Crazy Lexie, Spence called her, but not as a pejorative, or even literally. It was almost a compliment. He’d had non-Greek adventures with girls he’d called Crazy Janie, Crazy Amy, Crazy Lynn. He meant that she was wild, up for anything. Like Betsy had been. This I understood.

At Georgia State, Betsy was often out all night, meeting nocturnal people, talking for hours in bars like smoky holes, listening to start-up bands. She dabbled in drugs, even trying absinthe in a Waffle House parking lot at 4:00 a.m. The real thing, illegal and life-threatening, smuggled in from France. Or so the motorcycle boy who passed her the bottle said.

She’d come home smelling of mango hookah smoke and cumin, lips chapped from kissing, her eyes as puffy as they could get, given that she was nineteen. She’d stare at herself in the mirror, laughing, saying, “Hag,” before bouncing off to a new adventure. Like Lexie, she kept her wildest moments on the down-low, telling only me, as if freshman year were her personal Vegas. I think even then she knew she would go back to Marshall. She told me stories that he would not want to know. Stories she would not want anyone else to know.

Lexie was the same. She didn’t go to Greek parties. She barely drank. Quiet Lexie had to protect her scholarships. The one that bought her books was for winning a Christian essay contest. The one that covered the gap between the school’s financial aid and her housing costs was from a church organization. It came with a morals clause.

Her discretion meant Spence could slip off with her and do “loser shit” that would have hurt his status with his brothers had it been known. He and Lexie would smoke pot and go to the midnight showing of Rocky Horror, or eat shrooms and sit on her dorm roof blowing bubbles.

They test-drove harder drugs together, Ecstasy and acid and Special K. Spence had the funding and Lexie had the hookups. These were experiments, not habits, though. They also tried a few things, sexual in nature, that Spence had only seen on the small collection of VHS porn the brothers kept hidden in the basement.

In October he bought her a pricey silver slip dress and took her to a French bistro downtown that had live jazz and twenty-dollar entrées. It was a Pretty Woman move, and she loved it. The next weekend she instigated a threesome with her pot dealer, a lush brunette whom Spence called Crazy Bonnie.