“Y’all, I just think she’d be happier elsewhere,” someone would say, a handily coded euphemism for “not a chance.” The chapter president would call a name and open the floor for discussion and if the “scary balloon”—a helium balloon that Margie, a mean girl from Vero Beach, had scrawled a scowl on with a black Sharpie marker—rose above their heads like the Bat-Signal, they were doomed. Not everyone was in on the joke, but there were enough sisters who knew what it meant that their votes would add up, and, just like that, they tallied the raised hands and she was “happier elsewhere.” Margie once made a tearful speech at 2:00 a.m., after a blistering day of singing and talking trash about people, that revealed how her big-shot Daddy would not pay her annual dues if he knew that the biracial girl (Betsy would never forget: Shannon. Salutatorian. Macon.) had been offered a spot in his sweet angel’s sorority. Betsy was shocked by her own reaction, which was stunned silence by intimidation, and never forgave herself for not speaking up. Shannon eventually pledged a black sorority, and Betsy would find herself scanning the crowds between classes, searching for her face as she pedaled through campus, unsure of what she would say, if she’d say anything at all, if she found her. Their paths never crossed again.
Betsy couldn’t explain why she’d endured rush in the first place, and she often ran through every possible excuse she could think of to justify it. She had some kind of bizarre obligation to her competitive streak. She’d never been able to resist wanting something that was perceived as hard to get, whether it was an A, or a cute guy, or a position on the drill team, or one of fifty coveted spots in a sorority pledge class. She wanted to make her mother proud. The school itself was so immense that she figured she’d need a way to shrink it in order to find a manageable circle of friends. She wanted people to think she was OK, that she was likable and popular, even though most of the time she felt anything but. She wanted a little of the magic, of the Ginnys and the Carolines with their surplus of charm. By surrounding herself with so many rows of perfect teeth, a hundred overachieving young women with respectable GPAs in cotton floral sundresses, Betsy felt special by proxy. Befriending Ginny cemented her status and made her think, for a little while at least, that all of those feelings of acceptance were true and real. When she followed Ginny and Caroline at a party, Betsy would catch the looks that were first cast on them and then lingered on her, the way people would pause to remember her face, to wonder who she was or if they’d ever seen her somewhere before. Betsy noticed how everyone, busy bartenders, campus traffic cops, even the guy at the Taco Bell drive-thru, treated her differently when she was with them.
BUT DESPITE ALL of that, it wasn’t long before Betsy decided she wanted out. Like all secret societies, when a person is inducted into a fraternity or a sorority there is an unspoken agreement that comes along with the tiny gold pin. The system relies on people not looking too closely for flaws and, more specifically, not sharing the unsavory elements they may see with anyone on the outside. But it was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that Betsy wasn’t buying it, and that made her a sort of threat, someone who couldn’t be entirely trusted, despite her allegiance to Ginny and Caroline, who often dismissed the flaws that Betsy would point out with a shrug.
“It’s just how it is,” Ginny would say, when Betsy pointed out the complicated social hierarchy, the strange double standards. “You take the good with the bad, I guess.” Betsy realized it was the sorority that created her friendship with Ginny and Caroline in the first place, and that it felt wrong to doubt the very institution that shored her self-esteem enough to give her the nerve to walk out on it. But the whole situation was causing her more pain than pleasure, piling layers onto what was surely an existential crisis in the way that Joan Didion wrote about, that the beauty, and the torture, of being young is that you think that you’re the only one who’d ever felt those feelings or asked those questions or lived that life. Or something like that, since Betsy was never much good with quotes.
The fact was that once she got behind the scenes, there wasn’t much magic left at all. It just felt like one, big long obligation and an endless litany of fines, weekly fraternity mixers with sagging card tables covered with gallon bottles of Popov vodka and Ocean Spray cranberry juice, trashcans full of ominous grain alcohol and Kool-Aid hunch punch, and then the battery of chastising looks from the sisters when any female guest dared to drink it. There was only one Ginny, but there were ten others like Dana—a scowling senior from the Panhandle who paced the house holding a plastic pitcher of water and a cup, which she would fill and drink obsessively in an effort to lose weight while she barked at pledges to answer the phone. Caroline’s wicked but hysterical humor was drowned out by earnest Amy and snobby Shelly, who turned and left the room if they walked in and saw that Betsy, a known troublemaker, was in it. Betsy was used to feeling uneasy in her surroundings, like she was never quite of the place where she was from, but in that world, it was the stifling scrutiny that broke her. She decided that she wanted out. For one deluded instant, she thought maybe Ginny would leave the sorority with her. She was wrong.
