“You’ll love it,” Muriel had promised Elissa, presenting her cousin Betty’s offer last week. Elissa had lived her whole life in Pine Rapids in the house her parents had built on Rapids Avenue, and was lately considering redecorating her room. She was a senior in high school, and she’d just turned eighteen, yet her white wrought-iron bed still had a pink ruffled spread on it, and the white vanity where she was sitting had a pink-cushioned stool. Then there was the white-painted chest of drawers, the deeply piled white rug with only inches of hardwood floor peeking out around its edges. The curtains were sheer white, with pink roses on them. Elissa’s doll collection was prominent on shelves above the dresser and nightstand. Elissa supposed that Betty Grable’s room was much more elegant, yet a part of her didn’t want to change a thing. She loved the feel of the cushy rug under her toes when she got up in the morning; still said good night to her dolls sometimes.

“Betty says there’s no shortage of partners,” Muriel had continued. “Every girl gets to dance as much as she likes. And they’re sweet, too, she says. The Second Infantry Division! From the South, all of them! With those accents! Can you just imagine?” At this she had flopped back on Elissa’s bed, disturbing Elissa’s snoozing cat, Homer.

“Well, Muriel, I’d like to go,” Elissa said, studying herself in the vanity mirror: Was that a blemish coming on? “But I doubt my dad would let me.”

Muriel rolled onto her side and, resting her chin in her hand, lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “Oh, your father! When’s he going to realize he can’t keep you buried in this town forever?” Homer jumped down from the bed, padded across the room, pawed open the door, and made his exit, tail swishing.

It wasn’t exactly fair of Muriel to say that, Elissa thought, but it was true that her parents had never taken her traveling, had never even taken her to see Chicago or Minneapolis. In fact, they never had gone anywhere at all, except to the family summer home on Lake Michigan. But that was on account of her father, Jack, having seen enough of the world to suit him when he was in the Great War. (That was just how he said it, too, if she ever asked: “I’ve seen enough of the world to suit me, Liss.” And that was the end of that.) Now that her brother JJ was with the Marines over on Guadalcanal, she supposed she could understand her parents wanting to keep her under their thumbs, with him so far away. But she did awfully like to dance, and the idea of one-after-another dancing with soldiers was especially appealing.