“Oh shit, there are pledges in there,” said Ginny. “Caroline’s gonna eat them alive if they’re high. I’d sort of hate to miss that.”
Betsy could see straight into the house from the backseat of the car. When she noticed the pledges spot Caroline under the porch light, they both leaped off of the couch and smoothed their clothes, trying unsuccessfully to appear sober. Ginny snorted a little laugh.
“Don’t you worry, ladies,” she heard Gavin say to the girls, who were clearly scared shitless. “Caroline here can keep her mouth shut. Can’t you, Caroline?”
“I didn’t see a thing,” she said.
“Huh?” said Betsy.
“She’s letting them off the hook,” said Ginny.
“Who knew you two were such big Ice Cube fans?” Caroline asked. “I’m just going to wait outside.”
Caroline made her way back to the car, glaring at Betsy and Ginny.
“What?” she said, as she walked back to them across the gravel, silhouetted by the porch light, which was swarming with moths the size of hummingbirds. “I can’t be nice?”
A minute later, Gavin shuffled out to the car. He leaned against the driver’s door. Caroline handed him some cash and he passed her a small Ziploc filled with crumbly green buds.
“Ziploc must make a killing in this town, right?” asked Betsy.
Gavin chuckled.
“Do you ladies care to join in the fun, or are you above getting high with a couple of dim freshman girls?” he asked. Betsy was convinced that Caroline and Ginny would go inside and either force her to join or make her sleep in the car until dawn. Under normal circumstances, she knew that was when Caroline would have made her move, shocked him with her spot-on recitation of the lyrics to “Once Upon a Time in the Projects,” flirted with the roommate to make him jealous. But even this late, even from the backseat of a car after half a dozen beers, it was clear that Gavin saw straight through Caroline’s bullshit.
“Tell Mack that we’re giving Betsy a ride home, not that he seems that concerned,” said Caroline.
Betsy suspected that the truth was that Caroline noticed him long before that. He was tall, hard to miss. And she could tell that he wasn’t much like the other guys hanging around, ready to eat out of Caroline’s hand on command.
Since then, she hadn’t thought about it. But that day outside of Walmart, she realized Caroline had been watching and waiting for a second round, a decent chance to change his mind. It looked like Betsy had gotten there ahead of her this time, and she smiled to herself at the thought.
“I think he’s cute,” Ginny said. “Betsy, I just don’t know if, you know, you’re dark and mysterious enough for him.”
“Mysterious?” laughed Caroline. “If you’re looking for mystery, you’re in the wrong town.”
Inside the store, Caroline and Ginny both grabbed a shopping basket off of the stack. Betsy wandered the aisles behind Caroline, enjoying the frigid air, and watched her pluck a Baywatch-themed air freshener, Tucks medicated pads, and lip waxing strips from the shelves. When they made it to the school supply section, Caroline passed the basket to Ginny.
“I got you a few things,” she said, and picked up six or seven pieces of the biggest poster board she could find. “I’ll grab these. You get the markers.”
“Now that I’m here I can’t tell if I want markers or poster paint,” said Ginny, studying the selection of art supplies. “Betsy, what do you think?”
Betsy was already bored with the day, the yogurt drama, Caroline’s dumb pranks, and the heat. She glanced at her Timex. It was 12:40.
“Definitely markers. You won’t have time for the paint to dry. Now let’s get out of here.”
“Oh fine, you’re in a hurry to go drink beer by a lake. You know what I’m going back to. I’m taking my time.”
Caroline decided to speed up the operation considerably.
“Oh Ginny, I know you like the giant black ones,” she said, waving a marker in front of Ginny’s face, exaggerating her volume. “Forget all of these skinny pale ones. Didn’t you tell me you liked the feel of the big black ones in your hand? It gives you something to hold on to, right?”
“Oh my God, would you just shut up?” Ginny hissed at Caroline, accidentally knocking a box of permanent markers to the floor, which then scattered like toothpicks into the aisle.
“Spaz,” Caroline said. Ginny and Betsy put down the baskets and the unwieldy poster boards and knelt on the cold, gray-flecked linoleum to collect the pens.
