All Betsy knew was that there were a shitload of oranges to squeeze by 7:00 a.m., and that this was the year her life would change. Later, she thought, she’d smear veggie spread on a toasted sesame and try to swap it for a slice out back.
CHAPTER 5
GAVIN
August 25, 1990: Morning
Hey, do y’all have any fresh-squeezed juice?”
Betsy heard the smug, raspy giggle. Even with her back turned she knew it was the moron. It had been three solid months since she’d heard that drawl, the smoker’s cough, the relentless sarcasm she once mistook for humor. There was a time when she found that rebellious but still preppy Southern thing—the fraying Izod, the ball cap pulled low, the hard pack of Camels in the back pocket, the flattened Reef flip-flops, the easy smile, the giant Chevy Suburban with Georgia plates that smelled, eternally, of gasoline—irresistible. But she quickly realized that these guys came with a package deal, and the package included a habit of traveling for jam band shows and playing endless rounds of golf. As a bonus, they also came with frequent visits from a condescending, plastic-nosed mother and/or sister, regular lost magic-mushroom weekends, and a baffling number of out-of-town fishing trips (the latter two were often concurrent events).
“Hey, Mack, no freebies today,” she said without looking up. “Tom’s onto my ways and he’s started counting the cups.” The morning rush had vanished, along with her caffeine high, and she was in no mood for assholes.
“I’m a paying customer today. Semester’s just started and I’m flush.” He laughed. “So I guess we’ll take two.”
It was the “we” that got her attention. She turned around to see Mack, tan and lean from a summer caddying on Hilton Head, standing next to Gavin.
LAST SPRING AT the Dish, a gritty club downtown, American Music Club was in town to play to a packed house of about forty-three people. Betsy had pleaded with Ginny to go with her, even bartered joining her on a drive to Ocala to visit her grandmother, Nana Jean, the following day. By 11:00, the band still hadn’t made it onto the stage. Ginny, with her shiny brown hair and royal blue miniskirt, beamed like a distress signal.
“So this is where you go,” Ginny said, glancing around at the sparse groups of filthy T-shirt-clad guys, “when you’re not with us?”
“You mean when I’m not drinking three-dollar pitchers at a bar called Balls?” she said. “Honestly, Gin, is that the best they could do? Balls? At least at Hooters they’re going for a somewhat veiled innuendo with the owl thing. But a sports bar called Balls is just lazy and, frankly, a little gross.”
“Um, three-dollar pitchers?” Ginny leaned in to whisper in her ear, “They could call it Scrotum and I would still show up every Thursday.”
“And who is the ‘us’ you’re referring to, anyway? You and Caroline?” said Betsy.
“Well, yeah, me and Caroline. Plus every other person we know,” said Ginny.
A guy wearing giant black glasses and a faded Kool-Aid T-shirt walked by, nodded, and offered a barely audible “What’s up, Bets?”
“Or at least everyone I know,” Ginny said, pausing to see if that was a good moment to bring up what she’d been avoiding for weeks. “You know, you could tell Caroline you’re sorry and just move on. It would be so easy. You wouldn’t even have to mean it.”
“Sorry for what? What do I have to be sorry about?” Betsy barked at her.
At that point, to Betsy’s relief, the band took the stage, albeit with the bombast and dynamism of a slug. Sullen and exhausted, they were met with a single woot and some limp applause. After what seemed like endless tuning, Mark Eitzel, the lead singer, had a bit of a meltdown onstage, though calling it that lent it more drama than it deserved. He looked around at the sparse crowd, which must have seemed pathetic to someone who’d been somewhere else, anywhere else, but seemed perfectly fine to anyone who hadn’t, made a kind of condescending harrumphing sound into the mic and stormed off the stage. It was more like a minor tantrum than a breakdown. The band must have been used to his antics because after the drummer and bass player exchanged a weary glance, they shrugged and kept playing. Within a few minutes, when it was clear Eitzel would not return, a guy from the audience hopped on the stage, shook the guitarist’s hand, whispered something to him, and lumbered over to the mic stand.
