The Drifter

by Christine Lennon

  “Holy shit, if it isn’t Betsy Young,” boomed a voice from behind her, causing her to jump and splash the first of many lukewarm beverages on her feet that day. She turned to see a familiar face, at once harder (around the cheekbones) and softer (around the eyes) than it had been twenty years ago.

  “Jen?” She remembered there were four Jens, a handful of Stacys, three Kims, and a couple of Hollys. She’d flipped through old party pics like flash cards the night before she left to see how many names she could recall. But standing before her, plain as day, was Jen Haws, with Molly and Brooke and one of the Kims, exiting a Mercedes wagon with the blackest tinted windows she had ever seen.

  “Gav, I . . . they’re here,” she said, trying not to sound so ominous. “I’ll call you later?”

  “I’ll look for you and the face painters on ESPN,” he said.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Look what the flippin’ cat dragged in,” barked Jen. Despite the hour, and the informality of the event, lip gloss had been distributed generously among the pack before her, a sort of suburban, mannered version of Real Housewives with Bible study and Reef flip-flops. The hair was straight and excessively tasteful now. Their breasts still perfect after childbirth, their limbs Pilates-toned. Betsy imagined them all in a line at their respective private school drop-offs in a parade of luxury SUVs, hopping out to shuttle their small, bobbed, doppelgängers into fifth grade. They were the Lycra pants moms, bearing more discreet swooshes on non-game days. Betsy knew that she had been one of the last of her classmates to get pregnant and expected to be presented with photos of sons and daughters before the high school homecoming dance. She’d seen their offspring on Facebook and realized, not without feeling the looming inevitability of her own mortality, that she was not much older than those kids when she first met their mothers.

  A tour bus the length of a city block with an entire swirling, purple galaxy airbrushed on its side panels came wheezing into the parking lot. Then, a woman in knee-length shorts and a blaze orange T-shirt, holding an Ann Taylor Loft shopping bag full of metallic Mardi Gras beads and blue plastic Solo cups appeared from around the corner.

  “Oh my God, this thing is hideous,” she said, peering into the tinted glass door of the bus after it whined to a halt in front of her.

  “Excuse me, sir?” She tapped on the glass with her index finger. “Can you open this thing up so we can load the coolers?”

  A cardboard box full of toxic energy drinks and liter jugs of vodka, plus three bags of rapidly melting ice, were unloaded from the back of a Ford Expedition onto the gravelly asphalt by a man who, if she squinted, looked like Phil Portner, a guy she had made out with once after a day spent floating down the Ichetucknee River in an inner tube with a bunch of drunk frat boys. She had erased him, and his awkward groping in her dorm room, from her memory until that moment.

  “Betsy, Jesus, it’s been a while,” he said, slapping her on the shoulder, never removing the sunglasses that were secured across the back of his neck by a neoprene strap.

  “Phil, honey, that ice is toast if you don’t get it in the cooler, pronto,” said the woman with the beads, who Betsy was now realizing was Leslie Richmond, a woman about whom she remembered two facts: she was in the room the night she walked out of the sorority house for the last time; and she kept six bags of peas in the community freezer, which she would eat, almost exclusively, for dinner.

  “Stacy was supposed to bring some food, but I told her, what’s the point?” she said to no one in particular, chuckling to herself. “Oh hey, Betsy Young! Or I guess it’s Davis now, right? Someone told me you go by Elizabeth now, too? Who are you anyway?” She laughed, though Betsy didn’t think she was trying to be funny.

  “Hey, Leslie. Nice to see you,” she said. “You can call me Betsy, or Elizabeth if you want. Just not ‘gal’ or ‘sport.’”

  Leslie squinted slightly, no trace of a smile.

  “What about you? So you’re Leslie Portner now? You and Phil have been together since school?”

  “Oh, please. We’ve been married since 1996,” she said, rolling her eyes. “And he’s still filling the cooler for me. Who says romance is dead?”

  “I do,” said a voice from behind her that sent a chill down her spine. Betsy turned to see Caroline, with chin-length hair, almost brown now, grinning slyly behind oversized black oval sunglasses.

  “Look who’s here to save the day,” said Caroline.