Finally, by the end of summer, she felt settled in her new ostracized life. She’d had enough of Caroline, though Ginny would not give up her efforts to make peace between them. Betsy had one more semester, then she could put all of this behind her for good. In the blazing afternoon sun, her eyes stung with sweat and bad memories as she got back on the bike and rode to Ginny’s, undetected, to wait for the storm.
CHAPTER 3
WELCOME BACK
August 24–25, 1990
When Betsy walked into Ginny and Caroline’s dark apartment after work, she could smell the familiar mix of cigarettes and Quelques Fleurs before she even saw her, which gave her a funny pang of fondness wrapped in nausea. She climbed the stairs and poked her head around the doorframe of Caroline’s room, the one Betsy had occupied all summer, and saw her in silhouette, standing in a sea of half-exploded suitcases and L.L. Bean boat and tote bags that spewed their contents on the floor like preppy, disemboweled Tauntauns. Even though the air-conditioning was on full blast, Caroline’s window was open about six inches beneath its heavy shade, and her left hand was dangling out of it, tapping a cigarette into a stolen Howard Johnson’s ashtray on the sill.
“There you are,” Caroline said, flatly.
“Jesus, it’s pitch-black in here.” Betsy’s eyes hadn’t adjusted from the glare outside so she reached for the light switch.
“If you turn that on, I will fucking kill you. How many times do I have to tell you? Overhead lighting is for peasants.” Caroline clicked on a small, porcelain lamp on her bedside table. In the light, Betsy could see her deep tan, the streaks of sun-bleached blonde in her hair. Caroline reached into one of the canvas bags with her free hand and produced a carton of Gauloises Blondes, which she tossed to Betsy with an expert flip of the wrist. “Bonjour, freeloader.”
“Thanks, Car,” said Betsy, catching the smokes and flopping down on the bed. “How was France?”
“It was French,” she said with a shrug. “Viv loved it, of course. I think she hooked up with one of the bellboys in Nice. I finally got to touch an uncircumcised penis. Not the bellboy’s. We’re sick, but we’re not that sick.”
“Nice,” said Betsy. “You can check that one off the list.”
“We made a deal. Viv let me chain-smoke as long as I didn’t call her Mom. She thought it made her seem old. You know, just your typical family vacation. How were things here?”
“You know, the usual. Le popcorn dans l’apres-midi. Wait, is it feminine or masculine?”
“It’s sort of androgynous,” Caroline said. “It’s like the hermaphrodite of snacks.”
“Thanks for letting me stay here. I washed the sheets,” said Betsy, and she slowly traced a perfect navy stripe on an Agnes B. T-shirt that Caroline tossed on the bed. The fondness she felt just minutes before faded. Only the nausea was left.
“How generous of you,” Caroline said.
“Now you can sleep on that beast of a couch downstairs or return to your cave.”
“Thirty-six hours, max, and I’m out,” said Betsy, throwing her hands up in surrender. “I’ll be invisible. Like a ghost.” She picked up the cigarettes and started to leave the room.
“I’m just giving you shit, Bets,” Caroline said, but if she regretted picking the fight, it wasn’t obvious. “Hey, I’m not going to show up for rush till tomorrow morning so we’re going out tonight, right? Old times?”
“Right. Old times.”
Ginny was the one who suggested that the three of them go out, like nothing had ever happened. They started out at CJ’s, the kind of dive with sawdust on the floor that in a month or two, when football season was in full swing, would be crowded with alumni drinking stale beer and trying to relive their glory days. The first whiff of the place made Betsy worry that she’d one day remember it fondly, and that life was all downhill from there, even though “there” felt close to the bottom. The plan was to celebrate Caroline’s end-of-summer homecoming with hot wings and a dozen oysters, though Ginny preferred the cocktail sauce straight up on saltines, hold the shellfish.
