“What’s happening in the real world today?” Betsy asked, nodding to the stack of papers, now spotted with grease and coffee stains. “I want to hear about anywhere but here.”
“Let me ask you: Do you know what’s happening in Kuwait? Or even where it is?” he said, raising an eyebrow in a quizzical way.
“Yes,” said Betsy. “It’s in the Middle East, I think. And the Iraqis have invaded it, for oil, right? Am I close?”
“You think.” he said. “Are you close?”
He folded the section he was reading and placed it on the pile.
“You know the answer, but you feel obligated to act like you know absolutely nothing at all. Why?”
She stood there blushing, holding the coffeepot.
“It’s early, I guess?” she said. The vocal fry, the timbre at the end of Betsy’s sentence that lilted up into an eternal question, was an irritating habit, even to her.
“Betsy, you’re a bright girl. Your brain likes to think for itself,” he said. Then he drank the remains of his coffee and stood up to leave. “You’ve just got to get out of your own way.”
She shifted her weight from one leg to the other, still holding the coffee, uncomfortable with his attention.
“Alas, I have hope,” he said, placing a hand on her shoulder. “For a while, I was worried that you were going to become one of them.”
He pretended to shiver to emphasize them and Betsy had to laugh.
“Hell is empty,” he said, looking at her deliberately, more serious now, “and all the devils are here.”
“Let me guess,” said Betsy, “that’s Shakespeare.”
“Right again,” he nodded, clicked his heels, and left.
AFTER SPLASHING WATER on her face in the sink in the back—a blatant violation of Bagelville policy—and borrowing some wild cherry ChapStick from Melissa, Betsy walked out the front door into the punishing sunlight. It was noon, and she had an hour to kill before she met Gavin at the record store two blocks away. She stood on the sidewalk, shielding her eyes, considering what to do next when she spotted Ginny’s beater Rabbit speeding down 2nd Street with Caroline in the passenger seat.
“Where’s my midget bike, bitch?” shouted Caroline, as Ginny pulled up to the curb beside her. Ginny didn’t drive the newer, more sophisticated Cabriolet (which Betsy thought must be French or German slang for “rich white girl”). It was a straight-up, mud-splattered Rabbit. Her Nana had offered to buy her a new car, but Ginny wasn’t interested.
“Hey, friends,” said Betsy, preparing for the worst. “Sprung from prison camp for the afternoon?”
“There was a poster board and snack emergency at the house,” said Ginny, whose T-shirt and cutoffs were speckled with paint from building sets for rush. Caroline was spotless as always. “We volunteered to make a run. It’s rush stuff, but you know that.”
“How noble of you,” said Betsy.
“Completely selfless, as always,” said Caroline, squinting hard at her.
“I came by to see if you needed a ride. It’s too hot to be out on a bike,” said Ginny.
“I guess I could leave the dwarfcycle here until later. But, hey, Caroline, I promise that I’ll get it back to you tomorrow,” Betsy said.
“Oh please, that piece of crap? Someone left it at our place last year. Like I would ever ride that thing,” she said.
Ginny shot Caroline a hard look and punched her in the thigh.
“So get in. Come to Walmart. We’re making a frozen yogurt run, too.”
Betsy weighed her options. It was ninety-six degrees and anyone who knew better was inside. Until classes started again and she could scurry across campus and into a classroom, and let her perspiration evaporate into the air-conditioned ether, she didn’t have anyplace to go. In that moment, getting in the backseat of Ginny’s car seemed like her only option.
“Alright, I’ll come. But I’ve got to be back here in an hour.”
She climbed in without opening the door, Ginny hit the gas, and the car sputtered around the corner onto University Boulevard. Caroline craned her neck around to look at Betsy over the top of her Ray-Bans.
“So I am assuming you’ve heard about the dead girls, right?”
“Uh-huh,” said Betsy, trying to be nonchalant, not to show Caroline any fear.
“As I am sure you can imagine, everyone at the house is losing their shit. The rumor is that there’s a killer on the loose, and he’s dressing up like a pizza delivery guy so people let him into their houses.”
“I heard that he was pretending to be from the department of water and power,” said Ginny. “He says that the landlord sent him and then once he’s inside he pulls out a gun.”