  “Thank God,” said Betsy, louder than she intended.

  “Yes, the Lord is certainly to thank for this pleasure,” said Leslie. “What a surprise! I didn’t see your name on the list.” If she was trying to conceal her disappointment it wasn’t working.

  “It’s not on the list,” she said. “But I’m here now.”

  Betsy couldn’t stop staring at her old friend, startled by her sudden fondness for someone she thought she hated.

  “But it’s full. The bus is at capacity.”

  “It’s a forty-foot bus, Richmond,” she said. “There’s room for one more. When is the last time everybody showed up who said they were coming to something like this? You’re telling me that nobody has a kid puking on them somewhere? You think there isn’t a single sitter who canceled in this whole pathetic crew?”

  Leslie shot Betsy a rueful look and turned to leave without another word.

  “That’s my motto,” said Caroline, flatly. “Not taking shit for forty years.”

  “What are we doing?” said Betsy, grabbing Caroline’s forearm, shaking her head. “I have no idea why I’m here.”

  “Because this,” said Caroline, making a loop in the air with her index finger, indicating the madness around them, “is going to be fucking hilarious.”

  By 10:15 a.m., a full forty-five minutes behind schedule, they boarded the party bus, which was already filled with the stench of a urinal cake and Gatorade. In back, the “bar” consisted of two cases of Bud Light, three liters of vodka, two of Jack Daniel’s, a single, warm carton of orange juice, a jug of Ocean Spray cranberry juice cocktail, and infinite cans of Red Bull.

  Caroline and Betsy opened two more beers.

  “I’m sober with more frequency now, especially during the day. Today I will make an exception,” said Caroline. “It’s like smoking. If I say I’m never having one again, it’s all I think about.”

  They examined their surroundings briefly, taking stock of who was there and who was mysteriously absent. Instead of rows of seats, the bus was lined with two long, velour upholstered benches, so they all sat facing each other. AC/DC was barely audible in the background.

  “I was kinda hoping to see Kendra,” said Betsy. “You know, the quiet one who was secretly so wild? With the crazy hair?” She shook her free hand around her face to indicate a big, wild mess. Kendra was famous for her studying habits, which were borderline obsessive. Every couple of months, she’d explode like a powder keg and go on wild drinking binges. Once, they found her on a Sunday morning passed out on the front lawn of the house. She was eager to see how that mess organized itself twenty years on.

  “Holy shit, Betsy, she died,” said one of the Hollys. “Like, in 1994 or 1995. She was an au pair for a family in Europe one summer when she was in graduate school. She died there, in her sleep.”

  “I heard she choked on her own vomit,” said Stacy, sitting hard next to them, taking a swig of her JDC.

  “Oh God, I had no idea,” said Betsy. “I’m sorry! Jesus, that’s really awful.”

  “You did. You knew. You just forgot,” said Caroline. “People were talking about it at Melanie and Teddy’s wedding.”

  Betsy flashed back to the wedding at the Everglades Club. She’d missed her plane. Caroline was mean as a snake.

  “All I remember about that wedding,” Betsy said, “is what a bitch you were to me in the bathroom.”

  “Hmm,” said Caroline, shaking her head. “Those were dark times for me. I guess you’re not the only one w
ho forgets terrible things.”

  Betsy looked out the window, hoped no one would notice the sudden shift in her mood, and wondered how long it would take her to walk back to Tampa if she got out right there on the side of the road.

  “How many funerals were we supposed to attend before we turned twenty-five?” said Jen, in a clumsy defense. “Give her a break.”

  “I’m not giving her a hard time,” said Caroline. “But I’ll be honest, I would have bet you five dollars that she forgot about Melanie’s wedding, too.”

  Betsy could see the landscape turn back to that familiar rural desolation, vast green fields punctuated by the occasional wandering cow, a few gray-tinged clouds that hung absurdly low in the sky.

  “They’re divorced now anyway, so who cares,” Betsy mumbled, willing herself back into the moment. “I do. I block stuff out. I’m sorry. It’s how I survive.”

  Betsy’s eyes locked on Caroline’s for the briefest second, searching for some connection.

