The Drifter

by Christine Lennon

  She peeled her bare forearm off of the wood bar, which was covered in a thick layer of milky-looking lacquer, which itself was coated with a thin film of something that the bartender’s mildewed rag couldn’t remove with a perfunctory swipe. She sniffed the soft, pale skin below her wrist for clues about what could have dried down to the tacky consistency of packing tape and pasted her arm to the bar. She narrowed it down to either Midori or margarita mix.

  It made Betsy think that she and Ginny needed to go back to the Copper Monkey, a relatively quiet pub on the second floor of a shopping center off of University that was Ginny’s favorite spot. It had rust-colored carpet, spindly wooden stools, and old-timey bar mirrors and reminded them of the Regal Beagle on Three’s Company. On a slow night, when nothing else was happening in town and they had a little extra cash, Ginny and Caroline would hide out in a booth, order stuffed mushrooms, and vow that they would grow old together, get bad perms, and wear caftans like Mrs. Roper. Despite the depressing staleness of the bar, Betsy felt a warmth bloom inside of her, a feeling of contentment verging on happiness. She was happy to be there and, after a long, lazy summer with Ginny, swimming in the pool at her apartment complex and lying on the lounge chairs, feeling the sun braise their skin in the humid heat, she was happy in general.

  Over the last year, Betsy found herself composing a sort of Dear John letter to the campus, the entire city of Gainesville, really, citing all of the reasons they weren’t right for each other. Their time together was nearly over, and she felt like she had to explain why she had to leave a semester early. It’s not you, Gainesville, it’s me, she thought. The school was too big, with all of those auditorium-sized classrooms full of faceless students, and the city was too small, without much of the charm she expected from a sleepy town. The novelty of their first months together, when Betsy was giddy with her hard-earned freedom and breathless about her new friends and the alien excitement of a keg party attended by no-longer-teenaged boys, was over. It had taken three full years, but she had finally decided who and what she wanted to be, and that was on her own, for the most part, without anyone tallying up her many social faux pas with hash marks, adding up her demerits, and scolding her with fines and sideways glances over chicken Cordon Bleu in the sorority dining room. She wanted to work hard and go to school and see and hear music as much as possible. She wanted to spend a half hour in the university museum at night before it closed, wandering its halls, alone in the clean, white, open space, and to drive out to Cedar Key on Sundays to listen to reggae at Frog’s Landing. She would be happy to scrape together spare change and eat fried okra at Grandy’s for dinner for a few more months. And she wanted to spend more days like that one, biking around the Duckpond and having spontaneous drinks with people she only sort of knew. Her relationship with Gainesville wasn’t perfect, but it had its perks. Gainesville was where she found Ginny, Tom, and Melissa at Bagelville, and the handful of people she looked forward to seeing at parties. It’s where she’d met Caroline. However complex their friendship was, they had their fun together. Betsy made a silent vow to make their remaining months together—with her friends, the town, even the school—count.

  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.

  Ginny and Caroline’s number was the only one Kathy had written in her address book in ink. Her most persistent complaint about her daughter, and at that point in time there were many, was that she lived like a “gypsy.” Kathy never knew where to find her and threatened, more than once, to look under “Bars” in the Gainesville Yellow Pages and call every number on the list, beginning with the A’s. But Betsy suspected that the real reason Kathy called the apartment was because she liked talking to Ginny. In fact, the only thing Betsy didn’t like about Ginny was that Kathy clearly adored her.

  “Did she ask you to keep tabs on me again? Keep me on the straight and narrow? Emphasis on the narrow?”

  “She’s a mom. She called because she loves you. And because she worries about you,” said Ginny. “Did it ever occur to you that she likes to talk to me because I’m nice to her? You should try it.”

  “Ha!” Betsy scoffed. “She likes to talk to you because she thinks you’re a good Christian girl who can keep me out of the bars. She doesn’t see that you’re playing the long con. And besides, she has to start being nice to me first.”

