The Drifter(33)

“I know,” she said. “I was thinking the same thing.”

Gavin offered to drop her off at “home,” a first-floor apartment in an old, stucco fourplex behind Norman Hall, and he walked her to the door.

“So, my new roommate?” she said, with one hand placed on the doorknob, as she hesitated to let him in. Her words lilted at the end, a tick that was exaggerated when she was nervous or drunk, and she was a little of both. “She’s not back in town with her furniture yet. I just want to warn you, it’s spare in here.” Here came out like a squeak.

She unlocked the door and surveyed the mess, the lonely lamp on the floor, the milk crates full of books, a cardboard U-Haul box spilling over with clothes, the dusty Matisse Harmony in Red poster in a cheap frame leaning against the scuffed wall, and a double mattress on the floor of one of the bedrooms in back. The message light blinked on her answering machine. Melissa had called with the same news that stoner Danny had shared at the gas station, saying that all of the sorority girls were camping out at the houses because no one wanted to go home alone. Betsy and Gavin had escaped to the lake for a few hours, and in that time the fear on campus had grown from something vague and unsettling to something sharper, more menacing.

“You think I’m going to say ‘I love what you’ve done with the place,’” he said, coming out of her empty room. She wondered if he had overheard the message.

“But that would be too predictable.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“I’ve been staying with Ginny, at her place over in Williamsburg Village on 16th. I slept in Caroline’s room while she was away, but she’s back,” she said.

He nodded.

“Anyway, I’d crash on their couch, but I just heard that they’re all camping out at the house until they catch this guy, you know . . .” She trailed off.

“The psychokiller.”

“Yep, that one.”

They stood there for a bit, under the bright overhead light in the kitchenette, and she was suddenly aware of her own pulse, every creak in the building, the tiny bugs circling the lightbulb above their heads.

“I tell you what. You grab some clothes and you come to my place for a night or two, just until the roomie arrives,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m serious,” he said. “My roommate, Jeff, isn’t back for fall semester yet. We’ll sneak you in the back door. Mack won’t notice a thing. You’re at work a good three hours before he wakes up anyway, right?”

“But, Gavin, I’m not, I mean . . .”

“You’re not having sex with me. I get it. Totally fair.”

“It is?”

“Of course, I wouldn’t mind if you . . . wanted to. Believe me. But I get it.”

They stood in silence and made the only truly awkward moment of the day last for longer than it should have. While the prospect of premeditated sleeping at a semistrange guy’s house was terrifying, it was not as terrifying as the idea of being decapitated in her sleep, or worse. Despite her serious doubts about the merits of the idea, she grabbed whatever clothes she found on top of the box and shoved them into a grungy, monogrammed boat and tote. It’s just a night, two, tops, she thought. If it got ugly, she’d beg Melissa and her grouchy roommates to let her come back, or she’d call Ginny and crawl back to the sorority house to beg for mercy.

Despite the apartment’s utter lack of anything worth stealing, she left the hall light on and locked the door and the dead bolt behind them.

“So, nothing weird,” she said, back in the car. “No middle of the night groggy, maybe she won’t remember it date-rape situation?”

“Jesus, Betsy, who have you been hanging out with? Oh, scratch that. My classy friend Mack, right?” he said, opening her car door. She slid into the passenger seat and he leaned down to kiss her. Betsy felt a strange tightness around her lungs, a warmth creeping across her face from her neck. She imagined it was a little like a heart attack, maybe slightly better.

“Just getting that out of the way,” he said, his mouth close to her ear.

Back at Gavin’s place every interior light was on and the back door was unlocked. “Went to Joe’s. Fuck you,” read a note scrawled on the top of a half-full pizza box on the counter in Mack’s handwriting.

“Guess I should remember to lock that door,” Gavin said. “But look, Mack bought us dinner!” He turned off the lights and took the box and a six-pack of Rolling Rock into his room, which had a bed, a desk, columns of paperbacks neatly stacked on the floor, a guitar propped in one corner, and a turntable with speakers on a piece of plywood between two wooden boxes. When they finished eating, Gavin pulled out crates of albums from the closet.

“We’ve got nothing but time, right?”

He started with the Velvet Underground.

“That’s Nico. I know this,” she said, nodding eagerly, relieved to not be a complete idiot.

The Pixies she also knew, albeit vaguely, plus a little pre–Combat Rock Clash. Then he moved on to Fugazi, Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr. Years later, when she remembered that night, she felt the sort of nostalgia that would have made her twenty-year-old self cringe. When you lived in Florida in the 1980s, and every shitty Buffalo wing–slinging dive posing as a family restaurant dished out sanitized 1960s hits from a jukebox to sunburned middle-aged tourists, nostalgia was the weakest, most pathetic thing in the world. Slurring through “Louie Louie” in a rayon floral shirt over a plate of mushy peel ’n’ eat shrimp was life at its worst, the way Betsy saw it. She was drowning in a sea of oldies, watching needle-thin speedboats barrel through the turquoise water blasting the Steve Miller Band. She’d seen enough too-tan old men in golf shirts, driving their pastel Cadillacs with the windows down, singing along to “Under the Boardwalk,” the Drifters song that was nearly as ubiquitous and irritating as “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” For decades to come, any time she’d catch the sound of Jimmy Buffett’s twangy, vapid lyrics about shellfish and frozen drinks, her eyes would cloud with a murderous rage. John from New Jersey liked Jimmy Buffett. She bet his lame girlfriend did, too.