The Drifter(4)
When people realized they’d stopped short of their destination by a hundred miles, they’d typically stay awhile, sleep it off in the grass. They never wanted for company.
Betsy picked up speed through the flat quad, enjoying the movement in the air it created, and then caught a flash of her reflection in the vast windows of Emerson Hall. The seat on the pink Schwinn she was riding, which she’d lifted from her friends Ginny and Caroline’s place, was at least three inches too low for her spindly frame, so her knees grazed the handlebars, and it made her look hunched and twisted, like an ampersand. Since she had cut her dark blonde hair to just below her chin, a trace of sunny highlights still clinging to the ends, it had started sticking to her face and neck in little, sweat-damp hanks. She was so startled by her reflection that she let out a little gasp. She knew how different she felt lately, but hadn’t realized that the transformation was apparent on the surface, too.
She made it to work with a chocolate glazed in hand (has anyone ever spotted an illuminated neon Hot Doughnuts sign moments before sunrise and resisted its pull?) and five minutes to spare. The windows were steamed from the boil-and-bake operation in back, which started every day at about 3:00 a.m. She tapped on the glass and peered through the fog to get Tom the manager’s attention. When he looked up from the industrial-sized vat of dough he was mixing and saw her fuzzy silhouette through the condensation on the windows, she motioned to the midget bike.
“No lock,” she shouted through the glass to Tom, the son of the Filipino owners, Tammy and Agapito Castillo, miming a gesture that might look significantly cruder than “U-lock” if anyone were passing by the store. Tom motioned to the back door with an impatient wave and Betsy wheeled herself around.
“Nice breakfast, asshole,” he said. “You can bring in the bike today, but next time I’ll let someone steal that piece of shit. Again.”
Betsy had lost her third bike of the year just a few days before. It wasn’t stolen, exactly. She’d left it locked on a rack downtown in front of a bar and hitched a ride home when she was too buzzed to pedal it home.
Later, when Betsy returned to the street sign where she locked it, the bike was missing its seat and front tire and she was too lazy and embarrassed to unlock the hulking mess and have it repaired.
Betsy stuffed the last half of the doughnut into her mouth, now frosted in the corners where last night’s lipstick lingered. She squeezed the bike through the door. “Just one more time. I really appreciate it.”
Tom was even crankier than usual, and Betsy doubted it was just about the doughnut.
“Is everything OK?” she asked him. “I would say that it looks like you woke up on the wrong side of the bed, but I know you sleep standing up.”
“There is some seriously crazy shit going down in this town right now, Betsy,” he said, opening the oven to let a blast of heat fill the room. She was washing her hands in back, examining her distorted reflection, this time in the paper towel dispenser. Maybe the blurry image in the stainless steel and her plate-glass-window reflection were lying to her, but it looked like the edge of her jaw was sharper, there was the slightest hollow under her cheekbone. She wondered if maybe Ginny’s summer popcorn with soy sauce diet actually worked, while Tom slid out a tray of everythings and the scent of charred garlic stung her sinuses.
“And by crazy, I mean weird. Even by Gainesville standards. So just be careful.”
“How weird is weird?” she asked, grabbing a wire basket from under the counter to fill with cooling sesames, unconvinced.
“I don’t know exactly, but the cops came to the back door for coffee not long ago and they’d seen some grisly stuff,” he said. “Just don’t do anything stupid. Or maybe do stuff that’s less stupid than your typical bullshit.”
“And when you say grisly, you mean . . . ?”
“I don’t think I’m supposed to say until they notify the family. That kind of grisly,” he said. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be talking so much while you’re on the clock, either.”
TOM HANDLED ALL of the staffing for Bagelville’s two locations, the original here in the student ghetto and the far less desirable (cleaner, newer, friendlier) annex in a strip mall near the highway, because his parents hated students after twenty years in a college town. Though Tom would shake his head in empathetic disgust when his mom ranted about the mysterious juice deficit (“Tagalong is a Girl Scout cookie,” he barked, when Betsy asked him to translate and help her defend herself when Tammy accused her of giving it away, “Tagalog is a language. What the fuck are they teaching you here?”), he was mildly entertained by the antics of his employees, a scruffy lot of pretty young women who tried hard not to look like they were trying, and knew they were good for business. English Lit TAs and bored fifth-year seniors didn’t come here and stay for hours, past breakfast into the less satisfying pizza bagel territory, just for free coffee refills.
When Betsy was arrested for using a fake I.D., Tom gave her an advance on her paycheck to cover the fine so she wouldn’t have to tell her mom. She was grateful, and she trusted him. And though he would never admit it, she knew he liked her. She was routinely fifteen minutes late, critical of customer’s orders—when Betsy’s favorite professor, Dr. Loman, a patient man who taught Shakespeare to auditoriums full of sunburned students in flip-flops and tank tops, would order his “usual” tuna melt on a cinnamon raisin bagel, she made a gagging sound as she placed it in a waxed-paper-lined plastic basket more than once—and had a murmured, smart-ass retort for every one of Tom’s requests. But she worked hard without too much complaint, and she was grateful for the job. Over the year and a half she’d been there, Tom teased her for being a flake and she mocked him for his complete lack of a social life and terrible taste in music, all while making $5.25 an hour.