The Drifter(36)
Betsy didn’t mention Channing during the drive home, and it fit in well with the pervasive silence. Ribbons of pale orange light filtered through the canopy of trees, and it was so beautiful that Betsy thought she might cry. She was tired, desperate to hang on to the moment and trying not to ruin it, any more than it had already been ruined—by Channing, or Caroline, or the murders. When they pulled onto Gavin’s street and saw Mack’s Suburban coming from the opposite direction, Betsy knew that her private idyll was about to be destroyed in a more aggressive way. Through the driver’s window, Betsy saw Mack raise his hand to wave at Gavin. Then, Mack noticed someone next to him and did a cartoonish double take when he recognized Betsy in the passenger seat. She watched his smile shift to fury in dramatically slow motion and her own jaw clenched in panic. Gavin lifted two fingers off of the steering wheel and nodded briefly, but he kept driving. When they noticed Mack’s brake lights burn fast and red in the rearview mirror Betsy held her breath and Gavin slowed to a stop. After a few seconds, in that odd game of backward chicken, Mack broke first, hit the gas, and sped out of sight.
“Cat’s outta the bag, all around,” Gavin said, turning to look at her straight on, a devious smile on his face. He grabbed her hand and they burst into a fit of laughter, letting the icy AC blow away all of that tension. For the second time that day, for very different reasons, Betsy wanted to cry.
“Maybe he left us some fried chicken this time.”
Betsy showered in Gavin’s bathroom, which reeked so heavily of mildew that she shampooed twice and hoped the scent of concentrated Prell would mask the sour-towel stench. She pulled on the 501s she’d been breaking in since the ninth grade, a white tank, and a gray men’s suit vest she’d picked up for a dollar at a thrift shop during her last visit to her mom’s house over a year ago. She’d cinched the silk strap and buckle in the back to make it less boxy around her waist, all the while thinking of Channing and her tawny, angular back. She parted her wet hair down the middle and patted Cherries in the Snow, her one tube of lipstick, worn down to a flat nub, onto her lips with her ring finger. Ginny had talked her into some bronzer once or twice, chided her disinterest in makeup, and even talked her into a visit to the Lanc?me counter, but Betsy resisted. Channing or no Channing, that was the most effort she’d ever made for a guy.
Her friends would be barricaded in the upstairs TV room watching slasher flicks in a kind of distasteful nod to current events. But Betsy didn’t want any surprises, or to run into anyone unexpectedly, least of all Caroline. She had no desire to field their questions about her temporary living arrangement, so she checked her answering machine to be sure. There was one hurried message from Kari, her delinquent roommate, saying that her parents wouldn’t let her come back until classes started again and the murder mayhem subsided. The second one was from Ginny.
“So Kim drove by the Chevron today on a snack run and saw you with Gaaavin,” she sang into the tape. “I need every last detail. Promise me you’ll remember the way to J.D.’s. We have to go once rush is over. Nana Jean told me that we should just come stay with her until this all blows over. She sends her love.”
Ginny and Betsy would often drive to Ocala on a Sunday with trash bags stuffed with laundry filling the backseat under the auspices of “helping” Ginny’s grandmother Nana Jean. They’d take her to Grace church, walk her dog, and make a stop at the market. Then they’d swim in her pool and beg her to make lemon bars. For breakfast, they’d eat Jean’s famous sausage gravy with the fluffiest biscuits imaginable. Ginny and Betsy spent quiet afternoons on the wide screened-in porch of her rambling old house, under the fan, napping or reading and not saying much at all. Betsy felt a deep ache of longing for all of it. She could taste the iced sweet tea and feel the fan cool her skin.
“Anyway, Caroline called Holly’s cousin from Vero fat and the s-h-i-t is hitting the fan. I’ve got a killer headache and I want to go home to sleep it off, but I’m trapped. Also, I’m beginning to think you had the right idea about bailing on this whole thing. My spirit is officially crushed.” She sighed. “It’s just not worth it. That’s all. Call me later.”
The last message was from Caroline.
“Hey, it’s me,” she said. “Just checking in from hell.”
She paused so long that Betsy thought the message was over, and she waited for the beep. Then she started again.
“I guess, I, I don’t know. Ginny said she hadn’t heard from you this afternoon. Just want to make sure you’re good, that you made it back from J.D.’s. If you’re staying in your dungeon apartment then you’re either really brave or completely stupid. Uh, my money’s on stupid. I am tempted to bail on the slasher movie marathon and go home to sleep it off. I’m still so hung from last night. Oh, and you better remember the fucking directions to J.D.’s. You and me, we’re going when this is over.”
“EVERYTHING OK?” GAVIN asked after she hung up.
“Yep, totally fine,” she said, clearing her throat, choosing to wait until the next day to discuss her indefinitely delayed move-in date.
It was 10:30 by the time they got to Weird Bobby’s, and things were just getting started. The house, which was off of University Boulevard down the hill from the stadium, was a neglected split-level at the end of a long, downward-sloping driveway. Inside, instead of furniture, he had a full studio set up in his gray-carpeted living room. There were a couple of guitars leaning on stands, some amps, a drum kit, a keyboard, a bass, and a mic for backup singers next to a stack of tambourines. To the left, stained, carpeted stairs led to the bedrooms, and the fluorescent-lit kitchen was separated from the main room by a low Formica counter. A thick haze of smoke filled the room, which was wall-to-wall people, none of whom Betsy recognized. Urge Overkill’s “God Flintstone” was playing loud enough to imprint itself instantly in the darkest crevice of her brain, and she knew that she would never forget Weird Bobby’s house, with its fluorescent green, algae-filled pool and bong-water stained rug. Gavin took her hand and led her through to the backyard, where the crowd thinned a bit. Jacob and Teddy were sitting at a glass patio table, which was covered with empty bottles and a quarter-inch layer of leaves with dust beneath it. Across from them with his back toward the house was Weird Bobby, who was holding court by packing sticky hash into a metal pipe with nicotine-stained fingers. A small pile of joints rested next to a Rolling Rock. In the grass nearby, a guy in a black trench coat was already passed out, facedown, and a couple of partygoers were launching empty beer cans at his head in a twisted version of horseshoes. It had been years since Betsy had been at a party where she barely knew anyone, or where she couldn’t ride on Caroline and Ginny’s wake through a crowd of strangers and not give a shit. Tonight she felt out of place and adrift. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Channing huddled with Anna Johnson, a Miami girl who’d pledged the sorority the same year as Betsy, but she didn’t dare look in their direction. Anna had shown up to mandatory study hall in a tiny stretchy miniskirt and oversized tank top that kept slipping off of her shoulders and passed out in a massive pile of her own hair one too many times. She was given the boot by the end of freshman year for not making her grades, and became the first casualty of their pledge class. She’d since become a punch line when any of them got woozy in a bar.