The Drifter(37)

“You’re not going to pull an Anna on me tonight, are you?” Caroline would bark at Ginny, as she slid off of a bar stool. “Nobody’s going to go Anna-sane this evening, ladies.”

Back when they were freshmen, Betsy remembered how intimidated she felt when Anna was around, floored by her perceived ability to not give a fuck about what anyone thought and general badass posture. But over the last couple of years when Betsy spotted her on campus, face covered in giant plastic sunglasses, hair curtain pulled around her features, perpetually hungover, she realized Anna was attempting to hide from her. Betsy was one of “them” according to Anna, and Anna wasn’t about to give her a chance to prove otherwise. So Betsy stopped trying to say hello after she was ignored at least a dozen times. That she and Channing were friends should have come as no surprise.

“Lovebird, we need you on drums later,” Weird Bobby said to Gavin, body shaking, hands oddly still, now rolling a joint with one and fishing for a lighter in his pocket with the other.

“Yeah, we’ll see.”

“Jacob’s been practicing ‘Psycho Killer’ all day and I think he’s finally got it right,” Teddy said. “Qu’est-ce que c’est . . . Fa fa fa FA fa, fa fa fa FA far, better . . .”

“Y’all are hilarious,” Gavin said. “Truly.”

“We spent the whole afternoon thinking of dead girl songs. Hey, is Newland coming?” asked Jacob, slumped so far down in the chair, with broken plastic straps hanging out of the bottom, that his head was barely visible over the bottles clustered on the table.

“Doubt it,” said Gavin, glancing at Betsy to see her reaction. She was looking at Channing, who Gavin noticed for the first time. Bobby passed the pipe to Betsy first and she took a drag and stifled a cough, surprised by its tarry thickness. She passed it on to Gavin. Bobby lit a joint and passed it in the other direction.

“I’m going in for beers,” Betsy said, as she noticed Channing and Anna making their way across the patio. “Teddy, show me where the kitchen is?”

“It’s the room with the stove in it,” he said. “Hard to miss.”

Betsy stared hard at him across the table until he took the hint.

“Alright. Now I’m going to the kitchen,” he said.

Inside, she shouted over the noise.

“You’ve got thirty seconds to tell me what’s up with Channing and Gavin,” she said, pressing herself against the wall of a long hallway to squeeze past the crowd.

“They had a thing last year,” said Teddy, shaking his head. “But she’s crazy. I mean legitimately nuts. Her parents are super loaded but they are never around. She flew Gavin to their house in the Bahamas after their first hookup. She’s clingy as hell, and he tried to end it, but she kept breaking into his house. She put her hand through the glass of his bedroom window and he had to take her to the emergency room. Twenty stitches. He’s just trying not to piss her off so she’ll leave him alone. Hopefully without drawing his blood next time.”

In the kitchen, Teddy opened the cabinet under the sink and pulled out a hidden bottle of Jack Daniels. Betsy grabbed four nearly warm Coronas from the sink.

“So I should probably stay away?” she asked Teddy.

“From her? Yes,” he said. “From Gavin? No. He’s alright. No joke.”

By the time they got back to the table, Channing and Anna were each sitting on one of Jacob’s knees.

“Hey, look who’s here! It’s Betty Bagelville,” said Channing, raising her Red Stripe in the air. Anna just glowered.

“It’s Betsy,” she said, weakly, starting to feel her heart beat a little faster, her tongue getting heavier.

“You two know each other, right?” Channing gestured to Anna.

“Yeah, we go waaay back,” said Anna, laughing without smiling, staring her down, waiting for Betsy to break first and look away. “Betty Bagelville was my sorority sister.”

Jacob coughed out a half laugh.

“You were in a sorority?” he asked Anna. “The slutty one, right?”

Anna pinched his knee hard and threw her head back with another sardonic laugh. Betsy looked at Teddy first, and then Gavin. Are all men too terrified of these kinds of female interactions to intervene, she thought, or just so deeply oblivious to the manipulative shit that’s going down that they sit wordlessly and limply? Teddy passed her a joint and, deeply aware of Channing’s and Anna’s eyes on her, she smoked the rest.

“Yeah, hey, Anna,” Betsy said, finally, choking on her exhale. “It’s been a while.”

Betsy checked to see if Gavin had noticed that the sharks smelled blood in the water and were circling in. If he did, he wasn’t letting on. He and Teddy were talking football. Bobby and Jacob were running down a list of songs: “Down by the River,” “Chain Saw” by the Ramones, the Stones’s “Paint It Black,” “Pink Turns to Blue” by Hüsker Dü. Anna was whispering into Channing’s ear, never taking her eyes off of Betsy for a second.

Betsy’s limbs suddenly felt heavy, which complicated her urge to flee.

“So why aren’t you at rush, Betty?” asked Anna. “It’s hell week, right? Shouldn’t you be singing show tunes with the rest of the stick-in-the-ass bitches?”