“I’m taking requests,” he said, pointing at the audience with one finger and wrapping the others around a Rolling Rock. “And no fucking Skynyrd.”
It was Gavin. She knew his name from hearing Mack say it, and seeing him around at parties and shows. He’d caught her eye once or twice. And last year, she drove out to his house with Caroline one night, but she hadn’t paid much attention until that moment.
Twenty minutes later, midway through a more shouted than sung version of “Sweet Home Alabama,” Betsy had a new crush. Ginny had had enough.
“I feel like Strawberry Shortcake, or what’s her name, the blueberry scented one, in this place,” she said, glancing at her crisp T-shirt and handing an empty can of PBR to Betsy. “And I either need to do a shot or go home.”
They slipped out the back door into the alley without saying hello or goodbye to Gavin. And there he was, looming before her at Bagelville, taller than she remembered.
“Hey, Gavin,” she said, nodding at him, looking past Mack’s shoulder.
“Hey, Betsy.”
He knew her name. He admitted he knew it. This might be easier than she thought.
“Y’all know each other?” Mack asked. “I mean, well enough for you to serve him a bagel?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen him around.”
“You, too.”
“That was quite a performance at the Dish last spring,” she said, wondering if she’d brushed her teeth that day as she tucked an unwashed strand of hair behind one ear. She ran her tongue behind her upper lip to check and hoped he wouldn’t notice. “How long did you stay up there?”
“I ran out of songs I knew by heart pretty fast,” he said. “Some asshole kept shouting ‘Tom Sawyer’ but I haven’t been able to sing high like Geddy Lee since seventh grade.”
“Um, I’ll have a large coffee and a sesame, toasted with chive cream cheese, thanks for asking,” said Mack, sliding a ten-dollar bill across the counter. Betsy moved to the counter to slice his bagel and put it in the toaster.
“We have light cream cheese now,” said Betsy. “I just thought you should know.”
Mack clenched his teeth.
“It looks like you leaned out over the summer. You don’t want to get, what’s that word?” She motioned vaguely to the underside of his unshaven chin.
“Jowly,” said Gavin.
“Yeah, that’s it! Jowly. You don’t want to get jowly. Again.”
Mack brushed his jawbone reflexively and grunted something obscene.
“I’ll just have coffee, no juice for me,” said Gavin.
Tom barged through the swinging doors from the back with a brown paper sack full of cinnamon raisins. Steam carried out the yeasty, sweet smell of bread baked with fruit.
“It’s $2.75 for the juice,” Tom said, looking dead straight at Mack. “I know you don’t pay, Newland.”
“There’s a murderer on the loose and all you care about is money,” said Mack. “I don’t want any of that shit anyway.”
“I’d charge the killer double,” said Tom.
“What killer?” said Betsy, trying not to seem alarmed as she spread a thick layer of green-flecked cream cheese and watched it melt into the warm bagel.
“Two girls were found dead in two different apartments in the last week. They think they’re connected. That’s what I was talking about earlier,” said Tom. “By the way, Newland, where have you been the last couple of nights?”
“Ah, hilarious,” he said. “Who knew you had to be funny to make my breakfast for a living?”
Gavin took his coffee. Mack grabbed his bagel and wandered over to a table in the corner near the window. Betsy tried to look busy, slicing tomatoe
s, refilling the cream cheese bin, straightening the refrigerator case, sweeping up the relentless downpour of poppy seeds on the floor, but her eyes kept darting to the corner. Melissa, a bird-like blonde from South Carolina, came in to help with the morning rush. She washed her hands in the steel sink and wiped them on her paint spattered Duck Head cutoffs.
“Hey, so did you hear about the dead girls?” Melissa said, slicing and scooping a salt bagel with her fingers for an impatient and bleary-eyed med school resident in hospital scrubs on the other side of the counter.
“Somebody mentioned something,” Betsy said, thinking If that guy’s going to be a doctor one day, he should know better than to ask a stranger to dig her fingernails into his bread, even if it meant a few extra calories. “Some lunatic was ranting about a murder a few minutes ago.” She glanced over at Mack and Gavin’s table, where they were, without question, talking about her. “But I thought it was the usual bullshit. So it’s true? Two girls are dead?”
