The Drifter(27)

“I bet she can,” he said. “Is this yours, too?” he said and passed Ginny the basket with the facial wax, the car freshener, and the hemorrhoid pads Caroline had assembled. Ginny looked at Betsy, pleading.

“Oh God, no, well, it’s sort of mine,” Betsy said, trying to help. “It’s our friend. She thinks she’s really funny. I don’t, uh, well we don’t really need this stuff.”

Ginny grabbed a handful of Sharpies, tossed them in the basket, and dumped the Tucks and the Sally Hansen strips on a low shelf. Betsy could see the color burning in her cheeks.

“Well, you ladies have a nice afternoon.”

Ginny paid for the art supplies with the petty cash she’d taken from the house, crammed the change into her pocket, and stormed back out into the parking lot. Caroline and Betsy followed. The car was blurry in the distance from the infrared waves of rubber-melting heat rising from the blacktop.

“Why didn’t I park closer?” she said with a hiss.

“Hey, Gin,” said Betsy. “That guy. Did he look familiar?”

“Oh good Lord, Betsy, how would I remember that?” Ginny said.

“Yeah, she can barely recognize her own mother,” Caroline laughed.

Ginny tossed the bag in the back of the convertible and sat hard in the driver’s seat and slammed the door. Betsy climbed into the back and Caroline slid into the passenger seat. She handed Ginny a Diet Dr Pepper and offered some Tic Tacs. Ginny shot Caroline an angry look.

“Jesus, I got cherry passion. Sue me! Who knew that you would have a complete hissy fit if you didn’t get spearmint, for once?”

The ignition started on the third try and soon they were back in traffic on 34th Street. Ginny’s warped Violent Femmes cassette was back in rotation, and it crackled and hissed through the tape deck. Hot late-summer air blew Ginny’s long ponytail into knots. Betsy shielded her eyes from the sun, wishing she’d remembered her sunglasses. The vanilla-scented Hasselhoff flapped wildly at his new post under the rearview mirror. The three of them were too distracted, or too irritated, to notice that the stranger in the boots, the one who grazed Ginny’s hand with his when he picked up the marker from the floor, was trailing a few cars behind them on his bike.





CHAPTER 7


J.D.’S


August 25, 1990: Afternoon

Ginny pulled over in front of Schoolhouse with a clumsy jerk and halted.

“Y’all have a good time!” she said. Caroline stared straight ahead, silent. Ginny clamped her hand down on Caroline’s leg with enough force to make her leap an inch off of her seat.

“Yeah, sure. Looks like you forgot your fishin’ pole,” Caroline said with an exaggerated drawl, “but I’m sure you’ll find something to do.”

Betsy paused to take a look at her friends, feeling uncertain, a little scared, and a little more alone than she would ever admit.

“Alright, well, since you two are staying at the house later, I guess I’ll try to settle in to my hovel. It could use a little sprucing, you know.” Betsy forced a laugh.

“Bets, I mean . . . you should . . .” Ginny fumbled for words before Caroline interrupted her.

“Hey,” Caroline said. “Look, come to the house later if you don’t want to be alone. We’ll be there all night. The plan is for everyone to crash there, bring sleeping bags and all. Really, you should. I mean it.”

“I know you do,” Betsy said. She climbed over the back of the convertible and hopped out onto the sidewalk in front of the record store.

She would have paused there for a bit, trying her best to pretend not to notice the forlorn expression on Ginny’s face, but before she could say goodbye, Ginny gave her a sad little wave and pulled away. Caroline extended her right hand to the sky and shot her the bird as they disappeared into traffic.

She stood at the window in front of Schoolhouse for a moment, watching Gavin glide through the aisles. She remembered that he worked there for a while last year. The record store was a place Betsy was curious about, but mostly avoided. She was self-conscious about her limited knowledge of music and certain that the smug employees were judging her as a dumb sorority girl with Top 40 taste. She’d sneak in for a glimpse of the bulletin board to see who was playing at the Dish, or the Florida Theatre, avoiding eye contact so no one would ask her a question she couldn’t answer. It was hard to come up with excuses to stay there if she could never afford to actually buy anything. It didn’t occur to her that the place was teeming with freeloaders, sticky fingers, hangers-on angling for ways to get on the list when a Sub Pop band dared dip south of Athens, Georgia, or east of Pensacola. She hesitated outside, feeling her skin sear in the reflected sun from the plate glass window. She would have to go inside if she wanted to go to J.D.’s.

Gavin was tall, maybe six foot three, but in certain situations he appeared much smaller. As it turns out, this skill was especially useful when he was stealing something. Betsy saw the cashier lean down to answer the phone while Gavin slid a CD, with its giant plastic theft-deterrent brace around it, out of the bin and into the back of his shorts. Quickly, he pulled his T-shirt over to cover it. Betsy turned away with an anxious jolt. She would have run down the sidewalk were she not paralyzed with a kind of naive shock, but her sudden movement caught his attention and he turned to the window to give her the subtlest, remarkably unself-conscious wave. Had she really never seen anyone steal something before? She’d swiped a lipstick tester herself last spring, as a kind of dare, to see if she had it in her. But something about her petty crime moment was oddly innocent. She needed the lipstick. She didn’t have the fifteen dollars to pay for it. It had already been used, for God’s sake. This felt different somehow, like walking in on a stranger with his pants down in a public bathroom.