“Betsy? What the fuck?” It was Gavin. She hurried to the passenger side, sat hard in the seat, and slammed the door.
“Go! Go, go, Gavin, get out of here, now. I’m serious! We’ve got to go.”
CHAPTER 10
NEW ORLEANS
August 27, 1990
Once Gavin was a couple of blocks away from Williamsburg Village in the parking lot of the Steak ’n Shake, and Betsy calmed down enough to talk, she told him what had happened.
“I don’t know. I can’t know for sure. But I swear to God it felt like someone was in that apartment, Gavin,” she said, sensing his doubt about the details.
“Well, you said that there was a pissed-off cat on the stairs, Betsy. You don’t think that it could have made some of those noises? It’s not unheard of for people to be up listening to music at this hour, either. It could have been coming from a neighbor’s place.”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “It didn’t sound like it was from a neighbor’s place, but maybe you’re right. My brain hurts.”
“I mean, we could go to the cops. But you’re underage, right? When do you turn twenty-one?”
“In November,” Betsy said, feeling as small as a child.
“And you’re high as shit,” he said. “And your blood alcohol level is likely pretty impressive.” He reached over to touch her forehead.
“How did you get mud on your face?” he asked.
She had almost forgotten about Mack.
“I fell in the woods near Weird Bobby’s,” she said. “With Mack.”
“That guy . . .” Gavin trailed off, gritting his teeth.
“I’ve already forgotten about him. I think the adrenaline took care of that,” she said, feeling dumb and paranoid about being so paranoid.
“You’ve had a rough night, Betsy. Who can blame you for thinking the worst?”
“You’re probably right. I don’t know. I’m just scared. I hate it here right now. The place is crawling with news crews. Class is canceled. I saw Phil fucking Donahue on campus today. I just want to go. I’ve got a little cash. Let’s just go.”
Betsy turned her face away from his and looked out the window. He thinks I’m crazy, she thought, and he’s still sleeping with Channing. On the white stucco wall in front of her was a pay phone.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, and jumped out of the car. Betsy picked up the receiver, took a breath. She was going to call 911.
“Gainesville nine-one-one. What’s the location of your emergency?”
“Um, I’m at a pay phone now,” Betsy’s voice started to tremble. She remembered the humiliation she felt on Fraternity Row. The firemen stood in a line, wearing their giant helmets, arms crossed, staring at her with clear condescension.
“What’s going on down there?”
“Well,” she said, reviewing her story in her head, trying to avoid any scenario in which the police found her drunk, high, and underage. She pictured her mom in bed at home in Venice, fumbling for the phone when the police would inevitably call. What am I supposed to say, she thought, I think I heard something suspicious? The floor creaked? A light was on that shouldn’t be on. And music was playing.
Oh shit.
“Ma’am, are you there?”
Betsy’s story, and her confidence, started to crumble. Her eyes were trained on the wall next to the phone. Someone had scratched “slut” into the paint with a car key.
“Hello?” The operator’s tone was short, obviously tired, and completely over stoned college kids flipping out about a tree branch grazing their bedroom window. She imagined how weary a 911 operator in a college town besieged by the media must be at 3:00 a.m., and suspected that she was one of many panicked students making calls about sinister-looking pizza deliverymen and creepy sounds. Betsy could hear herself breathing in the receiver.
“Sorry. False alarm.”
She hung up. Betsy glanced back at Gavin, who was covering his face with his hands. She remembered the party, Channing and Anna, Mack pouncing on her in the driveway. For a second, she could see herself in the parking lot, the bluish glow of the Steak ’n Shake sign on her face, like she was hovering over the building and peering down. From up there, she looked impossibly small.
“How’d that go?” Gavin said, once she was back in the car.
“Not well. I’d say that wasn’t good at all,” she said.
AFTER SOME CONVINCING, Gavin agreed to leave for forty-eight hours. Once they decided to leave Gainesville, Betsy started breathing again.