None of them mentioned the real reason they chose the place, which was because last fall Caroline had had a brief thing with the bartender, Justin something-or-other from Miami. For three weeks, it was their evening hangout. Caroline would toy with Justin in exchange for free drinks and a basket of fries for herself and her friends. Nobody said she wasn’t generous. On their final night as regulars, Betsy and Caroline had shut the place down at 2:00 a.m., doing one last shot of Jäegermeister with Justin and an unremarkable waiter. It was Betsy’s idea to head to Lake Alice, an oversized pond on the southwest corner of campus, for a drunken, adrenaline-fueled trail run. Lake Alice was an alligator habitat, fenced off from the public with fairly explicit signs depicting open-mouthed reptiles under words like Danger and clearly marked orders to Keep Out. If the presence of live alligators wasn’t enough to scare any sensible person shitless, there was the university’s Bat House, a tall, eerie-looking structure that was built to house a giant, displaced colony of Brazilian bats, diverting it from the tennis stadium, where it had taken up residence and was routinely covering the courts with guano. By the time the foursome arrived near 2:30, the sky was swarming with them. Adrenaline was hard to get in that town, and Betsy found herself coming up with increasingly outrageous ways to coax it out of thin air. Once, she convinced Ginny and Caroline to wander a pasture near town in search of hallucinogenic mushrooms, which grew on cow manure. Even in the moonlight, they couldn’t make out what was growing out of where, and the three of them made such a racket that they woke up the rancher, who chased them out of his field with a flashlight and a loaded shotgun.
“Betsy Young, you almost got us killed,” shouted Caroline as they sped away in Ginny’s car. “I love it!”
On another night, Betsy commandeered Krystal, the fast-food burger place, jumping over the counter and putting on a spare apron to pass out free French fries to a hungry late-night crowd, until the manager called the police and they ran out the back door. The bats and alligator obstacle course was by far the scariest distraction of them all, and therefore Betsy’s favorite.
They made it around the lake, running wild-eyed and howling, amazingly unharmed. But back at Caroline and Ginny’s apartment, Ginny and the waiter passed out in her room, and Betsy was the only one to notice the smoke filling the air. Justin removed a forgotten Gino’s pizza from the oven and tried to slice it by pressing a knife into it with the palm of his hand, blade side up. Caroline, who was laughing uncontrollably, could not be convinced that the inch-deep gash in Justin’s hand needed stitches. So Betsy took his keys and drove him to the hospital, leaving Caroline, Ginny, and the waiter back at the apartment. After that, Justin decided that no sociopath was hot enough to endure the utter lack of compassion that came with the deal. He stopped calling Caroline, and she generally avoided CJ’s. On the evening of her summer homecoming, however, the memory of that evening seemed foggy, and she wanted to start the new school year off right: with a reminder that she still owned that town and a round of free drinks. So CJ’s it was.
When the cracker basket was empty and the two free rounds of Sea Breezes drained, the three of them waved goodbye to Justin, who nodded with visible relief as they filed through the door to leave. Then they piled into Ginny’s car, pretending like no time had passed, like no feelings had been hurt, and Betsy was furious at herself for backing down and giving in to Caroline once again. As usual, they had no real destination in mind. Even though it was after midnight, they were restless and eager to see who’d made it back to town from summer break. They wanted to replace the stories they’d heard a hundred times before with new ones, and they needed a distraction from the building tension. They ended up in the back room of the Porpoise, a too-dark bar with pool tables and three-for-one drink specials inked on black mirrors with neon paint pens. The place was largely empty, except for a dully handsome trio from Ginny’s high school whose names Betsy didn’t catch over the frantic, grating chorus of R.E.M.’s “Pop Song 89” and didn’t care enough about to ask them to repeat. Ginny had legs that dissolved beneath her after two glasses of syrupy Chardonnay, but that didn’t slow her down. She and Betsy managed, mostly, to stay out of trouble, which is to say more sober than not, for weeks.
