The Drifter Read online

  She hung a left to cut a diagonal line through the Plaza of the Americas, past a handful of drifters. They usually ended up in Gainesville after wandering off the interstate, growing impatient in their search for the mythical Florida orange groves. Inside the pastel halls of the sorority, it had been easy enough to ignore the seedier side of Gainesville, but outside those walls, it was impossible. It’s the first sizable city intersected by I-75, the freeway that begins in Michigan. It starts north of Detroit at the Canadian border and snakes down to Ohio past Toledo and Dayton, further south to Lexington, Kentucky, before it passes through the depressed west Tennessee mountain towns into Atlanta and Macon until it crosses the state line into absolutely empty, impossibly green space. The verdant wasteland of low trees and fields punctuated by the occasional cow is an epic disappointment for kids who expect an eight-foot Mickey Mouse to greet them upon entering the Promised Land, not realizing that they still had nearly four Disney-free hours in the car ahead of them. In the fall, it’s the migratory path for Midwestern snowbirds who flee the cold en route to their slumped, one-story cinder block homes in sixty-plus communities. Then, after Easter they do the reverse trip “up north” in understated, gold four-door sedans. Gainesville was brimming with Last-Stop Larrys of the world—sad sacks who just want to see one palm tree before they die, and anyone who’d given up on the rust belt cities and decided to try their luck in the Sunshine State. During the school year, the young, tan coeds were the center of attention in town. In August, before the semester started and the stream of returning students clogged the three exits into town, the people trickling in off the highway more likely stuck out their thumbs somewhere north of there and hitched a ride. It wasn’t unusual for bad news to tag along with them.

  When people realized they’d stopped short of their destination by a hundred miles, they’d typically stay awhile, sleep it off in the grass. They never wanted for company.

  Betsy picked up speed through the flat quad, enjoying the movement in the air it created, and then caught a flash of her reflection in the vast windows of Emerson Hall. The seat on the pink Schwinn she was riding, which she’d lifted from her friends Ginny and Caroline’s place, was at least three inches too low for her spindly frame, so her knees grazed the handlebars, and it made her look hunched and twisted, like an ampersand. Since she had cut her dark blonde hair to just below her chin, a trace of sunny highlights still clinging to the ends, it had started sticking to her face and neck in little, sweat-damp hanks. She was so startled by her reflection that she let out a little gasp. She knew how different she felt lately, but hadn’t realized that the transformation was apparent on the surface, too.

  She made it to work with a chocolate glazed in hand (has anyone ever spotted an illuminated neon Hot Doughnuts sign moments before sunrise and resisted its pull?) and five minutes to spare. The windows were steamed from the boil-and-bake operation in back, which started every day at about 3:00 a.m. She tapped on the glass and peered through the fog to get Tom the manager’s attention. When he looked up from the industrial-sized vat of dough he was mixing and saw her fuzzy silhouette through the condensation on the windows, she motioned to the midget bike.

  “No lock,” she shouted through the glass to Tom, the son of the Filipino owners, Tammy and Agapito Castillo, miming a gesture that might look significantly cruder than “U-lock” if anyone were passing by the store. Tom motioned to the back door with an impatient wave and Betsy wheeled herself around.

  “Nice breakfast, asshole,” he said. “You can bring in the bike today, but next time I’ll let someone steal that piece of shit. Again.”

  Betsy had lost her third bike of the year just a few days before. It wasn’t stolen, exactly. She’d left it locked on a rack downtown in front of a bar and hitched a ride home when she was too buzzed to pedal it home.

  Later, when Betsy returned to the street sign where she locked it, the bike was missing its seat and front tire and she was too lazy and embarrassed to unlock the hulking mess and have it repaired.

  Betsy stuffed the last half of the doughnut into her mouth, now frosted in the corners where last night’s lipstick lingered. She squeezed the bike through the door. “Just one more time. I really appreciate it.”

  Tom was even crankier than usual, and Betsy doubted it was just about the doughnut.

  “Is everything OK?” she asked him. “I would say that it looks like you woke up on the wrong side of the bed, but I know you sleep standing up.”