  “So how’s New York? How’s Gavin?” asked Holly, who was now sitting beside her. “You two still together?”

  “Yeah, we’re hanging in,” said Betsy, surprised that Holly knew anything about her life. “We’ve been there almost twenty years now, if you can believe it.”

  “You know Cammie?” asked Holly, who, in her pale early forties was almost unrecognizable. Back in school, she was perpetually tan, but in a lifeguard kind of way with wide strap marks on her shoulders and faint, pale lines that extended from the outer corners of her eyes to the tops of her ears. “I heard she’s out in L.A. Someone saw her on an episode of Law & Order once.”

  “Oh, great. Good for her,” said Betsy, nodding her head, searching for the segue.

  “What is it that you do again?”

  “I’m a specialist in Prints and Multiples at an auction house in New York,” said Betsy.

  “Oh, cool. Is it like The Devil Wears Prada?” she asked.

  “Um, no, not really. That takes place at a magazine, I think, right? Isn’t it Vogue or something?”

  Betsy had long wondered what people from here had thought of her, of her life in New York, of her disappearance after Ginny’s funeral. If she’d been wondering what Holly, or anyone else on that party bus, had thought of her in the meantime, she got her answer that day: Not much.

  “So what do you do, Holly?” Betsy asked. She struggled to stay focused in the present.

  “I work in the state attorney’s office,” she said. “Thirteenth circuit, back in Tampa.”

  “Oh, yeah, I think I remember hearing that,” she said and hoped the lie wasn’t too transparent.

  “Alright well, I’ve got to pee. I’ve been holding it since Plant City because I’m terrified of that bathroom,” Holly said while she made her way through the crowd, swaying with every tip of the bus, in the midstages of a buzz. A small group in the back had started singing loudly and off-key to George Michael’s “Freedom ’90.” One of the Kims checked her reflection in the mirrored surface of the tinted window when she thought no one would notice.

  “Well, that one’s a firecracker, right?” Caroline said. “She’s a regular dynamo. To be honest, I didn’t think Holly knew that many words.”

  “She’s smart as hell, Caroline. She’s a state attorney,” said Betsy. “And come to find out, I’m an asshat.”

  Caroline tapped the side of her plastic cup to Betsy’s.

  “Seems like old times, right?” Caroline laughed, and it sent a jolt of joy through Betsy’s brain to see her happy.

  “Tell me you didn’t vanish for twenty years and come back expecting to bond over the glory days,” she added in a way that wasn’t exactly unkind, but more familiar. Then, like quicksilver, she softened again. “Do I really have to remind you that you never had much in common with them? Unless you were serious about liking soap operas.”

  “They were on during my lunch break,” said Betsy with a smile, swirling the remains of her warm beer. “Jack and Jennifer? What, you didn’t watch?”

  “It’s just a day, just a two-hour ride to a football game,” Caroline said, and Betsy noticed she was echoing Gavin’s words almost exactly. “The only thing that’s wrong about any of this reunion bullshit is that we’re forced to stay in touch with, like, everyone we’ve ever known and look at pictures of their fat husbands on social media. It ruins the element of surprise.”

  “What about you?” Betsy asked, relieved to be listening to someone say exactly what she thought before she had to think it for herself. “Didn’t you ever want a fat husband?”

  “I was engaged once,” she said. “But that was a long time ago.”

  Betsy didn’t press for details. There was time for that.

  They sat listening to the hum of the tires on the highway, which was now clogged with game day traffic, wondering what to say next. One of the Kims was talking to a Dana (had she been there the whole time?) about her divorce, which was clearly not amicable and left two damaged tweens in its wake. The bad beer and the bumpy ride had conspired to make Betsy queasy, and the fact that she was speeding down the highway to a place she had tried so hard to forget wasn’t helping matters. There she was sitting next to Caroline, who had hurt her so deeply a lifetime ago, but was the only person she needed in that moment.

  “So tell me about Remi Virginia,” Caroline said, grinning. “I bet she’s just like her mom. For better or worse, right?”