Technically, Betsy lived in a small two-bedroom apartment in a fourplex near Bagelville with a roommate, Kari, a junior from Ocala whom she had met in Masterpieces of Modern Drama. She signed the lease in June and Ginny helped her move in her meager belongings: a secondhand floor lamp, some crates of books, a couple of boxes of clothes, and a mattress without a box spring or frame. Once Kari came back into town, she would move her furniture out of mini-storage. Until then, it was grim and lonely, and Betsy loved Ginny even more for giving her the spare key to their apartment without making her ask for it. Betsy had been staying with Ginny all summer, feeling safe and cozy watching TV on the overstuffed couch, surrounded by grown-up furniture and dainty table lamps that added to the “bridge club” vibe of the place, and the popcorn popper they fired up every day at 3:30 when the clouds would open up and dump a couple of hours’ worth of summer rain. There was something oddly comforting about the riotous mess of clothes around Ginny, the Stein Mart shopping bags giving at the seams from the strain of untouched purchases, tags revealing 75 percent off of the retail price.
So the arrangement worked perfectly—Ginny, who hated to be alone, got company while Caroline was away, and Betsy got furniture—until Caroline returned.
Instead of the wide, soft bed and crisp sheets monogrammed with Caroline’s initials, Betsy had the couch for another night. Then, she’d move into her last apartment in Gainesville with her own lower thread count linens for four more months, one more long semester.
By the end of the year she’d be gone for good, ahead of schedule and not soon enough. Not that she had any particular plan. Even if she did have a specific goal, or the beginnings of a dream about what her life would look like in ten, five, or even two years from that moment, she wouldn’t dare admit it to anyone. Ambition felt sort of awkward and pointless to her in that place, where looking for work typically involved browsing bulletin boards. Some people she knew showed up at the university’s job fair in their cheap suits, half hoping to miss a shot at an entry-level gig at the First Union Bank, or as a manager of an Enterprise rental car outpost, and some of them got the job. They moved to Atlanta or Charlotte or even Orlando. English majors with an Art History minor weren’t in high demand in that marketplace. Anyway, most of the people Betsy knew were going through the motions; technically, they were open to the idea of full-time employment, in case careers jumped out of the bushes and attacked them. So they polished their résumés, but that was where the go-getting ended.
The Time magazine article about useless, entitled twentysomethings that her mother ripped out and sent her that summer with the words “hazy
sense of their own identity” underlined in shaky ballpoint ink did nothing to convince her that opportunity would come knocking. Betsy was surprised to learn she was part of a generation of any kind, even one so dubiously described. All she knew for sure was that she’d have to put as much distance between herself and Gainesville as possible if she wanted to make something of her dismal life.
None of the answers to those haunting What Color Is Your Parachute? questions were likely to be answered the night the three of them piled into Ginny’s car and drove to the Porpoise.
People had grown accustomed to seeing the three of them together. They were a unit, and from the outside looking in, Betsy realized that the strain between them was barely perceptible. At the beginning of their friendship, it didn’t bother Betsy that Caroline and Ginny were flashier and more conventionally pretty. She learned that traveling in a pack of beautiful women is a powerful thing, that each head that turned to notice them fired a tiny spike of adrenaline. But lately, Betsy was growing increasingly paranoid that she was the sensible Charlie’s Angel, the tall, pantsuit-wearing Sabrina to Ginny’s beautiful but slightly dim Kelly, and Caroline’s sun-kissed Kris, if behind Cheryl Ladd’s gleaming blonde hair, straight patrician nose, and flawless smile lurked the shrewdest manipulator you’d ever met.
At the bar Caroline broke out her thick, mint-green Amex and bought the first round of shots.
“Five lemon drops and one tequila, no lime, for my angry friend over there,” she said, snickering conspiratorially with the bartender. She pointed across the room at Betsy, who produced a middle finger on cue. “She’s too cool for fruit.”
An hour later, Betsy was desperate to leave. Caroline had disappeared into the front room. Betsy watched as Ginny walked over to the booth Caroline was hidden in to try to convince her to leave, and she squinted to focus on their exchange. Caroline stood up on the banquette and shooed her away, like she was swatting a fly.
The Drifter Page 5