  “There is some seriously crazy shit going down in this town right now, Betsy,” he said, opening the oven to let a blast of heat fill the room. She was washing her hands in back, examining her distorted reflection, this time in the paper towel dispenser. Maybe the blurry image in the stainless steel and her plate-glass-window reflection were lying to her, but it looked like the edge of her jaw was sharper, there was the slightest hollow under her cheekbone. She wondered if maybe Ginny’s summer popcorn with soy sauce diet actually worked, while Tom slid out a tray of everythings and the scent of charred garlic stung her sinuses.

  “And by crazy, I mean weird. Even by Gainesville standards. So just be careful.”

  “How weird is weird?” she asked, grabbing a wire basket from under the counter to fill with cooling sesames, unconvinced.

  “I don’t know exactly, but the cops came to the back door for coffee not long ago and they’d seen some grisly stuff,” he said. “Just don’t do anything stupid. Or maybe do stuff that’s less stupid than your typical bullshit.”

  “And when you say grisly, you mean . . . ?”

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to say until they notify the family. That kind of grisly,” he said. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be talking so much while you’re on the clock, either.”

  TOM HANDLED ALL of the staffing for Bagelville’s two locations, the original here in the student ghetto and the far less desirable (cleaner, newer, friendlier) annex in a strip mall near the highway, because his parents hated students after twenty years in a college town. Though Tom would shake his head in empathetic disgust when his mom ranted about the mysterious juice deficit (“Tagalong is a Girl Scout cookie,” he barked, when Betsy asked him to translate and help her defend herself when Tammy accused her of giving it away, “Tagalog is a language. What the fuck are they teaching you here?”), he was mildly entertained by the antics of his employees, a scruffy lot of pretty young women who tried hard not to look like they were trying, and knew they were good for business. English Lit TAs and bored fifth-year seniors didn’t come here and stay for hours, past breakfast into the less satisfying pizza bagel territory, just for free coffee refills.

  When Betsy was arrested for using a fake I.D., Tom gave her an advance on her paycheck to cover the fine so she wouldn’t have to tell her mom. She was grateful, and she trusted him. And though he would never admit it, she knew he liked her. She was routinely fifteen minutes late, critical of customer’s orders—when Betsy’s favorite professor, Dr. Loman, a patient man who taught Shakespeare to auditoriums full of sunburned students in flip-flops and tank tops, would order his “usual” tuna melt on a cinnamon raisin bagel, she made a gagging sound as she placed it in a waxed-paper-lined plastic basket more than once—and had a murmured, smart-ass retort for every one of Tom’s requests. But she worked hard without too much complaint, and she was grateful for the job. Over the year and a half she’d been there, Tom teased her for being a flake and she mocked him for his complete lack of a social life and terrible taste in music, all while making $5.25 an hour.

  Once, as she fed handfuls of oranges into the gaping maw of the industrial juicer, Betsy tried to explain the local employment hierarchy to Tom.

  “Your job is like your shoes,” she said. Tom was about to hire a very tan sophomore from Fort Lauderdale who wore slouchy socks pushed down over white Reebok high-tops. “Like those girls over at Armando’s next door? They have tattoos, like a marine does, hearts with thorns and anchors and stuff. You know, they’re
brunettes. They’re Doc Martens. They’re more like us, the Bagelville crowd, not into Rob Base or pastels. But we’re Converse, Chuck Taylors. Low- or high-top, it doesn’t matter.”

  There was an unspoken allegiance between the women of Armando’s Pizza and the Bagelville employees. At least once a week, a sixteen-inch veggie and a pitcher of lite beer was bartered for a half-dozen sesames, a pint of lox spread, and a quart of fresh-squeezed liquid gold in the alley that connected the two buildings, and no one was the wiser.

  “That girl with the big socks?” she continued. “Maybe she could iron her pleated khakis and work at Blockbuster? Or if she bought a pair of Birks she could try Joffrey’s, that overpriced vegetarian place in the old Victorian house on the corner? Her calves are tan enough. She might need to wrap her hair in a bandana, though, maybe a patchouli-scented bandana? And she could pick up some of those dangly Indian earrings from the kiosk at the natural foods store.”

  “This is profound, Betsy, truly. Real senior thesis shit here,” he said. “Thank you for sharing your insights on microeconomics.”

