The Drifter(31)

“Right now?” she mouthed across the room, but Caroline was out the door.

“Thanks for the beer, Rich,” she said. “My friend has to go. Guess I’ll see you around?”

“Yeah, sure, no problem,” he said, confused by the sudden departure.

“I hate to tear you away from your new boyfriend,” Caroline said, once they were back on the sidewalk, downing her beer. “Geek much?”

She took out a cigarette and lit it with a flame shot from a tiny dragon monster’s mouth and then tossed the perfectly weighted specimen into Betsy’s hands.

“I got this for you,” she said. “Courtesy of Rich.”

That he had collected these lighters, painstakingly, at flea markets, from mail-order catalogues in the back of Mad magazine or wherever you’d find something this strange, and that Caroline had plucked one from its mates on the shelf of his bedroom at his own party, which she was allowed to enter only on the remotest chance that nerdy Rich would get some action that night, was of little consequence to her. She’d also cleaned out his medicine cabinet of an expired Percocet prescription and some Tylenol with codeine.

“Thank God for wisdom teeth,” said Caroline, shaking the bottle like a maraca, a little demonic glint in her eye.

Had Betsy told him her last name? Had she mentioned where she worked? Had it not been for the crashed keg party, she would have survived her entire undergraduate experience without seeing Rich once. Now, thanks to Caroline, she was sure she’d pass him weekly on the way home from work and she could already feel the searing hatred of his eyes boring into her skull. She remembered the feel of the lighter, which was hard and cold and fit perfectly in her palm.

“That,” said Gavin, squinting in the sun, rubbing the back of his head, “is one malicious bitch.”

They were quiet for a minute. She had never told anyone that story.

“You’ve got some pretty selective morals, Gav,” she said, sitting up, suddenly defensive of her onetime friend, sensing his judgment of Caroline, and of her by proxy, even though she agreed wholeheartedly with his assessment.

“That’s totally different. I took a CD from a record store. I didn’t cock tease some stranger at a party and then lift his prized possession,” he said.

“I wasn’t teasing him. And I didn’t steal it.”

“So you brought it back, right? The lighter?” he asked. Until then, the thought hadn’t occurred to her. She mumbled some kind of excuse.

“Oh shit, Bets. You’re just as bad as she is if you don’t,” he said.

“He probably doesn’t even live there anymore,” she said, raising her voice a little. “Rich is off engineering somewhere with other engineers and has forgotten all about it.”

“But, really? You kept it?” he said.

She was quiet again.

“I know. You’re right.”

She leaned back and rested her elbows on the dock, letting the sun hit her face. Before, she would have defended her friend. She would have rolled her eyes, told him he didn’t understand, maybe even walked away. This time, she felt the warm wood under her forearms and the backs of her legs, and she let the quiet rest between them for a while.

They sat in the sun for far too long, chatting about their classes, about post-graduation plans. It turned out that he was only slightly less aimless than she was. He was a fifth-year senior, squeezing some forgotten credits into one last semester, and would graduate in December, like Betsy, as a Broadcast Journalism major. She was English with an Art History minor. Given the size and sprawl of the school, they’d never had a class together. They talked about what they did when they should have been studying. Betsy had discovered Joan Didion’s The White Album at a used bookstore downtown and was desperate to talk about it with someone, anyone, even if it was only to say how much it affirmed her hatred for the Doors. She told him about the photograph in the museum that she liked to visit and promised to take him there. Gavin talked about Raymond Chandler in an emphatic whisper, like what he wanted to say about Philip Marlowe, and had no one to say it to, had built up inside him like steam in a kettle. Betsy ate it up like a hungry little fish just beneath the surface of the water that leaped at a tiny crumb or the buzz of a gnat.

“Maybe I’ll teach?” he said. “I don’t know what the hell else to do. Definitely not law school like every other dickhead around here.”

“My mom thought that maybe I should be a flight attendant,” she said, forcing back a smile. It was a pop quiz she was praying he’d pass.

“Because you’re clearly such an asset to the service industry,” he said.

“Hey, I am employee of the freaking decade,” she said. Her faced burned red with pleasure. He knew her. He thought about her enough to know her. He was in it as much as she was, already. “But you’re right. Never in a million. I don’t even like planes.”

With that, she stood up, took off her shorts and her Hanes T-shirt, and jumped in the lake, hoping the cool water would calm her skin, flushed and blotchy with excitement, not bothering to remember which bra and underwear she had put on in the dark that morning, and not caring that much. In the cool lake, she could forget about psychokillers and dead girls, about Caroline and even Ginny. All of that would be waiting for her back in town.