The Drifter(9)

“Rude!” said Ginny, glaring at her, head cocked to the side in disbelief, knowing exactly what Betsy was implying. He didn’t belong there. He was a drifter, a hanger-on. “That is so unlike you, Betsy. Sir, I’m sorry about my friend’s bad manners. Rum makes her mean. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

His eyes darted between hers and Ginny’s. He had a strong jaw and a delicate nose, but his pale eyes were sunken.

“I’m fine,” he said, shaking his head, pushing his hair off of his forehead and shoving his cap back on. He pushed the bike for a few feet, hopped back on, and rode away. He was the kind of man who vanished almost as soon as he appeared.

“That was odd,” said Ginny, getting back into the car. “Don’t you think that was odd?”

“At least he’s not dead,” said Betsy, tossing the chips tainted with dirt from the floorboards onto the sidewalk. “I mean, you didn’t kill him, which is a good thing.”

“God, Betsy. Please promise me that a return trip to Diggers is not in your future.”

They pulled out of the parking lot and drove toward home. Betsy took a huge bite of her taco, which she could already tell wasn’t working the magic she had anticipated. Ginny turned down the music.

“You know Caroline will be back in a few days, right?”

“Right.” Betsy nodded, mouth still full.

“I’m sure she won’t mind if you stay at our place until Kari is back in town and gets her furniture out of storage. You can just sleep on the couch.”

“Right, right.” They drove for a few blocks in silence, considering what their lives might be like once Caroline came home. Things had been rocky between Betsy and Caroline for a while and then took a dramatic dive last May.

“I mean, you can’t let one dumb guy ruin everything,” said Ginny, sounding unconvinced that what she was saying was true.

“It wasn’t just about a guy,” Betsy insisted. “John was as lame as they come. It was the rest of it. The three-way calling? The lying? She tormented me. Tell me you remember that part. You didn’t conveniently forget.”

“Betsy, it’s your last semester here. I just want things to be fun again, like they used to be. Will you promise that you’ll try?”

Betsy wrapped up her half-eaten taco and put it back in the bag. Her stomach seized.

“Bets? You OK?”

“You’ve got to pull over, now.”

Ginny pulled the car to the curb so Betsy could open the passenger door, hang her head out of the side, and launch a river of orange ick into the gutter off of Archer Road.





CHAPTER 2


DIRTY RUSHERS


August 23, 1990

On her way home from work, Betsy took the pink bike on a detour along the southern edge of campus, past Norman Hall, which was directly behind Sorority Row. She stopped in the parking lot under a shady tree, a couple of hundred yards away from the rear entrance of her former sorority house. She felt an urgent, morbid curiosity, and wanted proof that the world continued to revolve without her. She watched from a distance as people hurried up and down the back stairwell, shuttling suitcases and boxes. She’d lost touch with most of the friends she’d made during her two and a half years there, though their faces were all still so familiar. Ginny was the only one who didn’t stop calling after she turned in her pin. Caroline stuck around, but Betsy was convinced it was only for the entertainment value. She liked to watch Betsy suffer.

It was the last Friday in August, and fifteen hundred freshmen girls in linen sundresses were about to emerge from their newly assigned dorm rooms, with their stiff sheets just out of the package and freshly stocked mini-fridges, to participate in the ritual of sorority rush, which had been happening on campus since 1948. In Florida, securing a bid from one of the university’s sixteen houses also involved wrestling with a perpetually sweaty upper lip, oppressive humidity, and a caste system so complicated that it left everyone involved baffled and a little bruised.

For ten days leading up to rush, before the semester began, sisters returned to Gainesville early to put in mandatory fourteen-hour days rehearsing songs and skits and building sets for the song-and-dance numbers they’d put on during rush “parties,” crafting a convincingly ridiculous front to conceal the evil-genius mechanism at work behind it. This is what Betsy had come to witness now, to see the evidence that it was real, and was all still happening without her.

It was impossible to watch them file into the house and not let a flood of memories come rushing back.

Betsy first met Ginny and Caroline on Bid Day, the afternoon when rushees learned which house they pledged and then sprinted to the sorority with mascara-stained tears of joy streaming down their faces. The three of them had run down the sidewalk to the steps in front of the house searching for the signs with their names. Betsy had noticed both of them during rush and marveled at how confident they were, how entirely at ease. Only later did she learn that Ginny had been visiting her older sister, M.J., who graduated in 1987, at the house since she’d been an awkward seventh-grader in a Snoopy T-shirt and braces. Caroline also knew the security code on the front door before rush even started. Her mother, Viv Finnerty, pledge class of 1968, was a successful real estate agent in Miami and, because of her gold Kieselstein-Cord belts, St. John jackets, and icy blonde bob, Viv was the most glamorous woman Betsy had ever met. Ginny and Caroline were both “legacies,” which meant that they had a family member, a sister, mother, or even grandmother, who was a member of the sorority. Viv left school to get married in the middle of her sophomore year and had Caroline six months later. But the sorority was nothing if not loyal. Once you were in, you were in for as long as you wanted to be, as long as you paid your dues and you weren’t asked to resign. So Viv rarely missed an alumni weekend, and a stack of recommendations from her most socially prominent peers were stapled to Caroline’s rush application.