  What she didn’t bother theorizing about was the universally accepted notion that anyone who paid for their share of the $700 rent for a two-bedroom in an off-campus complex with a decent pool by working, those who were still stuck with a shoe box full of cassettes in a shiny CD world, were considered poor, and all other things being equal, not as fabulous. Betsy was sure that there were more people like her on campus than she realized, meaning that there were more people who were relatively broke and anonymous, but because she had thrown herself into the specious Greek life during her very first week of college, she didn’t socialize much with many of them. It seemed like everyone in Betsy’s social circle had fathers who were alumni with deep, golfer’s tans, exaggerated drawls, and an oversized parking space reserved for their game day RVs. They’d show up with four-foot-long sport fisherman coolers full of free booze for their daughter’s friends wearing tiny khaki shorts. Just before game time it was a long-standing tradition for students to fill Ziploc baggies with bourbon and smuggle them into the stadium in their shorts with the “zip” part tucked over the waistband of their underwear. Inside, they’d use it to spike their Cokes when security looked the other way. Somehow, parents found this charming. Like most big state schools, the football culture prevailed, and even Betsy would catch herself feeling intoxicating pride about the team’s winning streak, or the latest Heisman contender on the team. Florida was known for its sports team, being a host of the world’s largest tailgate party in Jacksonville, and for the fresh-scrubbed athletic wholesomeness of its well-tanned student body. Most of her classmates there were completely fine with that reputation, riding on the fumes of the Reagan era, delighted by Jell-O shots and Day-Glo parties, where they’d ruin perfectly good J.Crew T-shirts with splatters of fluorescent paint, and dance all night in front of a black light, marveling at the blue-whiteness of their teeth.

  Betsy had reservations about all of it. She had a vague notion that they were on the tail end of a cultural moment. She knew that elsewhere in the world, kids her age were literally tearing down the Berlin Wall and risking their lives in Tiananmen Square. Yet Betsy still had to wear a dress to enter her sorority’s dining hall on Monday nights. She was chastised for standing on the bar and screaming her lungs out, for smoking, for drinking too much, for her occasional flirtation with drugs. There was no room in that world for the anger that was stirring inside her. Betsy often wondered when her life would stop resembling a 1980s movie, if the still-warm corpse of that decade would stop haunting her at night.

  Until recently, Betsy had made her best effort to fit in. She’d lived at the sorority house among the quilted bulletin boards and photo collages, the afternoon soaps in the TV room, the baby-faced busboys that cleared her dinner plates, and the estrogen-charged pranks. There were some highlights, she’d admit. The brownies baked with a carton of ex-lax and tagged with a Do Not Eat! Post-it in the communal fridge in an attempt to nab a notoriously hungry food stealer were vicious and brilliant. She would miss the late-night-study snack runs that somehow led to Jäegermeister shots, and the incredibly loud singing of the Annie soundtrack at all hours of the night. None of those moments were enough to cancel out how terrible she felt during the annual cattle call known as sorority rush.

  HER SIX-HOUR WORK shift seemed desperately long today, given the fact that the second summer session had just ended and classes weren’t due to start for almost a week. Bagelville, like the rest of town, was practically empty. At noon, finally, Betsy slid on her red JanSport backpack and rode into campus to sell back her textbooks at the University Bookstore before they had a chance to collect dust. Once the contents of her backpack were unloaded, twenty-eight dollars suddenly burned a hole in her pocket. Betsy decided to splurge on a cheap bike lock and a three-dollar loose meat sandwich at Steamer’s. She’d had a dream about the vinegary ground beef on the soft onion roll the night before, which prompted the book sale, since it was often the first thing she bought when she had extra cash. Then she planned to ignore the heat and venture downtown toward the Duckpond. She loved to ride through that neighborhood under shady oaks past Gainesville’s historic homes with their wide Victorian porches, admiring the houses whose owners were smart enough not to rent to undergrads. She took the stately plaques forged with long-ago dates next to the front doors as a reassuring sign that there might be something about this place and this experience that was worth preserving and protecting. Sometimes, she would find a bench at the Thomas Center, a former hotel that had been converted into a gallery and arts center, and sit down to smoke a rare daylight cigarette. She hated the taste, but she would take her time, ashing into an empty Coke can and imagining that she lived somewhere else important, in a city that took up more space on a map, where interesting daytime smokers might live. It was all so pleasant and placid and downright boring that she couldn’t imagine that anything as grisly as what Tom mentioned earlier could happen there. Her other favorite spot was the new art museum on the opposite side of town, where she started spending time after she decided to minor in art history. It was a relief to lose herself in the gleaming white space after the tedious time she spent in the classroom. It was a long ride across the vast campus sprawl to get there, but whenever she made the trek, she would stand in the cool, spare room in front of her favorite image, a gelatin silver print by Todd Walker, and stare at it until her skin was studded with goose bumps from the turbocharged air-conditioning. The photo was of what looked like a woman, lying on the floor on her side and curled into a ball under a sheet or a blanket, hiding. It had the murky, underwater quality of an ultrasound image, and there was no real evidence that the form was a person, let alone female, but Betsy felt she knew instinctively what it was. The image filled her with a curious despair.