“I need a new mascara and some Tic Tacs. You like spearmint, right?” Caroline said, to no one in particular, and left them to clean up the mess. “I’ll see you at the cash registers.”
“If you have someone announce ‘Clean up on aisle six’ I swear on my life, Caroline, I’m leaving your ass here,” Ginny called after her, but Caroline was already out of earshot. Betsy caught a glimpse of a mud-spattered work boot from the corner of her eye.
“Ladies, you missed one,” said a man with a thick Southern accent, who crouched down to pick up a stray pen and handed it to Betsy.
“Oh, thanks, but that’s hers, not mine,” she said, passing the marker to Ginny. Betsy registered the intensity of his gaze, the way his eye traced the ragged edge of her cutoff shorts, and glared back at him.
“Thanks, and sorry about that,” said Ginny, blushing, as she took the marker from his dirty hand. Betsy recognized the faint whiff of second-day alcohol. She scanned his face, which looked vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place it. He had a youngish, angular profile, high, sharp cheekbones, and fair eyes. His skin was tan and freckled from the sun. He had deep pale creases in his forehead and around his eyes where he squinted. His hair, brown and long, was shaggy around the collar, and he was filthy, in a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal strong forearms and inky dark fingernails. His jeans were withered and creased like a note that had been folded and refolded and passed between classes. Whether he was dirty in a studio-art way, a “working on my motorcycle” way, or a vagrant way was hard to say. His tan suggested a lot of time spent outdoors, not necessarily poolside. Regardless, he was making Ginny nervous. Her eyes returned to the boots. She had seen them somewhere before, but where? “She can be a handful sometimes.”
“I bet she can,” he said. “Is this yours, too?” he said and passed Ginny the basket with the facial wax, the car freshener, and the hemorrhoid pads Caroline had assembled. Ginny looked at Betsy, pleading.
“Oh God, no, well, it’s sort of mine,” Betsy said, trying to help. “It’s our friend. She thinks she’s really funny. I don’t, uh, well we don’t really need this stuff.”
Ginny grabbed a handful of Sharpies, tossed them in the basket, and dumped the Tucks and the Sally Hansen strips on a low shelf. Betsy could see the color burning in her cheeks.
“Well, you ladies have a nice afternoon.”
Ginny paid for the art supplies with the petty cash she’d taken from the house, crammed the change into her pocket, and stormed back out into the parking lot. Caroline and Betsy followed. The car was blurry in the distance from the infrared waves of rubber-melting heat rising from the blacktop.
“Why didn’t I park closer?” she said with a hiss.
“Hey, Gin,” said Betsy. “That guy. Did he look familiar?”
“Oh good Lord, Betsy, how would I remember that?” Ginny said.
“Yeah, she can barely recognize her own mother,” Caroline laughed.
Ginny tossed the bag in the back of the convertible and sat hard in the driver’s seat and slammed the door. Betsy climbed into the back and Caroline slid into the passenger seat. She handed Ginny a Diet Dr Pepper and offered some Tic Tacs. Ginny shot Caroline an angry look.
“Jesus, I got cherry passion. Sue me! Who knew that you would have a complete hissy fit if you didn’t get spearmint, for once?”
The ignition started on the third try and soon they were back in traffic on 34th Street. Ginny’s warped Violent Femmes cassette was b
ack in rotation, and it crackled and hissed through the tape deck. Hot late-summer air blew Ginny’s long ponytail into knots. Betsy shielded her eyes from the sun, wishing she’d remembered her sunglasses. The vanilla-scented Hasselhoff flapped wildly at his new post under the rearview mirror. The three of them were too distracted, or too irritated, to notice that the stranger in the boots, the one who grazed Ginny’s hand with his when he picked up the marker from the floor, was trailing a few cars behind them on his bike.
CHAPTER 7
J.D.’S
August 25, 1990: Afternoon
Ginny pulled over in front of Schoolhouse with a clumsy jerk and halted.
“Y’all have a good time!” she said. Caroline stared straight ahead, silent. Ginny clamped her hand down on Caroline’s leg with enough force to make her leap an inch off of her seat.
“Yeah, sure. Looks like you forgot your fishin’ pole,” Caroline said with an exaggerated drawl, “but I’m sure you’ll find something to do.”