  CHAPTER 24

  GAME TIME

  September 25, 2010

  Since traffic had slowed to a halt less than a mile away from the freeway on their way into town, Betsy had plenty of time to get used to the idea that she was back in Gainesville twenty years after the fact. As the bus crept along University Boulevard, the most granular memories and details came flooding back. So much of it was the same, the rolling hills of the golf course, the ornate buildings of the original campus wedged in between the hulking, windowless brick mistakes from the late 1970s. The stadium was imposing as ever, the dominant structure on the landscape, metaphorically and otherwise.

  The group plan for the day, as Leslie arranged it, was to stop at the sorority house for a brief tour and make it back to the other side of campus with plenty of time for tailgating. Two years earlier, after a massive capital campaign during which they pried open the heavy purses of dowager alumni sisters of a certain age, and nickel-and-dimed the less moneyed alumni for fifty-dollar donations at every turn, the forty-room house Betsy remembered so vividly had been partially razed and entirely renovated to mimic the kind of cartoonishly regal Southern mansion you picture when you think “sorority.” There were white columns installed where a sort of angular modernist facade once stood. There were wide stairs leading to a stately white painted door. Once inside, Betsy didn’t feel any of the gut-aching dread she’d anticipated. The past had been demo’d, rebuilt, and then finished with dark-stained floors and plush carpets, designed with the kind of neutral and deeply inoffensive style from the Ritz-Carlton school of decorating. Every detail was so strenuously tasteful that it all just kind of disappeared in a not unpleasant way. They had even rebranded rush. It was called “recruitment” now, which sounded vaguely militaristic, and much more accurate.

  At first, Betsy tried to linger outside, hesitant to enter the place even though none of the circa-1990 dwelling was intact. After a few minutes on the shadeless, baking sidewalk, it occurred to her that no one on that bus had mentioned how she’d quit the sorority in a huff. It was likely that none of them, save for Caroline, remembered the details. Two decades ago, she struggled to break the rules in a place that didn’t value rebellion, or at least that’s what she’d told herself, and Dr. Hirsch, in therapy for all of those years.

  But what was she rebelling against? She knew it must have had something to do with her missing father. Kathy was so afraid of the world after he left that she cautioned her daughter against being different, acting out, against taking up too much space. When she started college, she was just beginning to
realize what that meant: that the people in the world in charge of making decisions weren’t capable of or interested in making decisions on her behalf. She just began to realize, like waking up from a dream, that she had other ideas. But there, in that bubble of hair spray and tailgates and white BMWs, everyone embraced the status quo, because that’s what allowed privileged kids to screw around on their parents’ dime.

  Betsy wished she had understood her rebellion of 1990, which amounted to wearing Army surplus boots, cutting her own hair, drinking too much, and fairly run-of-the-mill bad behavior, before she bailed on the sorority and left for New York. She wished that she had known some of the other young women around her in the midst of that same transformation and embraced it. In hindsight, it all seemed so clear. She walked up that sidewalk to the now unrecognizable front door, with a flashy brass knocker and a dramatically different view from adulthood. Betsy wondered why the intensity of her youth never led to a more radical adult life, why she wasted that energy on getting wasted and, more recently, endless web searches for ideas for her kitchen remodel. She vowed to stop making granola bars when she got back home.

  The question she asked herself, as she walked into that house and plastered a smile on her face, is how did the girl who wanted to be so different grow up? What if she didn’t feel like being vegan, or a subversive crafter, or mastering the art of butchering a pig, or getting a tat sleeve, or doing anything else predictably shocking or edgy? What if she’d rather take a cab than brave traffic on her vintage reproduction bike? What if she now thought secondhand clothes smell terrible, and would rather fill virtual shopping carts on Net-a-Porter, only to abandon them later when she was too lazy to get out of bed to find her credit card?

  “I know I’ve stood in this exact same spot, exactly as buzzed as I am now, but I don’t recognize a fucking thing,” said Caroline, who found Betsy at the top of the stairs and pulled her aside to whisper conspiratorially.

  “This is way too creepy,” said Betsy, eyeing oversized frame after oversized frame of house composite photos, each sister’s perfect smile frozen in time and shrunken into a stiff, two-inch-by-two-inch mug shot and assembled into a neat grid. “We’re so old that our composite pictures have been moved into the basement.”