The Drifter(13)
BUT DESPITE ALL of that, it wasn’t long before Betsy decided she wanted out. Like all secret societies, when a person is inducted into a fraternity or a sorority there is an unspoken agreement that comes along with the tiny gold pin. The system relies on people not looking too closely for flaws and, more specifically, not sharing the unsavory elements they may see with anyone on the outside. But it was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that Betsy wasn’t buying it, and that made her a sort of threat, someone who couldn’t be entirely trusted, despite her allegiance to Ginny and Caroline, who often dismissed the flaws that Betsy would point out with a shrug.
“It’s just how it is,” Ginny would say, when Betsy pointed out the complicated social hierarchy, the strange double standards. “You take the good with the bad, I guess.” Betsy realized it was the sorority that created her friendship with Ginny and Caroline in the first place, and that it felt wrong to doubt the very institution that shored her self-esteem enough to give her the nerve to walk out on it. But the whole situation was causing her more pain than pleasure, piling layers onto what was surely an existential crisis in the way that Joan Didion wrote about, that the beauty, and the torture, of being young is that you think that you’re the only one who’d ever felt those feelings or asked those questions or lived that life. Or something like that, since Betsy was never much good with quotes.
The fact was that once she got behind the scenes, there wasn’t much magic left at all. It just felt like one, big long obligation and an endless litany of fines, weekly fraternity mixers with sagging card tables covered with gallon bottles of Popov vodka and Ocean Spray cranberry juice, trashcans full of ominous grain alcohol and Kool-Aid hunch punch, and then the battery of chastising looks from the sisters when any female guest dared to drink it. There was only one Ginny, but there were ten others like Dana—a scowling senior from the Panhandle who paced the house holding a plastic pitcher of water and a cup, which she would fill and drink obsessively in an effort to lose weight while she barked at pledges to answer the phone. Caroline’s wicked but hysterical humor was drowned out by earnest Amy and snobby Shelly, who turned and left the room if they walked in and saw that Betsy, a known troublemaker, was in it. Betsy was used to feeling uneasy in her surroundings, like she was never quite of the place where she was from, but in that world, it was the stifling scrutiny that broke her. She decided that she wanted out. For one deluded instant, she thought maybe Ginny would leave the sorority with her. She was wrong.
Finally, by the end of summer, she felt settled in her new ostracized life. She’d had enough of Caroline, though Ginny would not give up her efforts to make peace between them. Betsy had one more semester, then she could put all of this behind her for good. In the blazing afternoon sun, her eyes stung with sweat and bad memories as she got back on the bike and rode to Ginny’s, undetected, to wait for the storm.
CHAPTER 3
WELCOME BACK
August 24–25, 1990
When Betsy walked into Ginny and Caroline’s dark apartment after work, she could smell the familiar mix of cigarettes and Quelques Fleurs before she even saw her, which gave her a funny pang of fondness wrapped in nausea. She climbed the stairs and poked her head around the doorframe of Caroline’s room, the one Betsy had occupied all summer, and saw her in silhouette, standing in a sea of half-exploded suitcases and L.L. Bean boat and tote bags that spewed their contents on the floor like preppy, disemboweled Tauntauns. Even though the air-conditioning was on full blast, Caroline’s window was open about six inches beneath its heavy shade, and her left hand was dangling out of it, tapping a cigarette into a stolen Howard Johnson’s ashtray on the sill.
“There you are,” Caroline said, flatly.
“Jesus, it’s pitch-black in here.” Betsy’s eyes hadn’t adjusted from the glare outside so she reached for the light switch.
“If you turn that on, I will fucking kill you. How many times do I have to tell you? Overhead lighting is for peasants.” Caroline clicked on a small, porcelain lamp on her bedside table. In the light, Betsy could see her deep tan, the streaks of sun-bleached blonde in her hair. Caroline reached into one of the canvas bags with her free hand and produced a carton of Gauloises Blondes, which she tossed to Betsy with an expert flip of the wrist. “Bonjour, freeloader.”
“Thanks, Car,” said Betsy, catching the smokes and flopping down on the bed. “How was France?”
“It was French,” she said with a shrug. “Viv loved it, of course. I think she hooked up with one of the bellboys in Nice. I finally got to touch an uncircumcised penis. Not the bellboy’s. We’re sick, but we’re not that sick.”
“Nice,” said Betsy. “You can check that one off the list.”
“We made a deal. Viv let me chain-smoke as long as I didn’t call her Mom. She thought it made her seem old. You know, just your typical family vacation. How were things here?”
“You know, the usual. Le popcorn dans l’apres-midi. Wait, is it feminine or masculine?”
“It’s sort of androgynous,” Caroline said. “It’s like the hermaphrodite of snacks.”
“Thanks for letting me stay here. I washed the sheets,” said Betsy, and she slowly traced a perfect navy stripe on an Agnes B. T-shirt that Caroline tossed on the bed. The fondness she felt just minutes before faded. Only the nausea was left.