The Drifter(88)

“If you ask me, you got lucky. Really lucky,” he said. “It just works that way for some people. But if I talk anymore about feelings, they’re going to run me out of town. Maybe even the state.”

“It’s true,” Betsy said. “It’s Florida. Men who talk about their feelings would be happier elsewhere.”

“Speaking of, I’m headed back to Tampa to see my folks before I fly back home tomorrow. You want to skip the recap on the bus ride home and come along?” said Teddy.

“Oh Lord, yes, please,” said Caroline, who had given up on trying to sully Tebow’s reputation and returned to the conversation. “You’ve had enough of this by now, right? No need to barrel back down memory lane when the mascara starts to run. Blood, sweat, and tears, am I right?”

After making plans to text Teddy after the game, they made the long ascent to the upper deck. Once inside the stadium, they wound their way through the crowd, up the endless ramp to the very top. By the time they were out into the stadium, the dizzying height, the roar of the crowd, and the heat conspired against her. The two friends sat pressing their shoulders against their sweat-drenched seatmates. At the end of the first quarter, a halting, commercial-interrupted bore of a game, Betsy made her confession.

“Caroline, I just realized, once and for all, that I don’t really like football,” she said, at almost a whisper.

“Holy shit! Are you serious? Do you seriously hate football?” her voice escalated slowly, and Betsy started to remember why they were friends. She stood up.

“Wow, you hate football?” Caroline was practically yelling.

“You are an ass,” said Betsy, trying to suppress her smile, pulling on her arm to get Caroline to sit back down on the hard aluminum bench. The fans around them started to boo, yelling at Caroline to sit down, and Betsy made a run for the exit while the people in the surrounding seats launched trash at her. Caroline followed her out, cackling with laughter over their loud jeers. They sprinted down what seemed like thousands of concrete stairs, like a low-security jailbreak, and burst back into the vast parking lot. They made their way across the street in search of someplace familiar, only to realize that all of the old places had been replaced with slicker, more polished but somehow sadder versions of their predecessors, kind of like Times Square. She was devastated to discover that Bagelville was long gone, replaced by a Schlotzsky’s. She wondered what happened to Tom. The old vegetarian restaurant in the Victorian house had been converted into a plantation-style bar with shady outdoor seating, outfitted with fans that sprayed a delicate mist of cool vapor on its inebriated patrons. There was over an hour wait for a table at the hostess stand, but Caroline being Caroline had talked her way into two empty seats at a table in the far corner of the wide patio occupied by a couple of meek grad students who didn’t have the balls to tell her she couldn’t sit down, directly under a mister with an unencumbered sight line to the TV. By the third quarter, Caroline was giving Charles, the smaller one with the recessed chin, dating advice, and Betsy was showing Albert photos of Remi on her phone.

“Just don’t tell her you love her, Charles,” said Caroline. “Trust me, she’s walking all over you.”

Out of some sense of obligation to the past, they ordered a massive plate of chicken nachos and a couple of bourbon and Cokes.

“Ah, bourbon on a hundred-degree day. I feel like I’m twenty again,” said Caroline.

“If that means you feel insecure about your thighs and sticky from sweat, so do I,” said Betsy. They sat in silence, pretending to watch the game, half listening to the conversations between the people two decades their junior that surrounded them.

“I don’t even remember what we were fighting about, you know, before everything went to shit,” said Caroline, not meeting Betsy’s eyes. She paused for a minute.

“Actually, that’s a lie. I remember all of it.”

“I do, too,” said Betsy. “We pretended that it was about guys and my leaving the sorority and all of that. But there was more.”

“I think I probably felt rejected, like you were leaving us behind. Like you thought that we were stupid and you were too wise for all of it. And maybe I thought on some level that you were right. But then you literally disappeared,” said Caroline. “You just left me here.”

In the two decades she’d been gone, it had never occurred to her that Caroline needed her help.

“I was desperate to leave, even before everything went down,” said Betsy. “And then, you know, the drama just expedited things. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t do it without Ginny.”

“You know, I called you on the day McRae was executed,” Caroline said. “But I couldn’t leave a message.”

Betsy remembered being pregnant with Remi, her walk up Central Park West on that awful morning in Dr. Kerr’s office. “It was Remi’s birthday. As in, the day she was born,” said Betsy. “I was kind of busy anyway.”

“Part of the problem was that I was jealous,” said Caroline. “I was the one who was supposed to get out of here first. I was the one who was on to bigger things. But you and Gavin just sailed into the sunset, like Danny and Sandy in that fucking flying convertible. And all of a sudden I was Frenchy, standing on the ground with some freaked-out hairdo waving a fucking hanky. I was the one who was supposed to get out. You were the one who was supposed to sell real estate in Miami. We got it all wrong.”