The Drifter(7)

No amount of optimism could make Diggers appealing for more than two hours, so she grabbed her backpack, pulled nine dollars out of her pocket, suspecting that it wouldn’t cover her share of the bill, excavated a dime encrusted with lint from another pocket, and set off into the lobby to find a pay phone.

“I’ll be right back . . . you guys,” she said, knowing it was a lie.

GINNY PICKED UP the call off of the answering machine, which played the chorus of the Smiths’s “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before” before it beeped.

“Gin, pick up. Pick up pick up pick up pick up pick up,” she shouted. “Giinnnny. I know you’re there. It’s Oprah time. Half-past O’prahclock!”

“Betsy? What’s going on? Where are you?” Ginny fumbled with the phone.

“I’m at Diggers. You know, at the Holiday Inn.”

“Uh, no, actually. I do not know Diggers at the Holiday Inn.”

“It’s the sad place. On University. I’m here with Louise and Not-Louise.”

“Of course you are.”

“I got here on the pink bike, but now I’m unfit to ride.”

“Of course you are.”

“Oh, Gin, please. Come get me. Don’t make me beg.”

Betsy’s eternal carelessness made her feel like one of the stragglers she rode past on the way to work that morning. Most of the time, Ginny was a surprisingly tolerant chauffeur.

“Fine,” she said, “I’m leaving now.”

Betsy slipped past the vending machines and out through the depressing lobby without saying goodbye. When she caught her reflection in the mirror behind the front desk, for the third time that day, it shocked her. This time, she was surprised to see that she was still wearing the hat from the vintage shop, which looked roguish and charming in the store, but now made her look insane. To her relief, the Schwinn was still locked to the pole. When Ginny finally pulled into the parking lot, Betsy was sitting near the curb in front of the hotel, curled up around her duct-taped backpack like a pillow.

“Nice hat,” said Ginny as she pulled over to the curb. “You are such a pretty girl, Betsy Young, despite all of your efforts not to be.”

“Oh thank God for you,” said Betsy. She hoisted the bike into the back of the Rabbit convertible, flung the passenger door open, and jumped inside. “We need to get to Taco Bell fast before I hurl frozen peaches with a Schnapps floater.”

She knew she had only about three dollars and change left, but Ginny had never passed through a drive-thru window without wrangling free food. People were always tossing in something extra for Ginny, making it a baker’s dozen, giving her an extension on her paper or the benefit of the doubt that she was, in fact, thirty-one-year-old Raquel Schuler from Alachua, Florida, as the fake I.D. in her hand indicated. She’d flirt with the pimply Little Caesars employee in exchange for a free pizza as a kind of exercise, a small social experiment. There was always a spare Nachos BellGrande to be had when Ginny was around.

“So, who is this Louise friend I’ve never heard of?” Ginny asked.

“Not her real name, by the way. I only sort of knew Not-Louise from Armando’s. Not Louise—the other one. Oh God, anyway, it doesn’t matter because I do not remember their names.” Betsy had a habit of drawing out the last syllable of any sentence whenever she’d had too much to drink: “I can’t find my shoes,” “I lost my keys,” “What is your problem?”

“So you had two-for-one drinks with strangers, at Diggers, starting at 3:00.”

“Four-for-two, technically, and yes. I did.”

Ginny laughed and shook her head, which made Betsy weirdly proud, in a perverse kind of way, that she could still surprise her best friend. Betsy leaned back against the headrest and noticed that the day was almost tolerable now since the sun was starting to dip beneath the tree line. The light was fading, casting a golden, nearly amber glow on everything around them, including Ginny, which made her dark eyes glow hazel.

BACK IN MAY, Betsy heard the Sundays for the first time and dug into her emergency cash fund to buy Ginny the tape. Ginny had only two cassettes in her car. One was the Violent Femmes, which someone in her high school car pool left in the deck. The other was her favorite, ’Til Tuesday. Both of them were warped and distorted from overuse. So Betsy convinced Ginny that the eleven dollars she should have spent on something else was actually an investment in her own sanity, since she spent nearly as much time in that car as Ginny did. But it was more than that. Something about the layered, angelic songs about breakups and the miserably cold, cloudy weather of a distant place felt like the soundtrack to being young in the spring of 1990 with a best friend to whom she felt she owed the world, and “Here’s Where the Story Ends” became their theme song. The two of them spent nearly every night driving around, rewinding and replaying it, singing loudest at the end, shouting “Surprise . . .” over and over again, their voices trailing behind them in the wind.

The memories made Betsy ache with a weird longing for that simpler time, just a couple of months ago. That evening, still woozy from the rum and Schnapps, Betsy kept her head from spinning by looking up at the coral pink clouds as “Hideous Towns” filled the air around them.

“Oh, Bets, I completely forgot: Your mom called earlier. She was looking for you,” Ginny said.