“You can always come back when you need to,” she said, offering the most discouraging of all parental send-offs.
The day after Christmas, which was celebrated in the Davis household, with his parents and younger brother, Jay, with a cheese log and a HoneyBaked ham, Gavin and Betsy bought a bottle of Cuervo and sat on the beach, wrapped in blankets, passing it between them.
“Let’s do it,” Gavin said after his final swig. “Neither of us is getting any younger.”
“And then I have to say, ‘Or any smarter,’” Betsy added, pulling the blanket up around her shoulders. “I have to.”
Five days later, she was staring at Gavin as he filled the hallway/kitchen of Ari’s place, deep in a fake argument about the Clash with Ari’s boyfriend. Gavin, for no reason other than to piss off this total stranger, was firm on his position that Mick Jones could kick Joe Strummer’s ass. And his adversary’s stuttering response made him smile wide, turn to Betsy, and wink. Betsy mimed drinking a glass of water to Gavin, hoping he’d get one for her, and then she was horrified to realize that he might not know her well enough to know what she meant.
“So Ari tells me that your best friend was murdered,” said the sullen girl with deep burgundy-lined eyes, who had been chain-smoking Parliaments on the pullout couch where she and Gavin would later sleep. She extended the pack, with two forlorn cigarettes lingering in the bottom. “Want one?”
“Uh, yeah,” Betsy answered, struggling to keep her voice from cracking in her throat, which was parched from heat, smoke, and exhaustion. She had kept her anxiety in check as they crawled up the coast, silent through a snowstorm near the Virginia border. Her muscles tensed as the population density increased and the traffic grew thicker until they were at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, struck dumb by the icy lower Manhattan skyline. She could barely eat. Every couple of hours she’d look over at Gavin, when he was behind the wheel of the car, or last night when he was huddled with her on the pullout under a slick polyester sleeping bag, and freeze in terror. What have I done? she thought. She waved to get his attention, and motioned for him to get her a glass of water again, tipping an imaginary glass to her mouth. Ginny would have known what I meant.
“So you’re saying that Big Audio Dynamite II is your favorite band?” She heard the poor sod plead with Gavin to use reason. “And you’re totally OK with putting that information out into the world?”
“So it’s true?” the Parliament girl said to Betsy, over the Love and Rockets song Ari was playing on repeat. They’d all split the handful of ecstasy tablets Gavin had offered, stolen from his brother, and driven across many state lines in his backpack, in exchange for a few nights room and board. Ari’s kicked in first, and she was having her moment in the corner, vigorously petting her cat, listening to “No New Tale to Tell” over and over again. “Do you know who killed her?”
“Not yet. They had some guy in custody, but he was just some punk kid who beat up his mom,” Betsy said. She flashed to the mug shot in the paper, the scarred face, the hooded eyes. She was surprised how she sounded totally unfazed, as though the information didn’t sting every time she repeated it. Ginny had been dead for four months. It had already been woven into Betsy’s story. Having a dead best friend was her normal. “He didn’t do it. The police just needed to put somebody in jail to make the university happy, and that guy’s number was up.”
“That’s major.” The girl nodded dumbly, her jaw grinding her back molars to tiny nubs.
“Yeah, real major,” said Betsy. “Hey, it’s got to be close to midnight, right? Doesn’t a ball drop or something? I might go get some air.”
She made her way across the small apartment, stepping over bodies, now quiet and huddled in pairs together on the floor, to Gavin.
“So you never learned the international symbol for thirst,” she said.
“Oh God, sorry, I saw you but I totally forgot,” he said. “I was distracted by what’s-his-name having a shit-fit about the Clash. I thought for a second that he was going to jump out of the window if I kept bagging on Strummer, but then I realized it was painted shut.”
Betsy filled the one clean cup she could find, a ceramic mug picturing a cartoon porcupine holding a balloon, from the tap.
“Meanwhile, Wednesday Addams on the couch over there was asking me for Ginny’s autopsy report,” said Betsy.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. Ari can’t keep her fucking mouth shut.”
