“We’ll just tell him we’re going shopping, and staying overnight with my cousin Betty,” Muriel had said, sitting up, brushing her skirt flat down over her knees. “And we will stay with Betty, and we will go shopping.” She grinned. “For a dress to wear to the Babylon.”

And now she was seeing the world! Seeing it suddenly, brightly, and with a certain brash confidence. Didn’t the soldiers have that way of looking at her? That way that Pine Rapids boys, having known her since kindergarten or before, never looked at her?

Even downtown, this afternoon, after shopping at Doerflinger’s (so many lovely dresses—almost overwhelming, for a girl used to Birnbaum’s, downtown Pine Rapids), when they’d stopped in at a soda fountain for a malt: Three soldiers had immediately joined them, gawky, loose-limbed, laughing over the way they’d invited themselves. One—a blond roughly hewn man with an exotically droll accent (Texan, she had learned)—had taken a particular interest in Elissa and insisted on paying for her malt, fanning his wallet open so she could see the profusion of bills inside, even when she’d tried to refuse him.

“When can we see you again?” he, or one of the others, had called as the girls left, shoving arms into coats, Betty having exclaimed that they were, or would soon be, “Late! For our bus!” Betty calling back over her shoulder, “The Babylon, tonight!” All three girls giggling, running to catch their bus: such a heady excitement in the air, here in La Crosse!

So far this evening there had been no sign of those particular soldiers—but how could you find them, in such a crowd? And who cared, really, when there were so many, dressed just alike, almost all of them handsome, almost all of them looking at her that way?

“As though they know a little secret about me, or would like to, at least,” she explained to Muriel and Betty, upstairs in the ladies’ room, as they fanned themselves, refreshed their lipstick, their powder. “Don’t you think?”

“Well, you’re a doll, Liss!” Betty said easily. “Just look at you!”

Elissa rolled her eyes at Betty in the mirror, leaning close to apply her Crimson Blush lipstick, purchased this afternoon to match her dress, which was white with a gored skirt that flared out from her waist and ended just below her knees, with a red X of trim beginning around the neck, framing her breasts, and wrapping around to the small of her back, where it came together in a V. She would have loved to have bought a pair of red shoes to match, but she’d had to settle for wearing her familiar old black pumps, what with shoe rationing. “Some doll,” she said, smoothing the golden blond curls that angled down to the sides of her neck, repinning her wavy bangs. “This hair.” It had such a tendency to frizz.