And then there was Val. She was from Beloit, a factory town on the Illinois border. Most of the girls had fathers who ran dairy farms, drove trucks, or worked as boilermakers, although Val bragged that her father worked at the Parker Pen factory, which didn’t seem like much to get excited over. Val said she’d taken the job to help her boyfriend Curtis buy his own carpet store. “It’ll be our store once we’re married. I’m investing in our future.” Val was gorgeous and cool, with feathered brown hair and cobalt blue eyes. She described herself as “Black Irish,” a term Sherri had never heard before. But she was rougher than sandpaper, and because her interest in the job was purely financial (or at least that’s what she said), she wasn’t nearly as impressed by the resort as the rest of the girls. To them, everything was So pretty! So exciting! So wonderful! So interesting!

“Open your mouths any wider and you’ll catch flies,” Val said. She scraped her nails with an emery board, a sound that made Sherri’s skin crawl. How on earth had Val convinced Gloria that she was wholesome? She made Roberta look like the Virgin Mary. She probably got the job because she knew their mentor, Bunny Starr, who was also from Beloit.

Sherri looked up to Starr. She was so poised and glamorous that she was in a category all her own. She called Hugh Hefner “Hef” as if he were an old friend, and said she hung out with Hef’s girlfriend, Barbi Benton. She impressed the trainees with stories of her stints at the Playboy Clubs in Chicago and Los Angeles, and at the resorts in London, Jamaica, and New Jersey. “You wouldn’t even believe those Bunnies. Most of them are centerfolds. I mean, I was a centerfold a few years ago, but these ladies are runway gorgeous. Anywhere else you go they’ll tell you you’re just cute for Wisconsin, so don’t get a big head just because you work here.”

Starr made everything she had to teach them—especially the rules—seem as important as collecting secrets for the CIA. “Pay attention,” she said. “Some of you won’t make it through training. They weed you out if you can’t keep up. It’s survival of the fittest around here. And even when you get the job, it’s hard. It really is. Look around. I’ll bet good money that in six months, only a few of you will still be here. Just yesterday we lost someone who’d only been here a month because she had a kidney infection.”

“How’d she get that?” Ginger asked.

“The stays in the uniform. They hit some girls in a bad spot. It just happens.”