“No, it’s OK. I’m alright. I just think I should grab my coat and get some air. Some frigid, lung-seizing air. I can’t take that everyone in this room is talking about Ginny.”
“That’s not fair, Bets. Ari didn’t tell everybody. You’re just being pa—” Gavin stopped himself before he could finish.
“Oh, I’m being paranoid? Where have I heard that before?”
Her eyes locked on his, daring him to continue.
They talked about the night Ginny was killed only twice: once on the drive back from New Orleans, when they decided what they would tell the police, and once just before Kathy came to Gainesville to collect her daughter a week after the funeral, when it was clear that Betsy wasn’t going to make it through the semester and she made arrangements to finish her classwork by correspondence. They loaded her milk crates and bags in the back of Kathy’s Buick Skylark. It was getting late and her mom wanted to get on the road to start the three-hour drive before dark. Gavin came out to the Embassy Suites, where Kathy was staying, to say goodbye. They were standing in the parking lot as the sun disappeared, leaning against his car.
The details of the night Ginny died were fuzzy for both of them. Betsy remembered riding a bike back to Ginny’s apartment, hearing a noise, running out of the apartment and into the street, freezing in his headlights, getting into his car, confessing that she thought someone was in the apartment. She remembered feeling ashamed, nervous to reveal her anxiety. In a twisted way, it felt like narcissism. Of all the women in Gainesville, the female half of the thirty-five thousand students on campus, she was the one to walk in on him and live to tell the tale? It felt delusional. Her most vivid recollection was that she did not want to call the police when she was high, or more specifically, she did not want the police to call her mother and tell her that her daughter smoked hash, hallucinated about a murderer, and made a bogus call to 911. Gavin was all too eager to let her off the hook.
“I should have stayed on the line, when I called nine-one-one. I should have woken up a neighbor, used their phone, stayed there, and waited for the police, Gavin,” she said, quietly, fighting tears in the hotel parking lot. “I’m such a coward. I’m such a selfish fucking coward.”
“No, Bets, no,” he said, pulling her closer to him. “You didn’t know. You weren’t thinking straight. I was fucked up. Mack was being such a psycho. You were scared to death.”
“You should just say it,” she said, lifting her shoulder to wipe her tears with the sleeve of her T-shirt. “You thought I was out of my mind.”
“We were both out of our minds. Jesus, everybody around here was,” he said. His voice lowered to a more serious whisper. “And what can we do about it now? You didn’t see anything. You didn’t get a look at him, or even hear his voice. Should you have told the cops when they were questioning you the other day? I don’t know, maybe. Maybe not. Do we call the cops now? That’s not going to change anything. Ginny will still be dead. And you will be in major fucking trouble.”
“Just me, then? I’m alone in this.”
“No, we.” He shook his head. “Of course. We will be in major fucking trouble. It’s ‘we’ now. We’re in this together.”
IT WAS THEIR secret. They drove it to New York with them like a third passenger asleep in the backseat, like an uninvited guest at the New Year’s party.
Gavin checked his watch.
“It’s a few minutes before midnight. You’re right, we should get some air.”
They shrugged on their coats and stumbled out onto the frozen street,
over a smattering of smashed plastic bags full of dog shit, some dirty ice patches, shards of shattered glass, and the occasional used syringe to ring in the New Year in Tompkins Square Park. Even in that ugly coat, Betsy felt shiny and new by comparison, like the Easter Bunny, Ginny would say. She thought of Ginny at the Dish in her royal blue skirt, the night that Gavin hopped onto the stage. She thought of Caroline, who she’d been avoiding for months, who didn’t even know Betsy was in New York. For some reason, she wanted her to know.
“So how does our first New Year’s Eve together rate?” Gavin asked, desperate to change the subject. “Thumbs-up? Thumbs-down?”
“Our first New Year’s? I think it might be our first Monday, Gavin,” she said, rubbing her hands together for warmth.