They’d settled on their destination, New Orleans, an hour into the drive. It was an unusual approach, sure, but neither of them had been thinking very clearly. They drove back to Gavin’s so he could scavenge enough clothes for a night or two, careful to avoid his raging bull neighbor. Betsy had already packed a bag to stay at Gavin’s. Then they made one stop, at Bagelville, to get an early payday from Tom. They’d pulled up to the store and saw the light in the kitchen was on, steam already clouding the windows, and Betsy pounded on the back door with the palm of her hand. Tom cleared the glass with his sleeve and peered out the window before he opened the door.
“Jesus Christ, Bets, you scared me,” said Tom, talking through the wrought-iron gate covering the door, glancing at his watch while he turned the dead bolt and let her in. “And you’re more than two hours early, which does not make up for the eight times you were fifteen minutes late. Just so we’re clear.”
“Tom, I’m not here for work. I can’t do it today,” she said, looking at his shoes so he wouldn’t see how wasted she was. “I . . . I was just wondering. Can you . . . just . . . pay me now? Is that OK?”
It occurred to her how hard she was trying to act sober, and she felt the judgment behind his concerned expression. “I need to get out of here for a couple of days. And I can’t come in tomorrow. Or I guess it’s today now.”
“You seem a little spooked. You OK?” he asked, stepping outside to look over at Gavin’s car to see who was inside. “If you’re in some kind of situation . . . I . . . I don’t know. Can I help you out in some way?”
“I’m fine, Tom,” she said. “Honest to God. It’s just with the reporters crawling all over the place, and classes being canceled, and you know, a guy on the loose who is murdering young women . . . I . . . I have to go. Now. So the only thing you can do to help me right now, if you want to help like you say you do, is to pay me a couple of days early, and give me today and tomorrow off.”
He stood there for a moment, leaning on the doorframe, still suspicious of the car. He pulled a handful of bills from his wallet.
“I’ve got a hundred on me. We can figure out your hours when you get back, OK?”
“Thanks, Tom,” she said, shrinking a little with gratitude. When she reached to take the money, he took her hand.
“But, Betsy, be careful. I’m serious,” he said. She nodded, fighting her tears. “If you need anything, for real, let me know.”
Back in the car, Gavin attempted a joke.
“What, no fresh-baked sesames?” he said. She didn’t laugh.
“I’ve got to tell you something, and I think now is the perfect time,” he said.
“What?” asked Betsy, her stomach knotting again. “What is it?”
“I hate bagels,” he said. “Hate ’em. They’re gummy and thick, and generally disgusting. Nobody needs that much bread. I’m more of a toast guy.”
“Can I ask you a question?” she said. “I mean, two questions?”
“Shoot.”
“How did you know where to find me?”
“Well, I didn’t realize you’d left for a while,” he said. “I saw Newland stumble in and Teddy confront him, and before I knew what was what he dove over the drum kit swinging at me, I mean, like a lunatic. It got pretty ugly.”
“Oh God.”
“They finally pulled him off of me, but not until he trashed Bobby’s drums. He was pissed.”
“Jesus, are you serious? I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. It was my fault. I should have said something to him about it, about you,” he said. “But you know what a hothead he is. I was just waiting for the right time. I never imagined he would snap like that. No offense, but he told me he hated you. I didn’t think he’d care if we were together.”
“No offense taken,” she said. Gavin said they were together.
“By the time he settled down and Teddy told me what happened, you were long gone. I went to your place first, but you clearly weren’t there. Then I went back to my place for a minute thinking you might show up. But then I remembered you told me about staying with Ginny over at Williamsburg, and I took a guess.”
Before they left town, Betsy requested one more stop. They made a right turn on 10th Street and she directed Gavin to pull into a dark driveway nearly overgrown with an ornery, untamed hedge.
“Give me a second,” she said. She got out of the car and crossed through the headlights, stepped lightly onto the sagging front porch of Rich the Geek’s house, reached into her pocket to retrieve Godzilla, still deep green and bumpy like an avocado and warm from her pocket, and placed it near the door.
