“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.”
“Don’t be so sure,” said Holly, calling for them at the end of the hall. “Here. I spotted one from 1988.”
Sure enough, the top row of towering bangs gave it away at twenty paces. Betsy was on the second row from the bottom. It was a different photo than the one in the email, just row after row of faces, each with its own imprint and shards of memories attached. She’d forgotten about her own photo from sophomore year, that shiny forehead, a last glimpse of her long hair, and the shirt with the lace collar that should have been pressed. In the row above her were Caroline Finnerty and Ginny, Virginia Harrington, hazel eyes shining, her hair falling past her shoulders in heavy brunette waves. Betsy and Caroline were so lost in that photo they didn’t hear Stacy approach them from behind.
“Every time I see the two of you together I expect her to come around the corner at any minute,” she said. Stacy was the first one, the only one, brave enough to mention the missing piece. “It’s got to be hard to be here without her.”
Betsy and Caroline heard what she said, but they were speechless. Their eyes were locked on the photo. Neither one could tear them away.
BACK ON THE bus, it was standing room only in the thick, stifling air, since more people had joined the reunion tour. The part of Betsy’s brain that retrieved faces and names from the distant past on demand was on overload. She just nodded and smiled at anyone who looked her way. Once they were parked, the shimmering purple bus door with the celestial scene slid open and spilled forth a clown car’s worth of middle-aged women who were off to find their respective visor-wearing mates in Izod shirts. Lacoste had created a staggering variation of orange and blue stripes, wide-wide-narrow, narrow-wide-narrow, all narrow, all wide, which were all on display here. Betsy fought her way through the crowd on Caroline’s arm, dazed from the heat and the beer, hobbled by swollen feet in her defiantly non-athletic shoes. Gavin had mentioned that Teddy would be in for the game from Savannah, where he was an architect who designed mammoth beach houses for red-faced, Atlanta businessmen and their grandchildren. They had talked about Gavin coming, too, but in the end she knew this was something she had to do on her own. She made a note in her phone of the parking space where Teddy would be tailgating, thinking how much less fun things would have been back then if you were so easily found, textable, traceable, identified by a pin dropped on a tiny, electronic map. She spotted Teddy through the crowd instantly, same rumpled blue oxford, a red cap pulled low to the top of his glasses, a few graying blonde curls springing around the back of it.
“Betsy Young, in the flesh,” he said. “Jesus, it’s like seeing a ghost.” If any of Gavin’s other old buddies in his immediate company was interested in seeing her, they didn’t show it. Their wide, dark, black glasses concealed any glimpse of enthusiasm for life they might experience until kickoff, when all of the rage and passion they’d been storing up during the off-season let loose. If they’d always been boring, Betsy hadn’t noticed in school. She had interpreted their aloofness as proof that they were special, above it all, but she realized now that it was in fact a kind of smoke screen to conceal that they didn’t have much to say, or at least not to her. They had become exactly like their own fathers, the graying men in khaki shorts with the giant RVs, wearing hats to cover beleaguered hair follicles clinging to their scalps like sparse, windswept scrub on the side of a cliff.
Whatever trouble she was having with Gavin, she was sure she’d ended up with the best from the lot and was grateful for the renewed perspective. Teddy was a close second. He had come up north for Betsy and Gavin’s wedding with Melanie, and Gavin had seen him a handful of times for fishing trips. Betsy only half remembered his attempts to reach out to her during the blurry days she left Gainesville for good. But she remembered that he tried.
“Teddy, you remember Caroline,” she said, stepping aside to let them shake hands.
“How do you forget Caroline?” he said.
“Yeah, right, scary Caroline,” she said, looking over her giant sunglasses at Betsy. “I was nothing compared to the bitches who run this place now.”
“I’m fully aware that this will make me sound like a Quaker,” said Betsy. “But do you think these girls are aware that their butt cheeks are hanging out of their shorts?”