“Wait, what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Counting this past week, I think we’ve spent a total of twelve full days together,” she said. “And now we’re here. Doesn’t that seem a little impulsive?”
“And whose idea was that?”
“That’s not what I mean. I don’t regret it, I just . . .”
“We could turn around and leave tomorrow. It’s that easy. We’re not locked into anything, but Christ, Betsy, I thought you wanted this.”
“I do! God, I’m just trying to be honest, to tell you I’m scared.” Her teeth chattered from the cold, from the lack of food, the cigarettes, the shots, the fear. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been scared since August. Now we’re standing in the middle of this park, which is straight out of a zombie movie. I don’t want to talk about Ginny with total strangers and pretend that having a dead best friend makes me deep and interesting. I’m cold. I have no real winter clothes. I’m tired. And I can’t go to sleep because Ari’s friends are probably giving each other creepy back rubs on the couch, where I currently live . . .”
“With me.”
“Yeah, with you.” She looked up at him through the vapors of her frozen breath and saw him smile.
“It’s going to be great,” he said. “We’re going to make it great.”
“How can you be so sure?” she asked.
“I just know it. I’ve known it since I first met you in Gainesville. You weren’t like everybody else. You were into stuff. You were desperate to get out into the world and do stuff, and so was I. From that very first day at the lake,” he said. “It was just something I knew was going to happen.”
In the distance, someone started the countdown.
“Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . whoa, wait . . . six . . . five . . .”
He kissed her at four.
“You really believe what you’re saying, don’t you?”
“One hundred percent,” he said. “No, wait. If I’m being honest, I’d say eighty percent, minimum. Now let’s walk up to Times Square and find us some morons. It’ll warm us up.”
Gavin swung his arm around Betsy’s shoulder and pulled her tight.
“But first we have to find you some mittens,” he said. “It’s the city that never sleeps, right?”
“Right, but is it the city that never closes its mitten stores?” she asked, as she slid her hand through the buttons of his jacket, temporarily fearless. “That’s what we need to find out.”
“I’m starting to feel like a local already.”
Tiny specks of icy snow began to fall as they trudged across 9th Street, crossing to avoid packs of rowdy drunks, hoping they could figure out which way was north.
CHAPTER 14
DEBRA MUST BE A PI PHI
Winter 1991
New York had been exactly the escape from reality that Betsy and Gavin wordlessly sought. They found a small one-bedroom, a sixth-floor walk-up in the East Village. Its only clear attribute was that it had huge windows that looked out onto the shabby rooftops of the neighborhood, which excited Betsy to no end. The wide-plank floors were decent, but the kitchen was sad and the bathroom was “original,” meaning that the once-charming tile and porcelain sink were cracked and stained. Betsy would buy a handful of subway tokens, put them in her red backpack with a map, a banana, and extra layers, and explore the city for as long as she could stand the cold. After every snowfall, they’d wander the streets, thrilled by the crunching sound it made under their boots. And there was music: Tramps, Wetlands, Brownies, even Webster Hall. They’d scrape together enough money for two tickets and walk through the freezing night, passing a flask, to save cab fare and money they’d spend on a bar tab. Betsy would borrow Gavin’s leather jacket with too-long sleeves and they would walk down the sidewalk, her shoulder tucked under his arm, her cheeks flushed from the cold, or from happiness, or from both. They would sit across from each other on the subway with dumb smiles on their faces, hardly believing the stunt they were pulling. They were together, in the city. They were so distracted by the constant motion around them that they hardly thought of Gainesville. They were in love.
That was the easy part. Finding employment was more of a challenge. It didn’t help that Betsy had no idea what she really wanted to do. She had loved her English classes, but she didn’t think she could write. She loved art, but the galleries she had seen downtown were so aggressively urban and cool that Betsy was too intimidated to walk in the door, let alone ask about a job. She scanned the Help Wanted section of the Times for something that sounded promising. Her first interview did not go well.
