their vulnerabilities against them – Margaret with her weight, Abby’s skin and amount of makeup she wears to cover it up, Glee with her crush on one of the teachers, which is a whole other level of evil that is common for both evil demons and insecure mean girls.
While a deeper analysis of the plot and the characters is fun, what is more fun is the ick factor of this novel- saving the best for last, one might say. Those that are squeamish and cannot handle tapeworms, roaches, and bugs in general should stay very far away. As most possession movies have shown, the actual exorcism can be rather… gross. While the exorcism scene in this book is no different, with roaches crawling in and out of Gretchen, Abby accidentally drinking urine from a glass of what she thought was water, and the general heaviness of the body horror associated with exorcisms, there is one scene in this novel involving a tapeworm that will live in my head rent-free until the end of time. A few decades ago, and I even remember this being on the news, several people were rushed to the hospital after ingesting tapeworm eggs as a form of weight-loss strategy. The tapeworms would then hatch and grow in the intestines, eating all the food coming its way as opposed to the body naturally digesting it and possibly gaining weight from the caloric intake. Well, without giving anything away, all I will say is that 23 feet of
tapeworms is far worse than any exorcism scene I have ever watched.