  When they circled around the parking lot to order into the drive-thru speaker, Betsy shouted from the passenger seat.

  “We’ll take two of everything that costs ninety-nine cents, and three of everything that costs seventy-nine cents.”

  “Oh Christ, Betsy, will you shut up?”

  “I’m sorry . . . Welcome to Taco Bell . . . Could you repeat that order, please?”

  “Let me handle this, Betsy. I promise you’re not as funny as you think you are right now.”

  “Oh Dorothy, you are absolutely no fuunn.” Even sober, Betsy’s Blanche Devereaux was awful. They had been on a Golden Girls watching spree that summer, and Betsy, who memorized every episode, quoted the show with alarming frequency. Ginny rolled her eyes.

  “Fine,” she said, pretending to be exasperated, though Betsy could tell that she was secretly thrilled. “Uh, sorry about that, sweetheart, scratch that first order. What we really want is three of everything that costs seventy-nine cents. And two of everything that costs ninety-nine cents.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard the lady,” said Betsy, peering ahead at the guy leaning out of the glass enclosure to see who was taunting him, straining the cord attached to his headset. “My mistake. I thought that since you look like Yoda you were also wise.”

  “Enough,” Ginny said, in a pleading whisper. “He is obviously not a fan.”

  “Next window, please.”

  “Uh-oh,” Betsy whispered. “Somebody is pissed.”

  Of course, they had to reach the second window in order for Ginny to work her magic. After some profuse apologies and deft negotiation, they left with two orders of Nachos BellGrande, which they paid for, and three crispy beef tacos and two large Cokes, on the house.

  “Oh see how handsome he is when he smiles?” Ginny said as she collected her change. “I could tell you had a generous heart.”

  “Works every time,” said Betsy, digging into the bag. “Like a charm.”

  “My days of taco swindling are over,” said Ginny with a laugh. “From now on, you’re on your own.”

  As she pulled away from the drive-thru window, Ginny waved goodbye and grabbed a messy handful of tortilla chips. Then, when she dropped a glob of hot fake cheese on her bare thigh, she was squealing and laughing in pain when her car inched forward toward the sidewalk. Betsy was searching through the bag for a napkin and didn’t notice that the car was rolling slowly forward. Ginny looked up just in time to see the bike pulling in front of the car, from out of nowhere, and she slammed on the brakes with a quick chirp of rubber tires on hot asphalt. The nachos slid off Betsy’s lap onto the dirty floorboards.

  “Holy shit!” Betsy shouted without looking up to see who or what was in front of them. “Don’t mind this big metal thing on wheels, jackass. It’s just a car. That could kill you.”

  “Jesus, Betsy, it was my fault,” Ginny said, as she put the car in Park and jumped out. A man on a bicycle scrambled to his feet and stood silently, staring at them. “I’m so sorry, sir. Oh my God, are you OK?”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” added Betsy with a salute, still in the passenger seat. “It won’t happen again, sir.”

  Betsy looked up to find him staring at her and returned his gaze, which was oddly unsettling. He wasn’t outraged, shouting at them, or threatening to call the cops.

  He was eerily calm and studied both of their faces. It was hard to guess his age. Could he be a graduate student? He was a little over six feet, shabbily dressed in dirty jeans and work boots, but that didn’t mean anything. Maybe he was just poor, like Betsy, scraping to pay tuition and stay afloat, but didn’t try to hide it. He had shaggy sandy-brown hair, glasses with cheap wire frames, a blue duffel bag, and a beat-up guitar case slung over his back. His clothes were too warm for the weather. And whether he was intimidated or resentful, or both, he didn’t treat them like peers. He was tense, and you could see it in the small, animal-like movements he made, like an actual, twitching deer in the headlights. Betsy sensed in her gut that there was no way this guy was a student.

  “Don’t you have to get going? Aren’t you late for class?” Betsy said.

  “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.