  “Is there anything more frustrating than the title, Untitled? Don’t you want to know what happened to her?” she once asked her favorite guard, who just shook his head and left her to wonder on her own.

  From the Duckpond she looped downtown past the Hippodrome and bumped along the old brick streets in front of it. Betsy propped the bike against a brick wall in front of a dusty vintage shop, locked it, and wandered in. It was a closet-sized space stocked with square-heeled shoes for tiny, pre–WWII feet and stiff dresses decorated with decaying lace. She found a pair of black, cat’s-eye sunglasses and stuck a felt bowler hat on her head, then studied her reflection in the swivel mirror that stood on the counter.

  “Nice hat,” said a voice behind her. Betsy turned around to see a woman hidden by giant black vintage sunglasses, her skin the blue-white color of glacial ice. She wore a Metallica T-shirt modified with a pair of dull scissors into a tank top, which was half-covered with a cascade of dyed black hair.

  “Betsy, right? From the bagel place?”

  “Oh hey, yeah.” She recognized her as one of the pizza-swappers from Armando’s.

  “What’re you up to?”

 
“Just, uh, buying a hat,” said Betsy, gesturing to her head with one hand, then immediately feeling silly for doing so. She fished four dollars out of her pocket with the other.

  Another Armando’s employee with a Louise Brooks bob and a shock of brick red lipstick emerged from the dressing room with an armful of 1940s print dresses. Betsy wasn’t sure who Louise Brooks was, but she had read about her hair in one of Caroline’s magazines and was pleased that she used the phrase “Louise Brooks bob,” even if it was only to herself.

  “We’re off to find AC and cheap drinks at Diggers,” said the shorter of the two. Betsy realized her window of opportunity for asking their names, and thereby admitting that she’d forgotten them, was closing rapidly. “You in?”

  After a suffocating fifteen-minute ride, she locked the bike onto a street sign in front of Diggers, the cave-like lounge at the Holiday Inn on University. Once inside, she squinted in the dark to find her companions, who had saved her a stool at the bar. Betsy shared her philosophy about day-drinking while she waited for the bartender to shuffle over and take their order: If there was a substantial serving of fruit (strawberry, pineapple, coconut, etc.) and/or vegetables (celery, olive) in a cocktail, it could be consumed pre-sundown without remorse.

  “I’m partial to the Bloody Mary,” Not-Louise said. “It’s like a salad in a glass. You can argue that tomato is a fruit until you pass out, but I will still think that’s bullshit.”

  Betsy settled on a five-dollar Digger daiquiri, a caloric, high school drink that she would never have dared to order in front of Caroline, but her judgmental friend wasn’t back from summer break yet, and wasn’t there to witness her transgression. It had what tasted like at least a serving of canned peaches in it, so it qualified as a drink and a snack. The first few sips were so cold and smooth that her buzz rode in on the back of an ice cream headache. The frozen drink and the blast of recirculated, sixty-five-degree air was enough of a reprieve from the heat that she didn’t mind the dull, chemical sweetness of the Schnapps floater. For the next round, because two-for-one almost always equals four-for-two, she would switch to rum and Diet Coke. Betsy liked to plan ahead.