The Drifter(25)

“There are over a thousand girls who want one of fifty spots. What are you going to do?” said Caroline, calmer now, back to picking at her nails. “She didn’t even give me my sample. And she shorted your Pebbles by about half.”

They walked for a minute without saying a word, past the Fantastic Sams, past the Chinese restaurant with the coal black tinted windows, past the Dollar Tree, where Ginny, Betsy, and Caroline used to go when they were bored and high to look for paint-by-number kits. Betsy would badger the surly old lady at the cash register by picking up a series of items, a dishcloth with a map of the state on it, a bunch of drooping silk lilies, asking, “How much is this?” while Caroline and Ginny hid near the greeting cards trying in vain to stifle their giggles.

“It’s a dollar. All of it,” the cashier would snap. “And you damn well know it by now, Betsy.”

Afterward, they would watch Betsy squirm with regret. She would try to make amends by chatting about football or when she thought the heat might relent.

“She always breaks first. No fun. No commitment,” Betsy would hear Caroline whisper, while she jammed a birthday card back into a graduation card slot on purpose. Caroline never broke first.

“It’s life,” said Caroline, letting her intensity fade. “If everybody won a blue ribbon, blue ribbons wouldn’t be worth winning.”

Ginny dragged her spoon through the yogurt, which was melting into a weirdly clear liquid faster than she could eat it, so she pitched the remainder in the trash.

“Let’s get going,” said Betsy, desperate to erase Tracy’s scowl from her short-term memory and get on with it. “I’ve got to get back downtown by one.”

“What’s the rush? Is it a boy?” Ginny chided, elated to change the subject. Betsy gave her a warning look.

“Oh my God, you are meeting a boy, aren’t you? How can you think about guys at a time like this, with a campus in crisis,” said Caroline, in mock newscaster mode.

“I’m just going to J.D.’s with some guy,” Betsy said, trying her best to seem unimpressed with herself.

The exact location of J.D.’s, a bait shack that served beer off of a lake approximately forty minutes outside of town in one direction or another, was a closely guarded secret. Even if one could find J.D.’s—which wasn’t listed in the phonebook because they’d need a phone for that—one wouldn’t just show up. The regulars arranged it so that there would have to be an invitation. Arrive without one, without an escort to show you the way, and even if you’d seen the eight or ten people sprawled out on the dock or the picnic tables shaded by a giant wisteria around town for the last three years, you might find yourself sitting alone until your beer lost its chill, wishing you hadn’t wasted the gas money. J.D.’s was for fifth-year seniors, burnouts, and guys like Gavin who were too cool, or too high, to let on that they cared that they knew the way to J.D.’s. It was for members of local bands who may have realized that their days of relative fame were dwindling, but wouldn’t let on they were counting. It was for guys like Weird Bobby, who wore ironic striped tube socks and enormous, black-framed glasses and claimed “Frisbee golfer” as his profession. It was for a handful of girls who stopped talking whenever Betsy would walk by them at a party, with what she sensed as a predetermined hatred for the sorority girl trying to pass as someone else in their midst. Betsy was, not surprisingly, obsessively curious about anyone who didn’t talk to her, so she knew all of their names and identifying details though she was sure she was invisible to them, like she was watching through a two-way mirror.

“J.D.’s? Have you been holding out on us?” asked Ginny.

“No, I’ve never been there. Mack came in for breakfast today with Gavin Davis, the guy from the Dish. Do you remember, Gin?”

“Heeey, Mr. Skynyrd himself,” said Ginny.

“I know who he is,” said Caroline in a way that made Betsy panic in advance of the story that would surely follow. Please God, she thought, don’t tell me she got here first.

“You remember when I bought weed from him earlier this year?” she said. “At least we know he’s industrious.”

Betsy suddenly remembered the three of them driving to a house on the west side of town one night when she was fighting with Mack. She was wasted, in the back of the Rabbit listening to him yammer about Reaganomics. Ginny was driving. Caroline and Mack got out of the car and walked to the back door of a squat brown house that was nearly hidden under a canopy of drooping oak trees. Mack went inside, without looking back to say goodbye. She could hear AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted from the open windows before they’d even pulled in the gravel driveway. Through the back door, they could see that there were people inside, two guys and a couple of girls. One of them was Gavin.

“Oh shit, there are pledges in there,” said Ginny. “Caroline’s gonna eat them alive if they’re high. I’d sort of hate to miss that.”

Betsy could see straight into the house from the backseat of the car. When she noticed the pledges spot Caroline under the porch light, they both leaped off of the couch and smoothed their clothes, trying unsuccessfully to appear sober. Ginny snorted a little laugh.

“Don’t you worry, ladies,” she heard Gavin say to the girls, who were clearly scared shitless. “Caroline here can keep her mouth shut. Can’t you, Caroline?”