The Drifter

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The Drifter Page 12

by Christine Lennon


  “Here we go,” said Gavin, under his breath, making his way across the grass to where they sat. Betsy followed her gut and trailed a few feet behind.

  “So, Gav, I’m having a little jam tonight at my place and would hate for you two lovebirds to miss it,” said Bobby, with a tremor.

  “Oh, he’s a looovebird now, is he?” said Channing, turning around to show her enormous blue eyes crinkled at the edges, her voice slow and raspy, a pack of Marlboro reds on the table before her. She grabbed Gavin’s hand. “That’s so cute.”

  “Yeah, real cute, Chan,” he said, pulling his hand away.

  “And you’re the lucky lady. It’s Betty, right?” she said, turning to take in all of Betsy, the baggy 501 cutoffs, the T-shirt she’d swiped from Gavin that morning, the dirty bare feet, and ratty Chucks in hand.

  “Betsy,” she said. Suddenly, the dots connected. “My name’s Betsy.”

  “You hang out at Bagelville, right?”

  “Yeah, it’s sort of like hanging out except that I put things in the toaster and make coffee and throw away your trash,” she said. Weird Bobby thought Betsy was hysterical and the entire table shook with his approval.

  “Well, watch out, Betty Bagelville, this one’s a real heartbreaker,” she said, hooking her finger into one of Gavin’s belt loops. “Aren’t you, Gavvy?” He turned quickly to leave.

  “Thanks for the tip,” said Betsy.

  “We’ll see y’all later, then?” said Bobby.

  “Yeah, later,” said Gavin, scratching the back of his head, which she was starting to notice was something he did when things got tense, a kind of nervous tic.

  Betsy didn’t mention Channing during the drive home, and it fit in well with the pervasive silence. Ribbons of pale orange light filtered through the canopy of trees, and it was so beautiful that Betsy thought she might cry. She was tired, desperate to hang on to the moment and trying not to ruin it, any more than it had already been ruined—by Channing, or Caroline, or the murders. When they pulled onto Gavin’s street and saw Mack’s Suburban coming from the opposite direction, Betsy knew that her private idyll was about to be destroyed in a more aggressive way. Through the driver’s window, Betsy saw Mack raise his hand to wave at Gavin. Then, Mack noticed someone next to him and did a cartoonish double take when he recognized Betsy in the passenger seat. She watched his smile shift to fury in dramatically slow motion and her own jaw clenched in panic. Gavin lifted two fingers off of the steering wheel and nodded briefly, but he kept driving. When they noticed Mack’s brake lights burn fast and red in the rearview mirror Betsy held her breath and Gavin slowed to a stop. After a few seconds, in that odd game of backward chicken, Mack broke first, hit the gas, and sped out of sight.

  “Cat’s outta the bag, all around,” Gavin said, turning to look at her straight on, a devious smile on his face. He grabbed her hand and they burst into a fit of laughter, letting the icy AC blow away all of that tension. For the second time that day, for very different reasons, Betsy wanted to cry.

  “Maybe he left us some fried chicken this time.”

  Betsy showered in Gavin’s bathroom, which reeked so heavily of mildew that she shampooed twice and hoped the scent of concentrated Prell would mask the sour-towel stench. She pulled on the 501s she’d been breaking in since the ninth grade, a white tank, and a gray men’s suit vest she’d picked up for a dollar at a thrift shop during her last visit to her mom’s house over a year ago. She’d cinched the silk strap and buckle in the back to make it less boxy around her waist, all the while thinking of Channing and her tawny, angular back. She parted her wet hair down the middle and patted Cherries in the Snow, her one tube of lipstick, worn down to a flat nub, onto her lips with her ring finger. Ginny had talked her into some bronzer once or twice, chided her disinterest in makeup, and even talked her into a visit to the Lancôme counter, but Betsy resisted. Channing or no Channing, that was the most effort she’d ever made for a guy.

  Her friends would be barricaded in the upstairs TV room watching slasher flicks in a kind of distasteful nod to current events. But Betsy didn’t want any surprises, or to run into anyone unexpectedly, least of all Caroline. She had no desire to field their questions about her temporary living arrangement, so she checked her answering machine to be sure. There was one hurried message from Kari, her delinquent roommate, saying that her parents wouldn’t let her come back until classes started again and the murder mayhem subsided. The second one was from Ginny.

