Ian turned to look at her
“That’s what you think I am? A criminal. What does that make you? My accomplice?” He shrugged. “Selling it, buying it, we’re in the same boat.”
They avoided eye contact as he pinched the murky pink weed into an expert joint.
Betsy moved to the sofa to find her water glass and took one of the pills with a single, swift gulp. Ian lit the joint, took a drag, and passed it to Betsy. It still scorched her throat every time. She would start to worry when it didn’t.
“I don’t think I’m better than you, if that’s what you’re implying. The way I see it, we are more in the same boat than you realize,” she said, as she stifled a cough. “I’m not as innocent as you think I am.”
“Oh, so seventy-nine has a past. You and your man, Mr. Decoy, on the run from the law?”
“Not exactly running, I don’t know. I guess we’re running from something, but we’re not wanted in ten states or anything.” She motioned with one hand to clear the smoke while she reached for the joint with her other. “I think that what I’m doing could best be described as avoiding, which is like a passive running.”
He nodded, silent. The kid wasn’t much of a talker, which made Betsy talk even more.
“I had some dark days. I lost my best friend. I let her die.”
Four months earlier, in March, Scottie McRae had been tried on five counts of first-degree murder in an Alachua County courthouse, and the details of the student murders in Gainesville once again flooded the news. Betsy thought about calling Caroline at least once a day in the weeks after the verdict was read and he received the death penalty, but she didn’t have her number, and was too chicken to call her mom, Viv, at her Miami office to get it. Now that she knew he was behind bars, with no possibility of parole, Betsy was desperate to tell someone what had happened, and thoughts of Caroline kept surfacing. Eventually, she got a recommendation for a therapist from Shana at work and called her instead. It worked for a while. Then she found herself confiding in Ian.
“I knew he looked familiar,” said Betsy, wondering how long she’d been talking, how long Ian had been sitting on the chair opposite her, leafing through a year-old issue of The Atlantic, listening. “Once I saw his face in the papers, it haunted me for weeks. I said to myself, ‘He looks so familiar.’ It was eerie as hell.”
She heard herself talking, how much she sounded like a stoner, and she hated herself for it, but she couldn’t stop. She told him about the dreams, the persistent visions she had of the night Ginny was killed. Warmth radiated from the base of her skull, forward to her hairline, and down her spine. The new mystery pill she swallowed was doing its job.
“I knew I had seen him before, but where? I couldn’t figure it out. Then one night, I don’t know when, maybe in June, while I was hauling bags of groceries back from Gristedes, I figured it out. It was one of those quiet, warm nights with no sirens wailing, and I felt calm and still even with two heavy bags in my hands. Even that sweet, rotten smell that comes up through the subway grates, you know what I mean when I say sweet? It didn’t bother me.”
“It’s rat poison,” said Ian, nodding intently. “That’s what my grandma says.”
“Oh God, really? That’s depressing. Well, even that sweet, rotten smell didn’t bother me that night. It was like my brain was turned on to some different frequency, or something.”
Betsy had pieced together a profile of her friend’s murderer from newspaper clippings and interviews with McRae, which had been published after his conviction the previous year. From what she had read, McRae dropped out of high school and spent his late teens and early twenties in a constellation of prisons across the South, robbing stores and stealing cars. He had been abused as a boy by his father and his grandfather, both mechanics with anger issues, and had his wrists taped to his brothers’ and been shoved to the floor more than once, just for sitting on the furniture in muddy jeans. Then, he was the one who started taping wrists, and found the power too delicious to resist.
She knew she’d seen his face before, but she couldn’t place him for months.
“So one night I was walking home from the grocery store after work, like I said, and I got about twenty feet away from our building and I just stopped. I dropped the bags on the sidewalk and I thought, ‘Taco Bell.’”
McRae was the loser on the bike at the Taco Bell, the one she saluted, the words echoed in her head. McRae handed Ginny the marker at Walmart.
“Aw, man, I could use some Taco Bell right now! Stat!”