The Drifter(14)
“How generous of you,” Caroline said. “Now you can sleep on that beast of a couch downstairs or return to your cave.”
“Thirty-six hours, max, and I’m out,” said Betsy, throwing her hands up in surrender. “I’ll be invisible. Like a ghost.” She picked up the cigarettes and started to leave the room.
“I’m just giving you shit, Bets,” Caroline said, but if she regretted picking the fight, it wasn’t obvious. “Hey, I’m not going to show up for rush till tomorrow morning so we’re going out tonight, right? Old times?”
“Right. Old times.”
Ginny was the one who suggested that the three of them go out, like nothing had ever happened. They started out at CJ’s, the kind of dive with sawdust on the floor that in a month or two, when football season was in full swing, would be crowded with alumni drinking stale beer and trying to relive their glory days. The first whiff of the place made Betsy worry that she’d one day remember it fondly, and that life was all downhill from there, even though “there” felt close to the bottom. The plan was to celebrate Caroline’s end-of-summer homecoming with hot wings and a dozen oysters, though Ginny preferred the cocktail sauce straight up on saltines, hold the shellfish.
None of them mentioned the real reason they chose the place, which was because last fall Caroline had had a brief thing with the bartender, Justin something-or-other from Miami. For three weeks, it was their evening hangout. Caroline would toy with Justin in exchange for free drinks and a basket of fries for herself and her friends. Nobody said she wasn’t generous. On their final night as regulars, Betsy and Caroline had shut the place down at 2:00 a.m., doing one last shot of J?egermeister with Justin and an unremarkable waiter. It was Betsy’s idea to head to Lake Alice, an oversized pond on the southwest corner of campus, for a drunken, adrenaline-fueled trail run. Lake Alice was an alligator habitat, fenced off from the public with fairly explicit signs depicting open-mouthed reptiles under words like Danger and clearly marked orders to Keep Out. If the presence of live alligators wasn’t enough to scare any sensible person shitless, there was the university’s Bat House, a tall, eerie-looking structure that was built to house a giant, displaced colony of Brazilian bats, diverting it from the tennis stadium, where it had taken up residence and was routinely covering the courts with guano. By the time the foursome arrived near 2:30, the sky was swarming with them. Adrenaline was hard to get in that town, and Betsy found herself coming up with increasingly outrageous ways to coax it out of thin air. Once, she convinced Ginny and Caroline to wander a pasture near town in search of hallucinogenic mushrooms, which grew on cow manure. Even in the moonlight, they couldn’t make out what was growing out of where, and the three of them made such a racket that they woke up the rancher, who chased them out of his field with a flashlight and a loaded shotgun.
“Betsy Young, you almost got us killed,” shouted Caroline as they sped away in Ginny’s car. “I love it!”
On another night, Betsy commandeered Krystal, the fast-food burger place, jumping over the counter and putting on a spare apron to pass out free French fries to a hungry late-night crowd, until the manager called the police and they ran out the back door. The bats and alligator obstacle course was by far the scariest distraction of them all, and therefore Betsy’s favorite.
They made it around the lake, running wild-eyed and howling, amazingly unharmed. But back at Caroline and Ginny’s apartment, Ginny and the waiter passed out in her room, and Betsy was the only one to notice the smoke filling the air. Justin removed a forgotten Gino’s pizza from the oven and tried to slice it by pressing a knife into it with the palm of his hand, blade side up. Caroline, who was laughing uncontrollably, could not be convinced that the inch-deep gash in Justin’s hand needed stitches. So Betsy took his keys and drove him to the hospital, leaving Caroline, Ginny, and the waiter back at the apartment. After that, Justin decided that no sociopath was hot enough to endure the utter lack of compassion that came with the deal. He stopped calling Caroline, and she generally avoided CJ’s. On the evening of her summer homecoming, however, the memory of that evening seemed foggy, and she wanted to start the new school year off right: with a reminder that she still owned that town and a round of free drinks. So CJ’s it was.
When the cracker basket was empty and the two free rounds of Sea Breezes drained, the three of them waved goodbye to Justin, who nodded with visible relief as they filed through the door to leave. Then they piled into Ginny’s car, pretending like no time had passed, like no feelings had been hurt, and Betsy was furious at herself for backing down and giving in to Caroline once again. As usual, they had no real destination in mind. Even though it was after midnight, they were restless and eager to see who’d made it back to town from summer break. They wanted to replace the stories they’d heard a hundred times before with new ones, and they needed a distraction from the building tension. They ended up in the back room of the Porpoise, a too-dark bar with pool tables and three-for-one drink specials inked on black mirrors with neon paint pens. The place was largely empty, except for a dully handsome trio from Ginny’s high school whose names Betsy didn’t catch over the frantic, grating chorus of R.E.M.’s “Pop Song 89” and didn’t care enough about to ask them to repeat. Ginny had legs that dissolved beneath her after two glasses of syrupy Chardonnay, but that didn’t slow her down. She and Betsy managed, mostly, to stay out of trouble, which is to say more sober than not, for weeks.