Sherri swelled with pride for her friend, but she was also jealous. California had always been her dream—well, hers and Roberta’s. They planned to have picnics at the base of the letters on the big Hollywood sign and look for handprints on the Walk of Fame. She saw celebrities at the resort, but in Los Angeles they’d be in their natural habitat.

“Guess what?” Sherri said. “I put a deposit down on a car.”

“Yeah?” Carmen seemed impressed. “I want one, but once I pay my brother’s medical bills, I’m going to start saving for nursing school.”

“You want to be a nurse?” That was the last job Sherri would ever want after so many years of taking care of her mother, but she could picture Carmen holding someone’s hand at their bedside, distracting them from their pain and suffering, or maybe just driving them nuts.

“I watched them work with my brother and I thought to myself, you know what? I could do that, I could! And let’s be honest, I’m a terrible stripper, and I’m not much better as a Bunny. After watching Mark’s skin blister and melt, nothing could gross me out. The burn ward is the third ring of hell.”

“I can just see you in comfortable white nurse shoes,” Sherri said.

“Doesn’t that sound like heaven?”

“I’ve thought about going to college myself,” Sherri said. She’d never spoken these words aloud before, and to do so felt like a commitment.

“What do you want to study?”

“Oh geez, I have no idea! Remember Linda? The tall girl who goes to Madison? She told me there’s such a thing as an undecided major.” Linda had taught Sherri drinking games she’d learned at fraternity parties. She said she had classes in big lecture halls and went to football games and hung out in the bars on State Street. Another Bunny, Pamela, went to Wash U. in St. Louis. She majored in statistics. One day when it was slow, she taught Sherri how to figure out standard deviation by quizzing all the Bunnies about their cup sizes and creating a graph. “This is easy,” Sherri said. “Anything bigger or smaller than average becomes increasingly rarer.” When Sherri told her that she had an almost perfect score on the ACT, Pamela encouraged Sherri to apply. Going to school in-state was one thing, but college in another state at a school she’d never heard of before sounded impossible. Besides, Jerry still hadn’t found anyone to buy, rent, or lease her building on the square. She couldn’t make any major plans until that was taken care of. And now that she’d put a deposit on the car, any ideas about college had to be put on hold. She’d opted for wheels, her most immediate form of freedom.

“You must be excited. Did you get the Monte Carlo?”