“Yeah, they found a girl dead at her apartment out by the highway or something. Then another one this morning. They think it’s related. One of them worked as a dispatch at the sheriff’s office. It was all over the police radio,” said Melissa. “I ran into my landlord and he told me. That crazy bastard has a scanner, like a police radio. What a cliché. Anyway, that’s how he heard. The cheap asshole was replacing all of the broken locks in our complex today so it must be serious.”
“Jesus,” said Betsy, thinking of her pre-dawn bike ride, trying to remember if she’d locked the door at Caroline and Ginny’s behind her. She thought about leaving Caroline at the bar.
Eventually Betsy’s curiosity got the better of her and she wandered over to Mack and Gavin’s table with a fresh pot of coffee under the guise of refills.
“So, you’re talking shit about me, obviously,” she said, filling Gavin’s cup first.
“Always, Young, always,” said Mack, balling up his napkin and tossing it on the table.
“What do you know about this so-called murderer?” she asked them, hoping Gavin would answer.
“What I hear is that some girl was sliced from her chin down. Never saw it coming,” said Mack, shoving the last bite of bagel into his mouth. “Alright. Gotta go get unpacked. I got some speakers to attend to. See you back at the house.”
“Ah, so you’re roommates now?” she said, trying not to let her disappointment show. “When’s the first rager?”
“No, not roommates,” said Gavin, quickly. “Just neighbors. Mack moved into the house next door to mine.”
“But there will be a rager. And don’t act like you need an invitation, Betsy. You’ll just follow the scent of beer. Kinda like a drunk, desperate dog, like, like, more like a bloodhound,” Mack said.
“You can bite me, Mack.”
“Been there, Betsy, believe me. Not going back,” he said, pausing a moment to let a dumb, slow grin spread across his face.
“You know, it would suck if you were the next one to get hacked to bits,” he said, turning to look at Gavin. “Later, Gav.”
“Later.”
She stood there holding the rapidly cooling coffeepot, noticing her hangover again for the first time in hours. Mack was one of the latest in a long line of bad decisions. Freshman year, there was George, her first mistake in town, which lasted forty-eight hours before she found out he had broken up with Heather, a senior in her sorority, a week before they met. George had given her a ride to the stadium for her first football game on the handlebars of his bike. Later, after he treated her to her first sushi dinner at a bad Japanese place by the highway, they had sex in a way that made Betsy think George was used to getting what he wanted without asking for it. Though what happened between them was just a degree or two from date rape, consensual in only that she didn’t ever exactly say “no,” she still went to his house the next day to play Spades with his roommates. She didn’t yet understand that what she wanted, or didn’t want, counted for something. Heather tracked Betsy down at dinner on Monday and gave her a loud, demeaning lecture about what happened to slutty pledges, and it was over. George left one weak message on her answering machine (“Hey, Betsy. Gimme a call.”) and was never heard from again. Betsy had a few deeply average make-out sessions here and there, a handful of forgettable flings, then, during her sophomore year, she had a monthslong flirtation with Andrew, her Geology TA, with whom she’d spend hours talking in the corner of a microbrew pub over warm, hoppy beer to no avail. The relationship culminated with a Friday afternoon trip to Devil’s Millhopper, a sinkhole about twenty minutes outside of town. He’d mentioned it in a lecture about local natural landmarks and Betsy expressed an interest, more in his chronic scruff and the way he blushed when he spoke to her than in a hole in the ground. But once they parked in the empty lot and took the long, wooden boardwalk 212 steps down into the funnel-shaped depression in the earth, she was mesmerized. Each layer of soil beneath the surface, every scrambling vine and tree that stretched its branches skyward for sunlight, told a story. There were bones of long-forgotten mammals buried within the dirt, fossilized marine life from the time when the ocean stretched across the peninsula, which was now covered with only a tangle of highways and subdivisions. The deeper you descended, the more alien it all became. At the bottom, it was cool and shady even when the surface was suffocating, and mild and balmy even on the chilliest January day. The boardwalk ended in a mysterious little rain forest of electric green ferns and odd plants that somehow survived beneath the gnarled oaks, conifers, and evergreens on the surface. They didn’t belong there in that deciduous forest. But they’d found a way to thrive by burrowing deep, staying low and out of sight, and the metaphor felt eerily familiar. That is how I will survive in Gainesville, she thought. It was silent down there, except for the waterfalls that trickled down its sides, carving a path through the rocks and moss, which then disappeared under the ground below. Andrew explained that a local grain farmer at the end of the nineteenth century had found human remains, bone fragments, and teeth, at the bottom of the depression, which was shaped like a grain funnel into hell, and since then the spot had acquired its share of creepy folklore.
