The Drifter(28)
So he steals CDs and sells them for beer money, she thought. Nobody’s perfect.
She walked over to the door and the bell attached let out a pained little jangle as she took the handle and yanked it from its swollen, rotting frame.
“Hey, that was fast,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Hey, Betsy,” said the girl behind the counter. They took a Studio Drawing class together the year before, but it took a minute for Betsy to register her face, given the randomly executed green hair that she dyed, judging by the blonde roots, about three months ago. Betsy remembered sitting on the plaza sketching moss-covered trees and badgering her with all sorts of questions about her nose piercing, which was a ring like a bull’s that spanned her nostrils. (How much did it hurt? “A lot.” What was her inspiration? “Dunno.”) She searched for a name and came up empty-handed, then smiled and offered an awkward half wave.
“Hey,” she said. Better to say as little as possible in these situations, she thought, though she’d never been in one of these situations before.
“Later, Gavin.”
“Later, Wendy. Good to see you back in town,” he said. Wendy, that’s it. Betsy wondered what the parents of cute Wendy, with a sprinkle of freckles on her nose, thought when she came home, post-bull’s-ring, post–Manic Panic, for summer break. “Don’t sweat the hair. It grows, right?”
“Screw you, Davis,” she offered limply before the door jangled shut and cast a small shower of leaded paint chips on the sidewalk.
“Did you drive here?” he asked, scooting sideways past the window to conceal the bulge in the back of his T-shirt.
“No car,” she said, remembering the tiny pink bike at Bagelville and not caring enough to retrieve it. They’d reached his bike, an anonymous, matte black cruiser with five pounds worth of heavy link chain wrapped around it and a bulky, rusted padlock.
“I’ll give you a tow back to my place so we can take mine,” he said, and she perched herself on the center of the wide, flat handlebars, placing her feet on the pegs on either side of his front tire, quietly thrilled. She wished she’d washed her hair that morning so he’d catch a faint whiff of grapefruit or fresh cut grass as it blew back near his face and be forever smitten.
They took a slightly longer route to pass through the shady, oak-lined streets behind the stadium, a cooler, possibly more romantic detour and an oddly chivalrous move for someone with stolen goods crammed in his pants. Whether it was the shade, or the breeze from the ride without the burden of actually pedalling, or the petty thief making small talk behind her, she felt lighter than she had in weeks.
When they got to the squat, beige cinder block house surrounded by patchy grass and a wide, gravel driveway, Betsy noticed Mack’s truck parked in back. She looked into the large window and saw him standing in a tangle of cables, his fingers buried in his hair. She ducked behind a tree. Mack must have spotted Gavin because she saw him raise his hand in a two-finger wave. She tiptoed around the other side of the house and met Gavin by the back porch.
“So how much do you feel like explaining to Mack what we’re doing today?” he whispered, as he quietly chained his bike to a tree.
“Not much. Not much at all,” Betsy said, as she pressed herself against the side of the house. “He may need some help with the manual, though. I’m not sure that he can read.”
They bolted across the yard toward the carport.
“He’ll have a heart attack by dinner,” said Gavin. “The guy’s a hothead.”
“He’s your friend,” whispered Betsy, ducking low to hide behind his Honda Accord. “For reasons unknown.”
“So you two . . .”
“Biggest mistake of my life.”
He unlocked the car door and sank into the driver’s seat, his head clearing the roof by maybe an inch, and heard the crunch of plastic under his weight. He reached around to pull the CD out of his waistband and tossed it in the backseat. Betsy got into the car, unused to using the handle to open the door.
“Have you heard this Sonic Youth record?” he asked, entirely unfazed by being exposed as a small-time crook. “It’s so good.”
“So you already own it?” she asked. “But you stole another one for fun?”
“I was going to sell it back used to Schoolhouse for lunch money when Wendy wasn’t around.” He backed out of the driveway in a hurry. “Don’t worry. I’ll buy you lunch, too. Maybe even a beer.”
He squeezed her knee hard and she laughed.
“But you can take it if you want,” he said. “Consider it a gift.”
“You knew just what I wanted.”
Ten minutes outside of town, the buildings disappeared and the scrub and low trees, the endless tangle of green, started to take over. Betsy knew she should have been paying attention to where they were going, but the signs—to Micanopy, Alachua, High Springs, Waldo—meant nothing to her. They listened to Neil Young with the windows down and pulled over to buy boiled peanuts from a man who served them from a rusty oil drum. Though she couldn’t have possibly known that this moment would happen today, she felt like she expected it, like it had been something she knew would happen for a while, and she enjoyed the odd, buzzy déjà vu head trick of an experience that was foreign and familiar at the same time. Every once in a while, Gavin would look at her and smile, a glance that revealed his own satisfied shock over what was happening this day, too, and she was relieved.