Betsy paused to take a look at her friends, feeling uncertain, a little scared, and a little more alone than she would ever admit.
“Alright, well, since you two are staying at the house later, I guess I’ll try to settle in to my hovel. It could use a little sprucing, you know.” Betsy forced a laugh.
“Bets, I mean . . . you should . . .” Ginny fumbled for words before Caroline interrupted her.
“Hey,” Caroline said. “Look, come to the house later if you don’t want to be alone. We’ll be there all night. The plan is for everyone to crash there, bring sleeping bags and all. Really, you should. I mean it.”
“I know you do,” Betsy said. She climbed over the back of the convertible and hopped out onto the sidewalk in front of the record store.
She would have paused there for a bit, trying her best to pretend not to notice the forlorn expression on Ginny’s face, but before she could say goodbye, Ginny gave her a sad little wave and pulled away. Caroline extended her right hand to the sky and shot her the bird as they disappeared into traffic.
She stood at the window in front of Schoolhouse for a moment, watching Gavin glide through the aisles. She remembered that he worked there for a while last year. The record store was a place Betsy was curious about, but mostly avoided. She was self-conscious about her limited knowledge of music and certain that the smug employees were judging her as a dumb sorority girl with Top 40 taste. She’d sneak in for a glimpse of the bulletin board to see who was playing at the Dish, or the Florida Theatre, avoiding eye contact so no one would ask her a question she couldn’t answer. It was hard to come up with excuses to stay there if she could never afford to actually buy anything. It didn’t occur to her that the place was teeming with freeloaders, sticky fingers, hangers-on angling for ways to get on the list when a Sub Pop band dared dip south of Athens, Georgia, or east of Pensacola. She hesitated outside, feeling her skin sear in the reflected sun from the plate glass window. She would have to go inside if she wanted to go to J.D.’s.
Gavin was tall, maybe six foot three, but in certain situations he appeared much smaller. As it turns out, this skill was especially useful when he was stealing something. Betsy saw the cashier lean down to answer the phone while Gavin slid a CD, with its giant plastic theft-deterrent brace around it, out of the bin and into the back of his shorts. Quickly, he pulled his T-shirt over to cover it. Betsy turned away with an anxious jolt. She would have run down the sidewalk were she not paralyzed with a kind of naive shock, but her sudden movement caught his attention and he turned to the window to give her the subtlest, remarkably unself-conscious wave. Had she really never seen anyone steal something before? She’d swiped a lipstick tester herself last spring, as a kind of dare, to see if she had it in her. But something about her petty crime moment was oddly innocent. She needed the lipstick. She didn’t have the fifteen dollars to pay for it. It had already been used, for God’s sake. This felt different somehow, like walking in on a stranger with his pants down in a public bathroom.
So he steals CDs and sells them for beer money, she thought. Nobody’s perfect.
She walked over to the door and the bell attached let out a pained little jangle as she took the handle and yanked it from its swollen, rotting frame.
“Hey, that was fast,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Hey, Betsy,” said the girl behind the counter. They took a Studio Drawing class together the year before, but it took a minute for Betsy to register her face, given the randomly executed green hair that she dyed, judging by the blonde roots, about three months ago. Betsy remembered sitting on the plaza sketching moss-covered trees and badgering her with all sorts of questions about her nose piercing, which was a ring like a bull’s that spanned her nostrils. (How much did it hurt? “A lot.” What was her inspiration? “Dunno.”) She searched for a name and came up empty-handed, then smiled and offered an awkward half wave.
“Hey,” she said. Better to say as little as possible in these situations, she thought, though she’d never been in one of these situations before.
“Later, Gavin.”
“Later, Wendy. Good to see you back in town,” he said. Wendy, that’s it. Betsy wondered what the parents of cute Wendy, with a sprinkle of freckles on her nose, thought when she came home, post-bull’s-ring, post–Manic Panic, for summer break. “Don’t sweat the hair. It grows, right?”
“Screw you, Davis,” she offered limply before the door jangled shut and cast a small shower of leaded paint chips on the sidewalk.
“Did you drive here?” he asked, scooting sideways past the window to conceal the bulge in the back of his T-shirt.