“There’s an Alachua Indian legend about this place,” he said, stopping to catch his breath halfway back up the steps. “The story is that the devil fell in love with a beautiful, young princess and captured her near here. When the bravest members of the tribe tried to come rescue her, the devil created this hole. The warriors set off to find her and bring her home, and each one would fall in the sinkhole to his death. No one could save her, or bring her back. The waterfalls were said to be rivers of tears her friends and family shed over their loss.”
By the time they were back above ground, Betsy was so transfixed by what she’d seen that she forgot all about her crush and she and Andrew parted with a firm handshake.
During her junior year, she met Mack, and the roller coaster of their relationship lasted for five months, her longest to date. After she was dumped, unceremoniously, on the hayride, there was the doomed attempt to go out with an absurdly preppy tennis player named John who supposedly had a girlfriend up north. That didn’t keep him from going out with Caroline less than a month later, which caused the rift that tore them apart. There’d been no one special since she noticed Gavin last year and circled around him until he left for summer break. And there he was, sitting before her in awkward silence. “How long have I been standing here?” she wondered.
“Mack can be a real asshole,” he said, finally, avoiding eye contact. “Sorry about that.”
“Oh believe me, I know. We have sort of a history,” she said. “But obviously that’s over. Really over. It’s been a while now, actually.”
He rose to leave and they stood there, both searching for another witty comment but coming up empty. The early lunch crowd was starting to stream in and Melissa was shooting Betsy pleading looks from behind the counter.
“Well, look. I’ve got to get back to work,” she said, nodding to
the line. “Enjoy the big-screen TV. The only good thing about living near Mack is that he comes with a lot of electronics.
“OK, so, I’ll see you around?” said Betsy.
“Alright,” he said
She started to walk back toward the counter, her heart rising through her chest to choke her, worried that whatever chance she had with Gavin was slipping away.
“Hey, Betsy,” he said. She stopped to look back.
“Uh, a few of us are going out to J.D.’s today, you know, at the lake?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You in?”
“Do you mean do I want to go?” she asked.
“Yes.” He laughed. “I mean do you want to go.”
“Sure,” she said, with a shrug. “I’m out of here pretty soon.”
“Tell you what. I’m going to do a few things and then hit Schoolhouse Records. You know where it is, right? You can come meet me over there about one. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Back in the corner behind the counter, Melissa was poking at the industrial toaster with a rubber spatula. Betsy picked up some red plastic baskets and tossed a mound of crumpled napkins in the trash on her way back to the counter.
“Well, something smells delicious,” said Betsy, washing her hands again in the metal sink.
“Oh, this is just hilarious, isn’t it, Bets,” said Melissa, scraping blackened mozzarella from the rack with a rubber spatula. “You could at least pretend to not be enjoying my hangover so much.”
“What? Do I look like I’m enjoying myself?” she said, fighting the smile that had suddenly, unexpectedly, returned to her face. The acrid smell of scorched cheese filled the air.
CHAPTER 6
SHARPIES
August 25, 1990: Midday
Betsy squeezed the juice, toasted the bagels, and made the coffee, and the rest of the morning passed in a slow, predictable way. At about 11:00, Dr. Loman wandered in, looking as distracted as ever, with several crumpled sections of various newspapers tucked under one arm. Betsy made him his usual tuna melt without a single rude comment, since she herself was distracted, thinking about Gavin, about the news on campus, about the sirens she heard on her way to work that morning. Just before her shift ended, she wandered over to his table to refill his coffee.
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