  “So Kim drove by the Chevron today on a snack run and saw you with Gaaavin,” she sang into the tape. “I need every last detail. Promise me you’ll remember the way to J.D.’s. We have to go once rush is over. Nana Jean told me that we should just come stay with her until this all blows over. She sends her love.”

  Ginny and Betsy would often drive to Ocala on a Sunday with trash bags stuffed with laundry filling the backseat under the auspices of “helping” Ginny’s grandmother Nana Jean. They’d take her to Grace church, walk her dog, and make a stop at the market. Then they’d swim in her pool and beg her to make lemon bars. For breakfast, they’d eat Jean’s famous sausage gravy with the fluffiest biscuits imaginable. Ginny and Betsy spent quiet afternoons on the wide screened-in porch of her rambling old house, under the fan, napping or reading and not saying much at all. Betsy felt a deep ache of longing for all of it. She could taste the iced sweet tea and feel the fan cool her skin.

  “Anyway, Caroline called Holly’s cousin from Vero fat and the s-h-i-t is hitting the fan. I’ve got a killer headache and I want to go home to sleep it off, but I’m trapped. Also, I’m beginning to think you had the right idea about bailing on this whole thing. My spirit is officially crushed.” She sighed. “It’s just not worth it. That’s all. Call me later.”

  The last message was from Caroline.

  “Hey, it’s me,” she said. “Just checking in from hell.”

  She paused so long that Betsy thought the message was over, and she waited for the beep. Then she started again.

  “I guess, I, I don’t know. Ginny said she hadn’t heard from you this afternoon. Just want to make sure you’re good, that you made it back from J.D.’s. If you’re staying in your dungeon apartment then you’re either really brave or completely stupid. Uh, my money’s on stupid. I am tempted to bail on the slasher movie marathon and go home to sleep it off. I’m still so hung from last night. Oh, and you better remember the fucking directions to J.D.’s. You and me, we’re going when this is over.”

  “EVERYTHING OK?” GAVIN asked after she hung up.

  “Yep, totally fine,” she said, clearing her throat, choosing to wait until the next day to discuss her indefinitely delayed move-in date.

  It was 10:30 by the time they got to Weird Bobby’s, and things were just getting started. The house, which was off of University Boulevard down the hill from the stadium, was a neglected split-level at the end of a long, downward-sloping driveway. Inside, instead of furniture, he had a full studio set up in his gray-carpeted living room. There were a couple of guitars leaning on stands, some amps, a drum kit, a keyboard, a bass, and a mic for backup singers next to a stack of tambourines. To the left, stained, carpeted stairs led to the bedrooms, and the fluorescent-lit kitchen was separated from the main room by a low Formica counter. A thick haze of smoke filled the room, which was wall-to-wall people, none of whom Betsy recognized. Urge Overkill’s “God Flintstone” was playing loud enough to imprint itself instantly in the darkest crevice of her brain, and she knew that she would never forget Weird Bobby’s house, with its fluorescent green, algae-filled pool and bong-water stained rug. Gavin took her hand and led her through to the backyard, where the crowd thinned a bit. Jacob and Teddy were sitting at a glass patio table, which was covered with empty bottles and a quarter-inch layer of leaves with dust beneath it. Across from them with his back toward the house was Weird Bobby, who was holding court by packing sticky hash into a metal pipe with nicotine-stained fingers. A small pile of joints rested next to a Ro
lling Rock. In the grass nearby, a guy in a black trench coat was already passed out, facedown, and a couple of partygoers were launching empty beer cans at his head in a twisted version of horseshoes. It had been years since Betsy had been at a party where she barely knew anyone, or where she couldn’t ride on Caroline and Ginny’s wake through a crowd of strangers and not give a shit. Tonight she felt out of place and adrift. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Channing huddled with Anna Johnson, a Miami girl who’d pledged the sorority the same year as Betsy, but she didn’t dare look in their direction. Anna had shown up to mandatory study hall in a tiny stretchy miniskirt and oversized tank top that kept slipping off of her shoulders and passed out in a massive pile of her own hair one too many times. She was given the boot by the end of freshman year for not making her grades, and became the first casualty of their pledge class. She’d since become a punch line when any of them got woozy in a bar.

