Betsy paused to take a look at her friends, feeling uncertain, a little scared, and a little more alone than she would ever admit.
“Alright, well, since you two are staying at the house later, I guess I’ll try to settle in to my hovel. It could use a little sprucing, you know.” Betsy forced a laugh.
“Bets, I mean . . . you should . . .” Ginny fumbled for words before Caroline interrupted her.
“Hey,” Caroline said. “Look, come to the house later if you don’t want to be alone. We’ll be there all night. The plan is for everyone to crash there, bring sleeping bags and all. Really, you should. I mean it.”
“I know you do,” Betsy said. She climbed over the back of the convertible and hopped out onto the sidewalk in front of the record store.
She would have paused there for a bit, trying her best to pretend not to notice the forlorn expression on Ginny’s face, but before she could say goodbye, Ginny gave her a sad little wave and pulled away. Caroline extended her right hand to the sky and shot her the bird as they disappeared into traffic.
She stood at the window in front of Schoolhouse for a moment, watching Gavin glide through the aisles. She remembered that he worked there for a while last year. The record store was a place Betsy was curious about, but mostly avoided. She was self-conscious about her limited knowledge of music and certain that the smug employees were judging her as a dumb sorority girl with Top 40 taste. She’d sneak in for a glimpse of the bulletin board to see who was playing at the Dish, or the Florida Theatre, avoiding eye contact so no one would ask her a question she couldn’t answer. It was hard to come up with excuses to stay there if she could never afford to actually buy anything. It didn’t occur to her that the place was teeming with freeloaders, sticky fingers, hangers-on angling for ways to get on the list when a Sub Pop band dared dip south of Athens, Georgia, or east of Pensacola. She hesitated outside, feeling her skin sear in the reflected sun from the plate glass window. She would have to go inside if she wanted to go to J.D.’s.
Gavin was tall, maybe six foot three, but in certain situations he appeared much smaller. As it turns out, this skill was especially useful when he was stealing something. Betsy saw the cashier lean down to answer the phone while Gavin slid a CD, with its giant plastic theft-deterrent brace around it, out of the bin and into the back of his shorts. Quickly, he pulled his T-shirt over to cover it. Betsy turned away with an anxious jolt. She would have run down the sidewalk were she not paralyzed with a kind of naive shock, but her sudden movement caught his attention and he turned to the window to give her the subtlest, remarkably unself-conscious wave. Had she really never seen anyone steal something before? She’d swiped a lipstick tester herself last spring, as a kind of dare, to see if she had it in her. But something about her petty crime moment was oddly innocent. She needed the lipstick. She didn’t have the fifteen dollars to pay for it. It had already been used, for God’s sake. This felt different somehow, like walking in on a stranger with his pants down in a public bathroom.
So he steals CDs and sells them for beer money, she thought. Nobody’s perfect.
She walked over to the door and the bell attached let out a pained little jangle as she took the handle and yanked it from its swollen, rotting frame.
“Hey, that was fast,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Hey, Betsy,” said the girl behind the counter. They took a Studio Drawing class together the year before, but it took a minute for Betsy to register her face, given the randomly executed green hair that she dyed, judging by the blonde roots, about three months ago. Betsy remembered sitting on the plaza sketching moss-covered trees and badgering her with all sorts of questions about her nose piercing, which was a ring like a bull’s that spanned her nostrils. (How much did it hurt? “A lot.” What was her inspiration? “Dunno.”) She searched for a name and came up empty-handed, then smiled and offered an awkward half wave.
“Hey,” she said. Better to say as little as possible in these situations, she thought, though she’d never been in one of these situations before.
“Later, Gavin.”
“Later, Wendy. Good to see you back in town,” he said. Wendy, that’s it. Betsy wondered what the parents of cute Wendy, with a sprinkle of freckles on her nose, thought when she came home, post-bull’s-ring, post–Manic Panic, for summer break. “Don’t sweat the hair. It grows, right?”
“Screw you, Davis,” she offered limply before the door jangled shut and cast a small shower of leaded paint chips on the sidewalk.
“Did you drive here?” he asked, scooting sideways past the window to conceal the bulge in the back of his T-shirt.