In the mornings, Carmen, Ginger, and Boo would come into Sherri’s room—the door was always open and Val was often gone—and lie in Sherri’s bed with her to rehash the evening. Carmen always had good stories from Sugar Shack. She still only worked one shift a week, in the afternoon, and wasn’t making much in tips. “They call it the C-section shift,” she said. “I work with the moms.” They kept track of each other’s diets, traded clothes, painted each other’s nails and did each other’s makeup, and gossiped about the case of crabs that was spreading like brushfire. The critters hopped from uniform to uniform, and soon the Bunnies were all grimacing while carrying their trays because they wanted to scratch their crotches so badly. Ola and Biata had to take all the uniforms to be dry-cleaned, something the girls were supposed to do themselves but obviously hadn’t, and the older women were none too happy about it.

Sherri felt as though she had sisters. Nothing was private. Sherri regaled them with detailed accounts of her exploits with Mitch and Arthur, and they listened, wide-eyed and jealous, not nearly as experienced as Sherri had assumed her friends were—even Carmen.

“Which one would you pick if you had to choose?”

“Oh gosh, I don’t know,” Sherri said. Never mind Mitch hadn’t made a single attempt to reach Sherri. As much as she adored Arthur, Mitch still had some appeal because he was elusive.

“You should see your face when you talk about Arthur,” Boo said. “You’re going to marry him, aren’t you?”

“It could happen, I suppose, but not anytime soon.” Sherri was enjoying the feeling of having Arthur in her back pocket. She fantasized sometimes about becoming Sherri St. John, the mistress of his cabin, the mother of his children. If he was game for an entire summer in Europe, surely she’d be able to convince Arthur to live somewhere besides East Troy. But that fantasy competed with all the fantasies she’d indulged before she’d even met Arthur—of Mitch and celebrity crushes, and some of the men she waited on or met at the bars and parties. All the lives she could possibly lead dangled in her future, still deliciously unknown to her. What made her youthfulness so deliriously exciting was the cornucopia of possibilities that awaited her, although she was blissfully unaware that most would necessarily go unrealized.