The Drifter(34)

On that night with Gavin, she felt like she’d found the secret door in the library, the one where if you’d lifted a dog-eared copy of The Stranger out of its place on the dusty shelf, it would open up and reveal a passageway to the place where the other people lived. She’d seen every decent band that had made its way to Gainesville in the last year. She devoured as many of the music magazines as she could find to read about new CD releases that she couldn’t afford to buy. Somehow, with any other guy, she’d have resented the seminar. She would have squirmed with discomfort, annoyed that a guy had to explain it to her, embarrassed by her cluelessness. She would have left. With Gavin, it was different. He wanted her to listen to hear what she thought, not to prove what she didn’t know. That he was showing off for her, trying to impress her, didn’t occur to Betsy. And she was desperate to hear it.

Betsy went so far as to join a Baptist church youth group in the ninth grade on the promise that the associate pastor would chaperone a group to the U2 concert at the Sun Dome in Tampa. Otherwise, she would have never been allowed to go. Ten kids crammed in a white van with four rows of seats, singing along to “The Unforgettable Fire” in the tape deck, made the hour drive north on a blistering May afternoon. They parked in the last row of the vast parking lot, and walked past legions of guys in stonewashed jean shorts, their dates in brief white skirts and neon tank tops swigging from Malibu Rum bottles, ducking next to their Camaros to shotgun cans of Busch beer. Once inside the small arena, Betsy broke off from the group to wind her way to the front of the general admission crowd on the floor in front of the stage. Someone passed her a flask, and she took a long swig of something strong and terrible. Halfway through “A Sort of Homecoming,” she was transfixed, convinced that Bono was singing directly to her. She wept, surrounded by total strangers trying to console her. Somehow, she’d been jostled around enough in the fray to lose one of her Keds. After the show, when she eventually hobbled back to the church van on one purple sneaker, the accusatory looks on the faces in the group made it clear that she would not be invited back for Stryper the following month. No surprise, she got the last seat in the very back row of the van, which was particularly claustrophobic once the windows fogged up with the evaporated sweat of multiple, irritatingly sober teenagers. She smiled to herself thinking that Bono didn’t look any of those other chumps dead straight in the eyes and sing about running on a borderland. Betsy also knew for once without a doubt, that there were other people like her, people who understood the supreme awfulness of Night Ranger. Since then, she’d been on a mission to learn about music, driven by the desperate feeling that she had years of catching up to do.

Just a few years later, she was in Gavin’s bedroom, fully clothed but asleep at 3:00 a.m. When the needle of the record player scratched along the inner edge of Dinosaur Jr.’s Bug, she woke up with a start. I’m safe, she thought, as she looked around the strange room and at Gavin’s sleeping form. I think.





CHAPTER 9


WEIRD BOBBY’S PARTY


August 26, 1990

At 5:20 the next morning, Gavin gave Betsy a ride to Bagelville, with the promise of meeting her for a burrito later. She stood in the low, muddy light, since dawn was just starting to creep over the trees, and watched him drive away. Just yesterday morning, she didn’t really know Gavin. Then he wandered in out of nowhere. She smiled to herself as she replayed the last twenty-four hours in her head. This was the Gainesville she would miss. It was a place where time stretched out into long, lazy hours, which were oddly boring and unpredictable at the same time. All it took to change your life was one person coming in to order a cup of coffee. Betsy wondered what strange new development this day would bring as she made her way down the side alley to the back door. Somehow, even the muggy morning didn’t bother her. There was a faint breeze in the air that hinted at the promise of autumn. She rounded the corner to the back parking lot, dreamy and distracted, thinking of how it felt to wake up in Gavin’s bed, hoping she would get to do it again.

Then she heard something move near the Dumpster, a rustle of boxes, and in less than a second there was a flood of adrenaline that filled her brain with a roar in her ears. Instinctively, she looked around for something that she could use to protect herself and knocked into a metal trashcan, which made a harsh metallic sound as it scraped the cinder block wall and hit the ground. The reality of her surroundings came rushing back. She wouldn’t remember it as the day she fell in love with Gavin. It was the day that police learned that someone was hunting and slaughtering students, women like her, the day when people stopped feeling safe. She wanted to run, but then she’d be late to work.

“Betsy, is that you?” said Tom, who was now standing at the back door. One of the night-shift bakers peeked out from around the Dumpster, where he was breaking down boxes.

Betsy felt the blood drain from her face. There’s a serial killer stalking this place and I’m still worried about punching the clock, she thought. Pathetic.

“Jesus, you see a ghost or something?” he asked.

“No, I was just a little absentminded, and then I heard . . . I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s nothing. I should have known it was nothing.”

Tom studied her face carefully.

“Nah, don’t worry about it,” he said. “Everybody’s on edge. Come and get some coffee while it’s hot.”