The Drifter(24)

“Fruity Pebbles OK?” Tracy asked, getting a better look at Caroline. There was a faint glimmer of recognition in her flat, blue eyes, which then narrowed into tiny, accusatory slits.

“No frogurt for me today, I’m good,” said Betsy, noticing Tracy notice Caroline for the first time.

“Are Fruity Pebbles OK? I don’t know, depends on who you ask,” said Caroline. “I’ll take a sample of chocolate. But just a sample.”

“You look familiar,” said Tracy, who’d grabbed a foam cup and turned her back to them as she depressed the cold handle of the thrumming, metal machine and dumped a long, oozy rope of frozen ick into it.

“Who me?” asked Ginny, suddenly panicked. She searched Betsy’s face for clues, but Betsy just shrugged. Betsy had started to notice that this happened to Ginny more than it should, and was an unfortunate reminder of her boozy camaraderie and regular blackouts at bars and parties across town. Everyone remembered Ginny, but she remembered no one. She confessed to Betsy once that she started plastering a smile on her face and nodding at everyone she passed as a precaution. But the summer had been uneventful. Betsy and Ginny burned through the new releases at Blockbuster and not much else. They’d shut down the Porpoise only once all summer. Ginny picked up a couple of cute law students, whose names she couldn’t recall, if she ever knew them. It didn’t take much effort. Guys loved Ginny. She was quick to laugh, a gifted flirt, and the one voted “Best All Around” her senior year when people couldn’t describe her with just one superlative.

“How is it that I’ve never let you buy me a drink before?” she’d said to the guys at the bar, by way of introduction. Betsy rolled her eyes. It was a Tuesday night so boring and oppressively humid that they had to get out of the house. Three pitchers later, the law students gave them a ride home in a vintage Chevy Impala, but not before the four of them dismantled a Pepsi pyramid in front of a gas station, howling with laughter as they loaded the trunk with as many of the two-liter bottles as they could. It was a classic Ginny night.

Ginny squinted at Tracy, trying to place her face, but Betsy saw that Tracy’s eyes were locked on Caroline, and she saw Ginny’s face relax.

“No, your friend here. It’s Caroline, right?” she said. Caroline was steely, calm, but Betsy thought she saw an almost imperceptible twitch of panic pulse under her left eye. “You rushed me last year.”

“Oh shit, sorry, yeah. I remember now, Tracy,” said Caroline, who was linking together words that might have formed an apology if they were delivered in a more sympathetic tone.

“I dropped out of rush after that,” she said, slamming the yogurt on the counter, stabbing it with a plastic spoon and extending a limp hand for the money. “It’s $2.49.”

“Hope it wasn’t something I said,” replied Caroline flatly, never averting her eyes from Tracy’s glare.

Hell is empty, Betsy thought. All the devils are here.

Ginny dug four crumpled bills out of her pocket and dropped them in a wad on the counter.

“Keep the change, Tracy. Thanks! Great to see you again,” said Ginny, with forced brightness, as she grabbed her friend’s arms and exited the store so quickly that the blast of heat outside greeted them like a punch in the face. Once they were safely beyond the plate glass window, beyond their new nemesis’s sight line, Betsy stopped and turned to Caroline, who was chuckling and checking the cuticle on her thumbnail again.

“It’s like once Belinda realized she was hot it all went to shit,” Caroline said.

“What are you talking about?” asked Ginny.

“Belinda Carlisle. She’s like ‘I’ve got an idea. I’m going to lose twenty pounds, abandon my totally bitchin’ band and become the most aggressively mediocre pop star of my generation,’” said Caroline.

“You have no remorse, do you?” asked Betsy.

“I love the Go-Go’s. I am not ashamed.”

“I’m not kidding, Car,” she said. “This Tracy person seems to blame you for ruining her life. And you’ve got no remorse.”

“Remorse?” she said, stopping on the sidewalk, shielding her eyes from the sun. “About what? I was nice to her during rush, or nice enough. I may have made a comment about her white shoes. Do you want me to apologize for not leading on the yogurt girl with Kentucky Fried hair? Did you see her cold sore? She’s totally got herpes. She put the ‘itch’ in ‘bitch.’”

“Come on!” said Betsy, losing patience.

“Car, I get what you’re saying. You didn’t have to lead her on exactly, but . . .”

“But what? What, Ginny?” she said, with a fury igniting inside of her. “You should be thanking me. You think that everything just happens this way? That you get to live in this perfect little world where all of your friends are smart and cute with perfect hair by some kind of luck of the draw? You need me. I’m the heavy. You sure as hell aren’t going to do it. Are you willing to tell Tracy that she’d be ‘happier elsewhere’? Would you say it to her face or just talk shit about her after she slumped down the sidewalk in her white pleather heels?”

Ginny looked down at her own shoes, gleaming white Tretorns. Betsy, who couldn’t think of a single response, felt the heat from the pavement seep through her sneakers to the sticky soles of her feet.