When the cracker basket was empty and the two free rounds of Sea Breezes drained, the three of them waved goodbye to Justin, who nodded with visible relief as they filed through the door to leave. Then they piled into Ginny’s car, pretending like no time had passed, like no feelings had been hurt, and Betsy was furious at herself for backing down and giving in to Caroline once again. As usual, they had no real destination in mind. Even though it was after midnight, they were restless and eager to see who’d made it back to town from summer break. They wanted to replace the stories they’d heard a hundred times before with new ones, and they needed a distraction from the building tension. They ended up in the back room of the Porpoise, a too-dark bar with pool tables and three-for-one drink specials inked on black mirrors with neon paint pens. The place was largely empty, except for a dully handsome trio from Ginny’s high school whose names Betsy didn’t catch over the frantic, grating chorus of R.E.M.’s “Pop Song 89” and didn’t care enough about to ask them to repeat. Ginny had legs that dissolved beneath her after two glasses of syrupy Chardonnay, but that didn’t slow her down. She and Betsy managed, mostly, to stay out of trouble, which is to say more sober than not, for weeks.
Technically, Betsy lived in a small two-bedroom apartment in a fourplex near Bagelville with a roommate, Kari, a junior from Ocala whom she had met in Masterpieces of Modern Drama. She signed the lease in June and Ginny helped her move in her meager belongings: a secondhand floor lamp, some crates of books, a couple of boxes of clothes, and a mattress without a box spring or frame. Once Kari came back into town, she would move her furniture out of mini-storage. Until then, it was grim and lonely, and Betsy loved Ginny even more for giving her the spare key to their apartment without making her ask for it. Betsy had been staying with Ginny all summer, feeling safe and cozy watching TV on the overstuffed couch, surrounded by grown-up furniture and dainty table lamps that added to the “bridge club” vibe of the place, and the popcorn popper they fired up every day at 3:30 when the clouds would open up and dump a couple of hours’ worth of summer rain. There was something oddly comforting about the riotous mess of clothes around Ginny, the Stein Mart shopping bags giving at the seams from the strain of untouched purchases, tags revealing 75 percent off of the retail price.
So the arrangement worked perfectly—Ginny, who hated to be alone, got company while Caroline was away, and Betsy got furniture—until Caroline returned.
Instead of the wide, soft bed and crisp sheets monogrammed with Caroline’s initials, Betsy had the couch for another night. Then, she’d move into her last apartment in Gainesville with her own lower thread count linens for four more months, one more long semester.
By the end of the year she’d be gone for good, ahead of schedule and not soon enough. Not that she had any particular plan. Even if she did have a specific goal, or the beginnings of a dream about what her life would look like in ten, five, or even two years from that moment, she wouldn’t dare admit it to anyone. Ambition felt sort of awkward and pointless to her in that place, where looking for work typically involved browsing bulletin boards. Some people she knew showed up at the university’s job fair in their cheap suits, half hoping to miss a shot at an entry-level gig at the First Union Bank, or as a manager of an Enterprise rental car outpost, and some of them got the job. They moved to Atlanta or Charlotte or even Orlando. English majors with an Art History minor weren’t in high demand in that marketplace. Anyway, most of the people Betsy knew were going through the motions; technically, they were open to the idea of full-time employment, in case careers jumped out of the bushes and attacked them. So they polished their résumés, but that was where the go-getting ended.
The Time magazine article about useless, entitled twentysomethings that her mother ripped out and sent her that summer with the words “hazy sense of their own identity” underlined in shaky ballpoint ink did nothing to convince her that opportunity would come knocking. Betsy was surprised to learn she was part of a generation of any kind, even one so dubiously described. All she knew for sure was that she’d have to put as much distance between herself and Gainesville as possible if she wanted to make something of her dismal life.
None of the answers to those haunting What Color Is Your Parachute? questions were likely to be answered the night the three of them piled into Ginny’s car and drove to the Porpoise.
People had grown accustomed to seeing the three of them together. They were a unit, and from the outside looking in, Betsy realized that the strain between them was barely perceptible. At the beginning of their friendship, it didn’t bother Betsy that Caroline and Ginny were flashier and more conventionally pretty. She learned that traveling in a pack of beautiful women is a powerful thing, that each head that turned to notice them fired a tiny spike of adrenaline. But lately, Betsy was growing increasingly paranoid that she was the sensible Charlie’s Angel, the tall, pantsuit-wearing Sabrina to Ginny’s beautiful but slightly dim Kelly, and Caroline’s sun-kissed Kris, if behind Cheryl Ladd’s gleaming blonde hair, straight patrician nose, and flawless smile lurked the shrewdest manipulator you’d ever met.
At the bar Caroline broke out her thick, mint-green Amex and bought the first round of shots.
“Five lemon drops and one tequila, no lime, for my angry friend over there,” she said, snickering conspiratorially with the bartender. She pointed across the room at Betsy, who produced a middle finger on cue. “She’s too cool for fruit.”