“What’s going on?” asked Gavin.
“Just something I forgot to do before.”
BACK IN THE car, they started on the eight-hour drive to New Orleans. Gavin had friends there who they could stay with for a day or two. Once they were on I-75, she drifted in and out of sleep. When she was awake, she circled the events of the night in her head in a deep panic, convinced one minute that the worst of her suspicions were true, and then the next that she’d let her fear get the best of her. She’d barely noticed that she was in a moving car, let alone that Gavin, heretofore known as the guy from the record store, a friend of her psycho-ex-boyfriend, was in it with her. They’d known each other, formally, for less than three days. It seemed like so much longer.
But there they were, at the Circle K near Live Oak. They stopped for gas, gas station coffee in a foam cup, and original Corn Nuts at a convenience store in such a desolate place, even the dimmest lights drew hordes of moths and flying roaches as big as a toddler’s hand. As she was shaking the last clotted flecks of Coffee-mate into her cup it occurred to her that it was the kind of place where one might not be entirely surprised to bump into people who were fleeing a possible crime scene.
“You should get some rest,” she said, her voice dry and cracked from booze and adrenaline. “I’m OK to drive for an hour or two. It’s the Corn Nuts. Tough on the dental work, but they keep me awake.”
“You sure?” he asked, putting his hands on her shoulders.
She nodded, staring at the asphalt, inspecting a splatter of thick red ooze that she hoped was day-old Slurpee.
“Wake me up in an hour,” he said, as he moved his palm to the side of her face.
“I know this is weird—all of it,” he said, not in an unkind way. “Everybody’s leaving town. Classes were canceled, remember? We’re just changing the scenery. Getting a little distance. You’re gonna love these guys we’re staying with in New Orleans. It’ll be OK.”
“I know,” she said. “I think I know.”
The last time she made this drive north was when she was ten. She and her dad made a mostly silent journey north to Connecticut, in his off-white Buick LeSabre with brown velour interior, for his mother’s, her Grandma Young’s, funeral. Why did people have to die in order for her to leave Florida?
Betsy made it across most of the Panhandle before she couldn’t take the silence and the swarm of her own thoughts for another minute. She’d been memorizing the lyrics to the Afghan Whigs’s “You My Flower,” on repeat for an hour, astonished by Gavin’s ability to sleep through her “singing.” So she woke him up with a doughnut, a pint of Tropicana, and an airplane bottle of vodka in a parking lot near Mobile.
The original thought was that they’d stay with two of Gavin’s friends from Jacksonville, Tulane guys who worked at a bar near campus. When they arrived unannounced at their crumbling house off of St. Charles, the last address Gavin had written in his book, the place was empty. There was no sign of anyone, anywhere. In front of the house there was a wide porch with enough half-assembled bikes to make even Betsy wince, and a withering, yellowed pile of The Times-Picayune in the corner. Gavin left a message on an answering machine from the pay phone down the street, saying that they were in town and they’d swing back by again later.
“I didn’t recognize the voice on the recording,” he said. “I’m hoping it’s a roommate. Otherwise, they moved.”
They stopped for more coffee, better this time, but the heat of the day was mounting, pressing down on their hangovers, and they needed a place to sleep it off. They wandered around looking for a room. When they stumbled onto a sloping, defeated Victorian bed-and-breakfast with a vacancy sign in the window, they climbed the creaking steps before Betsy paused on the shady porch.
“I’m sure that you think I’m an unbelievable moron right now, and possibly a little crazy,” she said. “But thank you, you know, for getting me out of there.”
“You’re cute when you’re crazy. Plus, I’ve got nothing better to do,” he said in a way that made her think that maybe he meant it.