“Wait, weren’t they stabbed?” asked Caroline, who was now checking her manicure.
“You seem really concerned, Car,” said Betsy. “I mean, concerned that you’ve chipped a nail. Not that people are being stabbed to death.”
“Oh please, you know how this town is. How much of this shit are you going to believe? Also, honestly, the numbers are in my favor. How many female students are on this campus? Say, fifteen thousand? I have a one in fifteen thousand chance of being murdered this week.”
“Um, I don’t think that’s exactly how it works. Am I right?” asked Ginny, taking her eyes off of the road for a dangerously long time to look back at Betsy. “I mean, I don’t remember much from Probability and Statistics, but I am almost positive that’s not how it works.”
“You’re so cute when you’re dumb,” said Betsy, reaching over the back of her seat to squeeze Ginny’s shoulder.
“The exact number doesn’t even matter, Gin. You’re always so literal,” said Caroline. “Besides, I took Self-Defense for two credits! That guy comes at me, and I could kill his sorry ass with a rolled-up newspaper. You roll it up so tight you can stab someone with it! I could rip his ear off with my hand. All it takes is twenty pounds of pressure. Or thirty. I can’t remember.”
“That is just gross,” said Ginny. “So you just pull on it till it rips off, and you’re just standing there with another person’s ear in your hand? What about you, Betsy? Could you rip someone’s ear off?”
“You’re ripping mine off right now with all of this yammering,” said Betsy, who couldn’t help but crack a smile. Then she and Ginny and even Caroline were laughing, that kind of nervous, appalling laughter that sneaks out at the least appropriate times.
Ginny steered into the last parking spot on one of several long, empty aisles in a largely vacant parking lot of a strip mall. What was the hurry? The longer they stayed away from estrogen camp, the frantic panic of pre-rush preparations, the better. She and Caroline had been in stale air, filled with raspberry-body-wash smells and bad karma, all day. What the three of them needed was arctic AC, frozen yogurt, a trial-sized hair spray, a long peruse down the aisles of Walmart, and the reason for their furlough, poster boards and markers.
“Primo spot, Gin,” said Caroline. “Honestly, we could have walked and gotten here faster.”
“Think of the thirty-five-second walk to the door as a chance to work on your tan,” she said. “Let’s get yogurt first.”
Inside the TCBY—“This Can’t Be Yogurt” or “The Country’s Best Yogurt,” depending on which side of the lawsuit you landed—a melancholy post–Go-Go’s Belinda Carlisle song was playing from an enormous boom box on the shelf next to the cake cone dispenser. The girl behind the counter had deeply tanned, nearly purple skin and a cascade of Aussie Sprunch–sprayed curls tumbling over the side of her white visor.
“Welcome to my nightmare, how can I help you?” said Caroline, looking over her shoulder at Ginny and Betsy. Caroline had mastered speaking at a range that was not quite loud enough for her victim to hear, but left the subject of her scrutiny with a vague feeling of unease nonetheless. Turning to expressionless Tracy, according to the nametag pinned to the blaze orange sweatshirt she was wearing despite the ninety-five-degree day, she said, “My friend here will have a
medium strawberry in a cup with whatever kind of crap cereal you’re selling today. What’s your poison, Betsy?”
“Fruity Pebbles OK?” Tracy asked, getting a better look at Caroline. There was a faint glimmer of recognition in her flat, blue eyes, which then narrowed into tiny, accusatory slits.
“No frogurt for me today, I’m good,” said Betsy, noticing Tracy notice Caroline for the first time.
“Are Fruity Pebbles OK? I don’t know, depends on who you ask,” said Caroline. “I’ll take a sample of chocolate. But just a sample.”
“You look familiar,” said Tracy, who’d grabbed a foam cup and turned her back to them as she depressed the cold handle of the thrumming, metal machine and dumped a long, oozy rope of frozen ick into it.
