Caroline’s total lack of remorse confirmed that Betsy was now on the wrong side of a ruthless bitch, and their trips to the drive-thru liquor store in Ginny’s car to bat their eyelashes for free bottles of cheap wine were over, maybe forever. This all happened in early May. By the time spring semester ended three weeks later, Caroline and Betsy were speaking again, but just barely.
Then Betsy told Gavin about Godzilla. Caroline and Betsy crashed a party near campus sophomore year. They just happened to be walking by after studying in the library one night. Betsy would never have thought to go in to a party on her own, uninvited, with total strangers. But Caroline couldn’t resist. They walked in the front door and went straight for the keg, where Betsy grabbed two Solo cups and waited in line, feeling more than a little conspicuous. When the host of the party, a sweaty, pale engineering major named Rich, who was smart and nice, and therefore no one she would have met otherwise, introduced himself, Caroline disappeared to the back bedrooms. Rich and Betsy chatted about how massive their school was, how they’d both been there for so long and neither face triggered a flicker of recognition. Betsy had started to feel good about the night. Maybe she’d meet some new people, branch out a little bit? Maybe she’d finally learn what an engineer did? But she had barely filled the second cup when Caroline appeared in the doorway, motioning to her to leave.
“Right now?” she mouthed across the room, but Caroline was out the door.
“Thanks for the beer, Rich,” she said. “My friend has to go. Guess I’ll see you around?”
“Yeah, sure, no problem,” he said, confused by the sudden departure.
“I hate to tear you away from your new boyfriend,” Caroline said, once they were back on the sidewalk, downing her beer. “Geek much?”
She took out a cigarette and lit it with a flame shot from a tiny dragon monster’s mouth and then tossed the perfectly weighted specimen into Betsy’s hands.
“I got this for you,” she said. “Courtesy of Rich.”
That he had collected these lighters, painstakingly, at flea markets, from mail-order catalogues in the back of Mad magazine or wherever you’d find something this strange, and that Caroline had plucked one from its mates on the shelf of his bedroom at his own party, which she was allowed to enter only on the remotest chance that nerdy Rich would get some action that night, was of little consequence to her. She’d also cleaned out his medicine cabinet of an expired Percocet prescription and some Tylenol with codeine.
“Thank God for wisdom teeth,” said Caroline, shaking the bottle like a maraca, a little demonic glint in her eye.
Had Betsy told him her last name? Had she mentioned where she worked? Had it not been for the crashed keg party, she would have survived her entire undergraduate experience without seeing Rich once. Now, thanks to Caroline, she was sure she’d pass him weekly on the way home from work and she could already feel the searing hatred of his eyes boring into her skull. She remembered the feel of the lighter, which was hard and cold and fit perfectly in her palm.
“That,” said Gavin, squinting in the sun, rubbing the back of his head, “is one malicious bitch.”
They were quiet for a minute. She had never told anyone that story.
“You’ve got some pretty selective morals, Gav,” she said, sitting up, suddenly defensive of her onetime friend, sensing his judgment of Caroline, and of her by proxy, even though she agreed wholeheartedly with his assessment.
“That’s totally different. I took a CD from a record store. I didn’t cock tease some stranger at a party and then lift his prized possession,” he said.
“I wasn’t teasing him. And I didn’t steal it.”
“So you brought it back, right? The lighter?” he asked. Until then, the thought hadn’t occurred to her. She mumbled some kind of excuse.
“Oh shit, Bets. You’re just as bad as she is if you don’t,” he said.
“He probably doesn’t even live there anymore,” she said, raising her voice a little. “Rich is off engineering somewhere with other engineers and has forgotten all about it.”
“But, really? You kept it?” he said.
She was quiet again.
“I know. You’re right.”