“Hey, it’s me,” she said. “Just checking in from hell.”
She paused so long that Betsy thought the message was over, and she waited for the beep. Then she started again.
“I guess, I, I don’t know. Ginny said she hadn’t heard from you this afternoon. Just want to make sure you’re good, that you made it back from J.D.’s. If you’re staying in your dungeon apartment then you’re either really brave or completely stupid. Uh, my money’s on stupid. I am tempted to bail on the slasher movie marathon and go home to sleep it off. I’m still so hung from last night. Oh, and you better remember the fucking directions to J.D.’s. You and me, we’re going when this is over.”
“EVERYTHING OK?” GAVIN asked after she hung up.
“Yep, totally fine,” she said, clearing her throat, choosing to wait until the next day to discuss her indefinitely delayed move-in date.
It was 10:30 by the time they got to Weird Bobby’s, and things were just getting started. The house, which was off of University Boulevard down the hill from the stadium, was a neglected split-level at the end of a long, downward-sloping driveway. Inside, instead of furniture, he had a full studio set up in his gray-carpeted living room. There were a couple of guitars leaning on stands, some amps, a drum kit, a keyboard, a bass, and a mic for backup singers next to a stack of tambourines. To the left, stained, carpeted stairs led to the bedrooms, and the fluorescent-lit kitchen was separated from the main room by a low Formica counter. A thick haze of smoke filled the room, which was wall-to-wall people, none of whom Betsy recognized. Urge Overkill’s “God Flintstone” was playing loud enough to imprint itself instantly in the darkest crevice of her brain, and she knew that she would never forget Weird Bobby’s house, with its fluorescent green, algae-filled pool and bong-water stained rug. Gavin took her hand and led her through to the backyard, where the crowd thinned a bit. Jacob and Teddy were sitting at a glass patio table, which was covered with empty bottles and a quarter-inch layer of leaves with dust beneath it. Across from them with his back toward the house was Weird Bobby, who was holding court by packing sticky hash into a metal pipe with nicotine-stained fingers. A small pile of joints rested next to a Rolling Rock. In the grass nearby, a guy in a black trench coat was already passed out, facedown, and a couple of partygoers were launching empty beer cans at his head in a twisted version of horseshoes. It had been years since Betsy had been at a party where she barely knew anyone, or where she couldn’t ride on Caroline and Ginny’s wake through a crowd of strangers and not give a shit. Tonight she felt out of place and adrift. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Channing huddled with Anna Johnson, a Miami girl who’d pledged the sorority the same year as Betsy, but she didn’t dare look in their direction. Anna had shown up to mandatory study hall in a tiny stretchy miniskirt and oversized tank top that kept slipping off of her shoulders and passed out in a massive pile of her own hair one too many times. She was given the boot by the end of freshman year for not making her grades, and became the first casualty of their pledge class. She’d since become a punch line when any of them got woozy in a bar.
“You’re not going to pull an Anna on me tonight, are you?” Caroline would bark at Ginny, as she slid off of a bar stool. “Nobody’s going to go Anna-sane this evening, ladies.”
Back when they were freshmen, Betsy remembered how intimidated she felt when Anna was around, floored by her perceived ability to not give a fuck about what anyone thought and general badass posture. But over the last couple of years when Betsy spotted her on campus, face covered in giant plastic sunglasses, hair curtain pulled around her features, perpetually hungover, she realized Anna was attempting to hide from her. Betsy was one of “them” according to Anna, and Anna wasn’t about to give her a chance to prove otherwise. So Betsy stopped trying to say hello after she was ignored at least a dozen times. That she and Channing were friends should have come as no surprise.
“Lovebird, we need you on drums later,” Weird Bobby said to Gavin, body shaking, hands oddly still, now rolling a joint with one and fishing for a lighter in his pocket with the other.
“Yeah, we’ll see.”
“Jacob’s been practicing ‘Psycho Killer’ all day and I think he’s finally got it right,” Teddy said. “Qu’est-ce que c’est . . . Fa fa fa FA fa, fa fa fa FA far, better . . .”
“Y’all are hilarious,” Gavin said. “Truly.”