“Who me?” asked Ginny, suddenly panicked. She searched Betsy’s face for clues, but Betsy just shrugged. Betsy had started to notice that this happened to Ginny more than it should, and was an unfortunate reminder of her boozy camaraderie and regular blackouts at bars and parties across town. Everyone remembered Ginny, but she remembered no one. She confessed to Betsy once that she started plastering a smile on her face and nodding at everyone she passed as a precaution. But the summer had been uneventful. Betsy and Ginny burned through the new releases at Blockbuster and not much else. They’d shut down the Porpoise only once all summer. Ginny picked up a couple of cute law students, whose names she couldn’t recall, if she ever knew them. It didn’t take much effort. Guys loved Ginny. She was quick to laugh, a gifted flirt, and the one voted “Best All Around” her senior year when people couldn’t describe her with just one superlative.
“How is it that I’ve never let you buy me a drink before?” she’d said to the guys at the bar, by way of introduction. Betsy rolled her eyes. It was a Tuesday night so boring and oppressively humid that they had to get out of the house. Three pitchers later, the law students gave them a ride home in a vintage Chevy Impala, but not before the four of them dismantled a Pepsi pyramid in front of a gas station, howling with laughter as they loaded the trunk with as many of the two-liter bottles as they could. It was a classic Ginny night.
Ginny squinted at Tracy, trying to place her face, but Betsy saw that Tracy’s eyes were locked on Caroline, and she saw Ginny’s face relax.
“No, your friend here. It’s Caroline, right?” she said. Caroline was steely, calm, but Betsy thought she saw an almost imperceptible twitch of panic pulse under her left eye. “You rushed me last year.”
“Oh shit, sorry, yeah. I remember now, Tracy,” said Caroline, who was linking together words that might have formed an apology if they were delivered in a more sympathetic tone.
“I dropped out of rush after that,” she said, slamming the yogurt on the counter, stabbing it with a plastic spoon and extending a limp hand for the money. “It’s $2.49.”
“Hope it wasn’t something I said,” replied Caroline flatly, never averting her eyes from Tracy’s glare.
Hell is empty, Betsy thought. All the devils are here.
Ginny dug four crumpled bills out of her pocket and dropped them in a wad on the counter.
“Keep the change, Tracy. Thanks! Great to see you again,” said Ginny, with forced brightness, as she grabbed her friend’s arms and exited the store so quickly that the blast of heat outside greeted them like a punch in the face. Once they were safely beyond the plate glass window, beyond their new nemesis’s sight line, Betsy stopped and turned to Caroline, who was chuckling and checking the cuticle on her thumbnail again.
“It’s like once Belinda realized she was hot it all went to shit,” Caroline said.
“What are you talking about?” asked Ginny.
“Belinda Carlisle. She’s like ‘I’ve got an idea. I’m going to lose twenty pounds, abandon my totally bitchin’ band and become the most aggressively mediocre pop star of my generation,’” said Caroline.
“You have no remorse, do you?” asked Betsy.
“I love the Go-Go’s. I am not ashamed.”
“I’m not kidding, Car,” she said. “This Tracy person seems to blame you for ruining her life. And you’ve got no remorse.”
“Remorse?” she said, stopping on the sidewalk, shielding her eyes from the sun. “About what? I was nice to her during rush, or nice enough. I may have made a comment about her white shoes. Do you want me to apologize for not leading on the yogurt girl with Kentucky Fried hair? Did you see her cold sore? She’s totally got herpes. She put the ‘itch’ in ‘bitch.’”
“Come on!” said Betsy, losing patience.
“Car, I get what you’re saying. You didn’t have to lead her on exactly, but . . .”
“But what? What, Ginny?” she said, with a fury igniting inside of her. “You should be thanking me. You think that everything just happens this way? That you get to live in this perfect little world where all of your friends are smart and cute with perfect hair by some kind of luck of the draw? You need me. I’m the heavy. You sure as hell aren’t going to do it. Are you willing to tell Tracy that she’d be ‘happier elsewhere’? Would you say it to her face or just talk shit about her after she slumped down the sidewalk in her white pleather heels?”
Ginny looked down at her own shoes, gleaming white Tretorns. Betsy, who couldn’t think of a single response, felt the heat from the pavement seep through her sneakers to the sticky soles of her feet.