  “You’re not going to pull an Anna on me tonight, are you?” Caroline would bark at Ginny, as she slid off of a bar stool. “Nobody’s going to go Anna-sane this evening, ladies.”

  Back when they were freshmen, Betsy remembered how intimidated she felt when Anna was around, floored by her perceived ability to not give a fuck about what anyone thought and general badass posture. But over the last couple of years when Betsy spotted her on campus, face covered in giant plastic sunglasses, hair curtain pulled around her features, perpetually hungover, she realized Anna was attempting to hide from her. Betsy was one of “them” according to Anna, and Anna wasn’t about to give her a chance to prove otherwise. So Betsy stopped trying to say hello after she was ignored at least a dozen times. That she and Channing were friends should have come as no surprise.

  “Lovebird, we need you on drums later,” Weird Bobby said to Gavin, body shaking, hands oddly still, now rolling a joint with one and fishing for a lighter in his pocket with the other.

  “Yeah, we’ll see.”

  “Jacob’s been practicing ‘Psycho Killer’ all day and I think he’s finally got it right,” Teddy said. “Qu’est-ce que c’est . . . Fa fa fa FA fa, fa fa fa FA far, better . . .”

  “Y’all are hilarious,” Gavin said. “Truly.”

  “We spent the whole afternoon thinking of dead girl songs. Hey, is Newland coming?” asked Jacob, slumped so far down in the chair, with broken plastic straps hanging out of the bottom, that his head was barely visible over the bottles clustered on the table.

  “Doubt it,” said Gavin, glancing at Betsy to see her reaction. She was looking at Channing, who Gavin noticed for the first time. Bobby passed the pipe to Betsy first and she took a drag and stifled a cough, surprised by its tarry thickness. She passed it on to Gavin. Bobby lit a joint and passed it in the other direction.

  “I’m going in for beers,” Betsy said, as she noticed Channing and Anna making their way across the patio. “Teddy, show me where the kitchen is?”

  “It’s the room with the stove in it,” he said. “Hard to miss.”

  Betsy stared hard at him across the table until he took the hint.

  “Alright. Now I’m going to the kitchen,” he said.

  Inside, she shouted over the noise.

  “You’ve got thirty seconds to tell me what’s up with Channing and Gavin,” she said, pressing herself against the wall of a long hallway to squeeze past the crowd.

  “They had a thing last year,” said Teddy, shaking his head. “But she’s crazy. I mean legitimately nuts. Her parents are super loaded but they are never around. She flew Gavin to their house in the Bahamas after their first hookup. She’s clingy as hell, and he tried to end it, but she kept breaking into his house. She put her hand through the glass of his bedroom window and he had to take her to the emergency room. Twenty stitches. He’s just trying not to piss her off so she’ll leave him alone. Hopefully without drawing his blood next time.”

  In the kitchen, Teddy opened the cabinet under the sink and pulled out a hidden bottle of Jack Daniels. Betsy grabbed four nearly warm Coronas from the sink.

  “So I should probably stay away?” she asked Teddy.

  “From her? Yes,” he said. “From Gavin? No. He’s alright. No joke.”

  By the time they got back to the table, Channing and Anna were each sitting on one of Jacob’s knees.

  “Hey, look who’s here! It’s Betty Bagelville,” said Channing, raising her Red Stripe in the air. Anna just glowered.

  “It’s Betsy,” she said, weakly, starting to feel her heart beat a little faster, her tongue getting heavier.

  “You two know each other, right?” Channing gestured to Anna.

  “Yeah, we go waaay back,” said Anna, laughing without smiling, staring her down, waiting for Betsy to break first and look away. “Betty Bagelville was my sorority sister.”

  Jacob coughed out a half laugh.

  “You were in a sorority?” he asked Anna. “The slutty one, right?”

  Anna pinched his knee hard and threw her head back with another sardonic laugh. Betsy looked at Teddy first, and then Gavin. Are all men too terrified of these kinds of female interactions to intervene, she thought, or just so deeply oblivious to the manipulative shit that’s going down that they sit wordlessly and limply? Teddy passed her a joint and, deeply aware of Channing’s and Anna’s eyes on her, she smoked the rest.

