At the intersection, she paused again. If she took a left, she was back to her dusty, empty apartment with a mattress on the floor. If she went straight, that road led her to the sorority house, where Ginny and Caroline were staying the night. To the right was their apartment, with its feather beds and freshly laundered sheets. The key to their front door was still in her front pocket. Betsy followed her gut and took a right, partly because it was a downhill ride, and partly because she needed to be alone, but not alone enough to face her own grim life and apartment, both of which felt empty, both of which were a mess. She coasted down 13th Street on her last stolen bike, vowing to remind herself about the God stuff tomorrow.
At the bottom of the long hill, she hung another right at the Steak ’n Shake, where three graveyard-shift employees were forced into the meat freezer at gunpoint by one lunatic last year while his crack buddy emptied the till. That prompted Caroline to announce “I’d kill for a steak burger!” every time they drove by and howl with laughter. It didn’t seem funny anymore. In this section of town, a few miles away from the nearest bar, the streets were entirely empty, and Betsy somehow felt safest riding in the dead center on the double yellow line. The slope of the hill, the arch of the tree branches that grew over it, were all so familiar to Betsy. Ginny and Caroline had been in their apartment in Williamsburg Village for three years, starting their day, every day, to a state-of-the-art CD alarm clock set to play “Superman” by R.E.M. at 7:30 a.m. sharp, the most optimistic song Ginny could find to rouse her for another day. Even though Ginny and Caroline wouldn’t be there, she needed to smell that faint popcorn scent mixed with Caroline’s Quelques Fleurs and feel the musty, deep, chintz sofa that practically grew arms to embrace her. So when she coasted into the parking lot, she ditched the bike between a couple of parked cars under a streetlight, just in case, and jogged toward the building, up the front stairs. With the building’s 1970s-era fake-colonial facade there to greet her like an old friend, she’d nearly forgotten about Weird Bobby and Channing, Mack’s apoplectic freak-out, attacking her in the woods, and Gavin—well, almost Gavin. She just wanted to sleep it off and wake up tomorrow with clearer eyes and start all over again. She would clean up her new apartment. She would buy a dresser at Goodwill and unpack her boxes. She would add a few more lines to her letter to Gainesville. She would start over, again.
Betsy was halfway up the steps when she felt something crunch underfoot, followed by the hissing and snarling of the neighbor’s cat, whose tail she’d apparently stepped on. She fell hard against the stair rail, heart racing with another adrenaline surge. A blur of matted gray fur disappeared into the darkness under the stairwell in a flash. She was still breathing hard from the last leg of her journey on the stolen bike and that hadn’t helped matters.
“It’s just me,” she hissed back, “you big, fat grouch.”
Once she was sure the cat wasn’t coming back for revenge, and that she hadn’t had a hash-fueled heart attack, she fished the key out of her front pocket and put it in the lock.