For sixty dollars cash, up front, they got a room from an ancient, round woman wearing a long, purple knit vest with long pockets weighed down by rings of more keys than she could ever identify. Check-in time wasn’t until three, she said, peering over the top of her red-framed reading glasses, taking a long look at Betsy’s drawn, delicate face before she decided to show some mercy. At the top of a dark, narrow staircase, down a long hall of unmarked doors, they dropped their duffel bags in a room with dark green walls and a simple iron bed made up with an old flour sack quilt and pushed up against a large window with its heavy, brocade tasseled shade pulled low. Across from the bed was a small desk with a reading lamp and a ladder-back chair. A slice of sun crept in from under the shade and made the dust particles in the air look like tiny, floating, electric snowflakes.
“Bath’s third door on ya left,” she said. “Drinks on the porch at six. You’re buying. Come down for breakfast. Not before eight. Big key’s for the front door. It’s locked after ten. Little one’s for the room.”
“Thank you, um . . . ,” Betsy asked.
“Miss June,” she said, turning sideways to pass through the narrow door. “Get some rest. You two look like you saw the wrong side of dawn. Keep the noise down and you’ll make me happy.”
Betsy barely remembered taking her shoes off, but five hours later, she peeled her face off of the crocheted pillowcase and pushed her hair off of her forehead. It was the kind of dreamless, heavy sleep that left her drenched in sweat and feeling oddly weightless. It took a minute for her to remember where she was. The light had dimmed. The sun was so low in the sky that it made the tiny room glow a deep shade of amber. Gavin was still asleep but she didn’t dare look at him, afraid he might wake up to find her staring at him like some kind of psychotic house cat. She cracked the window, letting in some of that early evening summer breeze. Then she grabbed a towel and a change of clothes and padded out the door to the shower down the hall. She closed her eyes to let the water rinse the soap from her face and thought again about the night before. Maybe it was the upstairs neighbor, opening the sliding door, she thought. There have to be at least a dozen explanations for that noise, the creak of the wood, the music, but she kept going back to the first one, over and over again.
She remembered the time, early in their freshman year, when Caroline convinced her that the cops were in front of that same apartment, ready to arrest them for smoking pot. Caroline saw a neighbor’s brake lights through the curtains in the living room and suddenly hit the floor, inspired to mess with her new friends’ heads.
“Get down,” she’d hissed. “What are you? Idiots? Can’t you see there’s a cruiser out front? Shit! Our neighbors must have smelled the smoke.”
Betsy, who was panic-stricken, turned
around to see Ginny in the kitchen, clutching her middle, doubled over with laughter. Their pledge-sister Holly was with them, and she hit the floor to crouch between the sofa and the coffee table, eyes wide, so impossibly high that she’d believed every word that Caroline fed her about their impending arrest for possession.
“Poor Ginny,” said Caroline, still in a husky whisper, never once breaking character. “She is so high that she doesn’t know she’s about to spend the night in jail with a fifty-year-old hooker.”
Ginny had fallen for it before and was giddy to be on the other side of the joke. But Betsy and Holly were the new girls who still believed, wholesale, that Len Bias let his guard down just one time, snorted a solitary line of coke, and that was all it took to stop his heart on the spot. Fear of sudden death by mild drug use was enough to keep Betsy straight through all of high school. So the first time she let herself go in her friends’ apartment, no curfew, no one to notice or care, pulse feeling strong, inhaling the weed smoke through a cored apple pipe, her only misstep was to fall for the old “cops outside the window” routine.
“My mom is going to kill me” was the only thing Betsy could think of to say. When Caroline saw that she had succeeded in terrifying her latest subjects, she flopped on the couch and said, “I’m completely fucking with you,” through a sinister, self-satisfied grin.
After that, Betsy’s paranoia became the stuff of legend. And Caroline’s performance cemented her status as a devious but, if you squint a little, entirely awesome superhero in Betsy’s eyes, once she realized what was happening and laughed at her own expense. Holly wasn’t so forgiving.
“You’re an insane cow, Caroline. Really twisted,” she said, before she grabbed her Dooney & Burke bag and stormed out of the door, past the neighbor’s idling car outside.
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