  “Yeah, hey, Anna,” Betsy said, finally, choking on her exhale. “It’s been a while.”

  Betsy checked to see if Gavin had noticed that the sharks smelled blood in the water and were circling in. If he did, he wasn’t letting on. He and Teddy were talking football. Bobby and Jacob were running down a list of songs: “Down by the River,” “Chain Saw” by the Ramones, the Stones’s “Paint It Black,” “Pink Turns to Blue” by Hüsker Dü. Anna was whispering into Channing’s ear, never taking her eyes off of Betsy for a second.

  Betsy’s limbs suddenly felt heavy, which complicated her urge to flee.

  “So why aren’t you at rush, Betty?” asked Anna. “It’s hell week, right? Shouldn’t you be singing show tunes with the rest of the stick-in-the-ass bitches?”

  “I quit, actually,” she said, wondering if this would somehow change the tenor of the conversation, make them members of the same club and align them against the stick-in-the-ass bitches of the world. “I turned in my pin last year.”

  “So that explains the makeover,” said Channing. Anna barked a kind of harsh, halting laugh this time. The revelation that Channing had noticed Betsy, too, even if it was to take inventory of her somewhat embarrassing style evolution, made Betsy believe that the fight wasn’t over yet.

  “I was wondering why you were slumming over here,” said Channing, taking a swig of her beer.

  “Sometimes, if you aim too high, you miss the target. But you should know that, right?” Betsy said. So this is just how it works. Bitches were everywhere. Channing was the Caroline of her domain, but Betsy could take her. “Felt like coming down from my shiny mountaintop tonight.”

  “Excuse me, ladies,” said Jacob, as Channing and Anna slid off of his lap. “Bets, you up for singing backup later?”

  “Uh, sure,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ear self-consciously, her old friend paranoia back in her head, telling her that Jacob only asked in order to make fun of her later, in front of them. When Betsy was high, it was like thinking in an echo chamber. Any of the insignificant, insecure inklings she’d have when she was sober would be amplified, played back to her a few times, louder and louder, until it became more important and dire than it was or funnier than it should be. Nothing was funny about that night, though, and she struggled with the “they’re laughing with me” vs. “they’re laughing at me” mind fuck. The fear around her, the sense that any one of the derelicts at the party could be the killer, made the feeling infinitely worse. She scanned the crowd for faces, trying to remember details. Would she recognize any of them in a police lineup? Even though she wanted to beg Gavin to leave, to go back to his house and disappear into his room, a
ll she could think to say was, “Maybe.”

  “You alright?” asked Gavin, touching her elbow. She turned to look at him and, in a half-second flash, realized that she was practically living with a total stranger. Who is this guy? Was he in on the joke with Channing and Weird Bobby, out to humiliate the sorority girl as some kind of game?

  “I’m fine. Why do you care?” she said.

  “Why do I care?” He laughed, guiding her away from the table. “Because Channing is into blood sports and she is totally after you.”

  “Oh you actually noticed that?” she said. “I thought you were just tossing me in the water to bloody it up like chum.” She didn’t know if she’d made the shark analogy out loud.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” he said.

  She hadn’t said it out loud.

  “Look, I would lay off the weed if I were you. That’s serious shit. Weird Bobby doesn’t mess around.”

  “What, so now you’re my chaperone? You think Betty Bagelville can’t handle it?”

  “What are you talking about?” he said. “Weird Bobby’s shit is strong. Period. Sorry if you’re some kind of expert hash-smoker and I didn’t know it.”

  “Yeah, well there are a lot of things you don’t know about me.” Ugh, she thought, Really? That’s the best you could do?

  “Hey, Gav, you in?” asked Jacob. “Weird Bobby’s on bass. We need you on drums.”

  “Yeah, one sec,” he called back, and then turned to Betsy as he reached up to scratch the back of his head. “Are you going to be OK if I go in there? Bets, you’re acting weird.”

  “I can handle myself,” she said. “As of forty-eight hours ago, I was totally capable of living without you.”

  Neither one of them knew what to do or say next. They stood there for a minute. Gavin tried to make eye contact, but Betsy wouldn’t do it. The words were out. Maybe that’s all it took to crush something that was so soft and new that it hadn’t formed a protective shell yet.

 

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