“I said Latvia, not Transylvania,” Caroline said, as they stumbled out of the bar. “Five! Five stupid boys, ah ah ah.”
Ginny showed both of them M.J.’s secret spot where you could scale the wall of the football stadium for a midnight sprint down the fifty-yard line. They made it across and back and halfway over the fence before they heard the security guard shouting after them. When they made it to the car, Caroline waved at him and shout-sang the school fight song as they sped away. Just riding in their wake was enough to erase all of the infinite times Betsy didn’t feel special. She basked in their attention, their invincibility, their reflected glow, until she didn’t.
Physically, Caroline and Betsy were more similar than Betsy and Ginny were. They were roughly the same height, with light hair and eyes, born just a few months apart. That’s where their similarities ended. Betsy was tall and lanky with dirty blonde hair. Objectively, she was pretty, but she did everything she could to not draw attention to it. She tried to fold herself like an origami bird into a smaller body to avoid standing above the crowd. She was funny and wry if you were standing close enough to hear the sly remarks. She noticed everything, examining her surroundings so carefully, paying special attention to the flaws that no one else caught. The fact that she noticed things proved problematic at times. At the most basic level, the whole social framework of sorority life hinged on the idea that everyone bought into it, that they sang the songs, and held hands, and flashed beaming smiles in photos with a total commitment to their sisterhood. Betsy had questions and doubts, and that made her more threatening than she realized.
Caroline, on the other hand, was imperious. She had the strong, tan shoulders, sharp clavicles and perfectly streaked blonde hair of a girl who’d grown up playing country club sports, and a quicksilver quality that lent her humor, which was sharp and unrelenting, a kind of menacing, unpredictable edge. One minute, you were in on the joke and the next, you were stunned silent when you realized you were the joke.
Ginny was petite and dark-haired with a gentler kind of confidence. Life was fantastically easy for her. Even the way she drove struck Betsy as simultaneously careless and graceful, her brown doe-like eyes saw everything but the road in front of her. Betsy would grip the sides of the passenger seat and wince, tensing her body for the impending car wrecks that somehow never materialized. Betsy had had close girlfriends before, but Ginny was her favorite. She saved her from Caroline’s mean streak, from a lonely summer, from herself.