“No car,” she said, remembering the tiny pink bike at Bagelville and not caring enough to retrieve it. They’d reached his bike, an anonymous, matte black cruiser with five pounds worth of heavy link chain wrapped around it and a bulky, rusted padlock.
“I’ll give you a tow back to my place so we can take mine,” he said, and she perched herself on the center of the wide, flat handlebars, placing her feet on the pegs on either side of his front tire, quietly thrilled. She wished she’d washed her hair that morning so he’d catch a faint whiff of grapefruit or fresh cut grass as it blew back near his face and be forever smitten.
They took a slightly longer route to pass through the shady, oak-lined streets behind the stadium, a cooler, possibly more romantic detour and an oddly chivalrous move for someone with stolen goods crammed in his pants. Whether it was the shade, or the breeze from the ride without the burden of actually pedalling, or the petty thief making small talk behind her, she felt lighter than she had in weeks.
When they got to the squat, beige cinder block house surrounded by patchy grass and a wide, gravel driveway, Betsy noticed Mack’s truck parked in back. She looked into the large window and saw him standing in a tangle of cables, his fingers buried in his hair. She ducked behind a tree. Mack must have spotted Gavin because she saw him raise his hand in a two-finger wave. She tiptoed around the other side of the house and met Gavin by the back porch.
“So how much do you feel like explaining to Mack what we’re doing today?” he whispered, as he quietly chained his bike to a tree.
“Not much. Not much at all,” Betsy said, as she pressed herself against the side of the house. “He may need some help with the manual, though. I’m not sure that he can read.”
They bolted across the yard toward the carport.
“He’ll have a heart attack by dinner,” said Gavin. “The guy’s a hothead.”
“He’s your friend,” whispered Betsy, ducking low to hide behind his Honda Accord. “For reasons unknown.”
“So you two . . .”
“Biggest mistake of my life.”
He unlocked the car door and sank into the driver’s seat, his head clearing the roof by maybe an inch, and heard the crunch of plastic under his weight. He reached around to pull the CD out of his waistband and tossed it in the backseat. Betsy got into the car, unused to u
sing the handle to open the door.
“Have you heard this Sonic Youth record?” he asked, entirely unfazed by being exposed as a small-time crook. “It’s so good.”
“So you already own it?” she asked. “But you stole another one for fun?”
“I was going to sell it back used to Schoolhouse for lunch money when Wendy wasn’t around.” He backed out of the driveway in a hurry. “Don’t worry. I’ll buy you lunch, too. Maybe even a beer.”
He squeezed her knee hard and she laughed.
“But you can take it if you want,” he said. “Consider it a gift.”
“You knew just what I wanted.”
Ten minutes outside of town, the buildings disappeared and the scrub and low trees, the endless tangle of green, started to take over. Betsy knew she should have been paying attention to where they were going, but the signs—to Micanopy, Alachua, High Springs, Waldo—meant nothing to her. They listened to Neil Young with the windows down and pulled over to buy boiled peanuts from a man who served them from a rusty oil drum. Though she couldn’t have possibly known that this moment would happen today, she felt like she expected it, like it had been something she knew would happen for a while, and she enjoyed the odd, buzzy déjà vu head trick of an experience that was foreign and familiar at the same time. Every once in a while, Gavin would look at her and smile, a glance that revealed his own satisfied shock over what was happening this day, too, and she was relieved.
When they pulled into the parking lot with another crunch of gravel, the building before them looked all but abandoned, with nothing but a couple of cardboard boxes green with mildew to be seen. But once they walked around the busted planks of the boardwalk, there was a small, flat, teal lake surrounded by an infinitely soggy, lush, green landscape. To the right, there was a guy, presumably J.D., who sold a carton of worms for a buck, bags of chips for fifty cents, and cold beers from a cooler for two dollars each. Three guys were sitting silently at a picnic table in the shade: Weird Bobby; Jacob, who played guitar and sang for a local band, Boba Fett and the Bounty Hunters, which had been gratefully shortened to the Bounty; and Teddy, who lived with George, the first of Betsy’s many mistakes back in 1988, and was one of the only truly decent guys she knew on campus. Teddy taught her how to play Spades when she was hanging out at their house. At least Betsy got something out of it other than a bad reputation.
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