The Drifter(53)

“So how does our first New Year’s Eve together rate?” Gavin asked, desperate to change the subject. “Thumbs-up? Thumbs-down?”

“Our first New Year’s? I think it might be our first Monday, Gavin,” she said, rubbing her hands together for warmth.

“Wait, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Counting this past week, I think we’ve spent a total of twelve full days together,” she said. “And now we’re here. Doesn’t that seem a little impulsive?”

“And whose idea was that?”

“That’s not what I mean. I don’t regret it, I just . . .”

“We could turn around and leave tomorrow. It’s that easy. We’re not locked into anything, but Christ, Betsy, I thought you wanted this.”

“I do! God, I’m just trying to be honest, to tell you I’m scared.” Her teeth chattered from the cold, from the lack of food, the cigarettes, the shots, the fear. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been scared since August. Now we’re standing in the middle of this park, which is straight out of a zombie movie. I don’t want to talk about Ginny with total strangers and pretend that having a dead best friend makes me deep and interesting. I’m cold. I have no real winter clothes. I’m tired. And I can’t go to sleep because Ari’s friends are probably giving each other creepy back rubs on the couch, where I currently live . . .”

“With me.”

“Yeah, with you.” She looked up at him through the vapors of her frozen breath and saw him smile.

“It’s going to be great,” he said. “We’re going to make it great.”

“How can you be so sure?” she asked.

“I just know it. I’ve known it since I first met you in Gainesville. You weren’t like everybody else. You were into stuff. You were desperate to get out into the world and do stuff, and so was I. From that very first day at the lake,” he said. “It was just something I knew was going to happen.”

In the distance, someone started the countdown.

“Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . whoa, wait . . . six . . . five . . .”

He kissed her at four.

“You really believe what you’re saying, don’t you?”

“One hundred percent,” he said. “No, wait. If I’m being honest, I’d say eighty percent, minimum. Now let’s walk up to Times Square and find us some morons. It’ll warm us up.”

Gavin swung his arm around Betsy’s shoulder and pulled her tight.

“But first we have to find you some mittens,” he said. “It’s the city that never sleeps, right?”

“Right, but is it the city that never closes its mitten stores?” she asked, as she slid her hand through the buttons of his jacket, temporarily fearless. “That’s what we need to find out.”

“I’m starting to feel like a local already.”

Tiny specks of icy snow began to fall as they trudged across 9th Street, crossing to avoid packs of rowdy drunks, hoping they could figure out which way was north.





CHAPTER 14


DEBRA MUST BE A PI PHI


Winter 1991

New York had been exactly the escape from reality that Betsy and Gavin wordlessly sought. They found a small one-bedroom, a sixth-floor walk-up in the East Village. Its only clear attribute was that it had huge windows that looked out onto the shabby rooftops of the neighborhood, which excited Betsy to no end. The wide-plank floors were decent, but the kitchen was sad and the bathroom was “original,” meaning that the once-charming tile and porcelain sink were cracked and stained. Betsy would buy a handful of subway tokens, put them in her red backpack with a map, a banana, and extra layers, and explore the city for as long as she could stand the cold. After every snowfall, they’d wander the streets, thrilled by the crunching sound it made under their boots. And there was music: Tramps, Wetlands, Brownies, even Webster Hall. They’d scrape together enough money for two tickets and walk through the freezing night, passing a flask, to save cab fare and money they’d spend on a bar tab. Betsy would borrow Gavin’s leather jacket with too-long sleeves and they would walk down the sidewalk, her shoulder tucked under his arm, her cheeks flushed from the cold, or from happiness, or from both. They would sit across from each other on the subway with dumb smiles on their faces, hardly believing the stunt they were pulling. They were together, in the city. They were so distracted by the constant motion around them that they hardly thought of Gainesville. They were in love.

That was the easy part. Finding employment was more of a challenge. It didn’t help that Betsy had no idea what she really wanted to do. She had loved her English classes, but she didn’t think she could write. She loved art, but the galleries she had seen downtown were so aggressively urban and cool that Betsy was too intimidated to walk in the door, let alone ask about a job. She scanned the Help Wanted section of the Times for something that sounded promising. Her first interview did not go well.

“How sad the sisters of, um, let’s see here, Delta-something must be to lose you to the big city. When did your bus arrive?” said Debra, the human resources assistant at Schulman & Brown, two years out of Cornell, prematurely world-weary and a condescending shrew well before her time, as she glanced at the last line of the brief résumé on the otherwise empty desk before her. She did not even try to hide her disdain.