“Later.”
She stood there holding the rapidly cooling coffeepot, noticing her hangover again for the first time in hours. Mack was one of the latest in a long line of bad decisions. Freshman year, there was George, her first mistake in town, which lasted forty-eight hours before she found out he had broken up with Heather, a senior in her sorority, a week before they met. George had given her a ride to the stadium for her first football game on the handlebars of his bike. Later, after he treated her to her first sushi dinner at a bad Japanese place by the highway, they had sex in a way that made Betsy think George was used to getting what he wanted without asking for it. Though what happened between them was just a degree or two from date rape, consensual in only that she didn’t ever exactly say “no,” she still went to his house the next day to play Spades with his roommates. She didn’t yet understand that what she wanted, or didn’t want, counted for something. Heather tracked Betsy down at dinner on Monday and gave her a loud, demeaning lecture about what happened to slutty pledges, and it was over. George left one weak message on her answering machine (“Hey, Betsy. Gimme a call.”) and was never heard from again. Betsy had a few deeply average make-out sessions here and there, a handful of forgettable flings, then, during her sophomore year, she had a monthslong flirtation with Andrew, her Geology TA, with whom she’d spend hours talking in the corner of a microbrew pub over warm, hoppy beer to no avail. The relationship culminated with a Friday afternoon trip to Devil’s Millhopper, a sinkhole about twenty minutes outside of town. He’d mentioned it in a lecture about local natural landmarks and Betsy expressed an interest, more in his chronic scruff and the way he blushed when he spoke to her than in a hole in the ground. But once they parked in the empty lot and took the long, wooden boardwalk 212 steps down into the funnel-shaped depression in the earth, she was mesmerized. Each layer of soil beneath the surface, every scrambling vine and tree that stretched its branches skyward for sunlight, told a story. There were bones of long-forgotten mammals buried within the dirt, fossilized marine life from the time when the ocean stretched across the peninsula, which was now covered with only a tangle of highways and subdivisions. The deeper you descended, the more alien it all became. At the bottom, it was cool and shady even when the surface was suffocating, and mild and balmy even on the chilliest January day. The boardwalk ended in a mysterious little rain forest of electric green ferns and odd plants that somehow survived beneath the gnarled oaks, conifers, and evergreens on the surface. They didn’t belong there in that deciduous forest. But they’d found a way to thrive by burrowing deep, staying low and out of sight, and the metaphor felt eerily familiar. That is how I will survive in Gainesville, she thought. It was silent down there, except for the waterfalls that trickled down its sides, carving a path through the rocks and moss, which then disappeared under the ground below. Andrew explained that a local grain farmer at the end of the nineteenth century had found human remains, bone fragments, and teeth, at the bottom of the depression, which was shaped like a grain funnel into hell, and since then the spot had acquired its share of creepy folklore.
“There’s an Alachua Indian legend about this place,” he said, stopping to catch his breath halfway back up the steps. “The story is that the devil fell in love with a beautiful, young princess and captured her near here. When the bravest members of the tribe tried to come rescue her, the devil created this hole. The warriors set off to find her and bring her home, and each one would fall in the sinkhole to his death. No one could save her, or bring her back. The waterfalls were said to be rivers of tears her friends and family shed over their loss.”
By the time they were back above ground, Betsy was so transfixed by what she’d seen that she forgot all about her crush and she and Andrew parted with a firm handshake.
During her junior year, she met Mack, and the roller coaster of their relationship lasted for five months, her longest to date. After she was dumped, unceremoniously, on the hayride, there was the doomed attempt to go out with an absurdly preppy tennis player named John who supposedly had a girlfriend up north. That didn’t keep him from going out with Caroline less than a month later, which caused the rift that tore them apart. There’d been no one special since she noticed Gavin last year and circled around him until he left for summer break. And there he was, sitting before her in awkward silence. “How long have I been standing here?” she wondered.
“Mack can be a real asshole,” he said, finally, avoiding eye contact. “Sorry about that.”