“There are over a thousand girls who want one of fifty spots. What are you going to do?” said Caroline, calmer now, back to picking at her nails. “She didn’t even give me my sample. And she shorted your Pebbles by about half.”
They walked for a minute without saying a word, past the Fantastic Sams, past the Chinese restaurant with the coal black tinted windows, past the Dollar Tree, where Ginny, Betsy, and Caroline used to go when they were bored and high to look for paint-by-number kits. Betsy would badger the surly old lady at the cash register by picking up a series of items, a dishcloth with a map of the state on it, a bunch of drooping silk lilies, asking, “How much is this?” while Caroline and Ginny hid near the greeting cards trying in vain to stifle their giggles.
“It’s a dollar. All of it,” the cashier would snap. “And you damn well know it by now, Betsy.”
Afterward, they would watch Betsy squirm with regret. She would try to make amends by chatting about football or when she thought the heat might relent.
“She always breaks first. No fun. No commitment,” Betsy would hear Caroline whisper, while she jammed a birthday card back into a graduation card slot on purpose. Caroline never broke first.
“It’s life,” said Caroline, letting her intensity fade. “If everybody won a blue ribbon, blue ribbons wouldn’t be worth winning.”
Ginny dragged her spoon through the yogurt, which was melting into a weirdly clear liquid faster than she could eat it, so she pitched the remainder in the trash.
“Let’s get going,” said Betsy, desperate to erase Tracy’s scowl from her short-term memory and get on with it. “I’ve got to get back downtown by one.”
“What’s the rush? Is it a boy?” Ginny chided, elated to change the subject. Betsy gave her a warning look.
“Oh my God, you are meeting a boy, aren’t you? How can you think about guys at a time like this, with a campus in crisis,” said Caroline, in mock newscaster mode.
“I’m just going to J.D.’s with some guy,” Betsy said, trying her best to seem unimpressed with herself.
The exact location of J.D.’s, a bait shack that served beer off of a lake approximately forty minutes outside of town in one direction or another, was a closely guarded secret. Even if one could find J.D.’s—which wasn’t listed in the phonebook because they’d need a phone for that—one wouldn’t just show up. The regulars arranged it so that there would have to be an invitation. Arrive without one, without an escort to show you the way, and even if you’d seen the eight or ten people sprawled out on the dock or the picnic tables shaded by a giant wisteria around town for the last three years, you might find you
rself sitting alone until your beer lost its chill, wishing you hadn’t wasted the gas money. J.D.’s was for fifth-year seniors, burnouts, and guys like Gavin who were too cool, or too high, to let on that they cared that they knew the way to J.D.’s. It was for members of local bands who may have realized that their days of relative fame were dwindling, but wouldn’t let on they were counting. It was for guys like Weird Bobby, who wore ironic striped tube socks and enormous, black-framed glasses and claimed “Frisbee golfer” as his profession. It was for a handful of girls who stopped talking whenever Betsy would walk by them at a party, with what she sensed as a predetermined hatred for the sorority girl trying to pass as someone else in their midst. Betsy was, not surprisingly, obsessively curious about anyone who didn’t talk to her, so she knew all of their names and identifying details though she was sure she was invisible to them, like she was watching through a two-way mirror.
“J.D.’s? Have you been holding out on us?” asked Ginny.
“No, I’ve never been there. Mack came in for breakfast today with Gavin Davis, the guy from the Dish. Do you remember, Gin?”
“Heeey, Mr. Skynyrd himself,” said Ginny.
“I know who he is,” said Caroline in a way that made Betsy panic in advance of the story that would surely follow. Please God, she thought, don’t tell me she got here first.
“You remember when I bought weed from him earlier this year?” she said. “At least we know he’s industrious.”
Betsy suddenly remembered the three of them driving to a house on the west side of town one night when she was fighting with Mack. She was wasted, in the back of the Rabbit listening to him yammer about Reaganomics. Ginny was driving. Caroline and Mack got out of the car and walked to the back door of a squat brown house that was nearly hidden under a canopy of drooping oak trees. Mack went inside, without looking back to say goodbye. She could hear AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted from the open windows before they’d even pulled in the gravel driveway. Through the back door, they could see that there were people inside, two guys and a couple of girls. One of them was Gavin.
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