“How sad the sisters of, um, let’s see here, Delta-something must be to lose you to the big city. When did your bus arrive?” said Debra, the human resources assistant at Schulman & Brown, two years out of Cornell, prematurely world-weary and a condescending shrew well before her time, as she glanced at the last line of the brief résumé on the otherwise empty desk before her. She did not even try to hide her disdain.
“Well, we—my boyfriend and I—drove here, actually? In a Honda Accord, if you’re into details,” Betsy said, suddenly thinking the navy “interview suit” she’d received from her mother, the one that crushed her with disappointment as she removed it from its box under their miniature Christmas tree and then hemmed in an effort to seem more fashion forward, might be, in fact, tragically short. She shifted her knees far to the left. “Oh, and I’m sure they’re managing without me.” Debra must be a Pi Phi, she thought.
“We drove here, did we, Betsy? Or is there another name you prefer?” asked Debra, who was practically smirking.
“Betsy’s fine. That’s my name,” she said, punctuating her sentence with a nervous, machine-gun fire giggle.
“I’m guessing this is your college boyfriend, right? Let me guess. He was a Sigma Chi!” She laughed. “That’s going to last. For, like, ever.”
“I’m sorry?” Could this really be happening? “Maybe we could just talk a little more about the assistant to the editor position? I’m eager to work. I’ll do anything, really.”
“It pays eighteen-five a year,” she said. “But I’m just going to be honest with you, Betsy, you’re not going to get it. I’ve seen five candidates for this position already this morning, and they’re all experienced writers, or campus newspaper editors. They’ve had multiple internships in publishing. They know what editing is. You need clips, and not from the sorority newsletter.”
That didn’t seem like the right time to mention the sorority didn’t publish a newsletter. Betsy must have looked stricken, because Debra’s expression changed ever so slightly and she tilted her head with feigned concern.
“Look, Betsy, I’m just being honest with you. Somebody should tell you this now before you get too settled. It’s not too late to go back to Florida.”
Betsy focused her gaze on the false grain of the mahogany laminate on the desk between them to steady herself. She could feel her pulse in her ears. Did Debra agree to see her just for sport, or to prove some kind of point? She must have excused herself from the room, maybe even thanked Debra for her time, but she had no memory of how she made it from the office to the elevator, and later onto the sidewalk, where she thought of about
a dozen choice comebacks about ten minutes too late. From the pay phone in the ladies’ lounge at Saks Fifth Avenue, she called Gavin in tears.
“I’m an idiot.” She sighed into the receiver, tears of frustration streaming down. “I’m just not ready for this.” No one in the enormous, sixteen-stall bathroom even glanced in her direction. An elderly woman with a tight wash-and-set hairdo sat on the long, mauve pleather bench that stretched across the length of the room under a row of frosted windows, silently reapplying her coral lipstick in the mirror of a case lined with red Chinese silk. Anonymous, Betsy thought, feeling the pang of hope that she would one day feel completely at home in this weird city. The woman caught Betsy staring at her, and when she got up to leave, she patted Betsy gently on the arm on her way out, without saying a word.
“She’s a bitch,” he said. “That wasn’t about you. She’s stuck in HR interviewing people for the jobs she wants. There isn’t a kid in the world who dreams about being a human resources assistant when he grows up.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Betsy, still unconvinced.
“Or she’s a Pi Phi,” he said.
Betsy laughed a short, hard laugh and a stream of snot landed on her jacket. She caught sight of the shiny buttons. Why am I wearing something with shiny buttons? She wiped her nose with a tissue and sniffed the receiver. It reeked of Kool menthol cigarettes.
“Just forget about it,” he said. “You’ll get a job. You’re great at folding. Check to see if the Gap’s hiring. Employee discount?”
“Ha. Ha. You’re such an original,” Betsy deadpanned.
“Come on. We’ll go to SoHo tonight for pizza, have a shitty interview party. It’s only your first one. We should start a tradition. I suspect we’ll be eating plenty of pizza.”
The Drifter Page 17