The brutal January weather extended into the first couple of weeks of February. The resort’s slopes were covered in ice. Not even the die-hard skiers were up for a visit or a swim in the heated outdoor pool by the ski chalet. During the week the resort was lucky to fill twenty rooms. The Bunnies’ shifts were cut back, and they were happy for any work that came their way, even if it meant spending hours rolling silverware into napkins. It was so cold that it felt even time had frozen still. Sherri rotated through endless shifts in the game room, playing cards with one or two little kids, the boys trying to sneak peeks at her cleavage. “Want to play a game called taxi?” she said to one particularly naughty boy, remembering when Lynn Jenkins had done the same thing to her in seventh grade. When the boy said yes, she held the deck of cards in her hands and said, “OK, you’re the taxi driver.” She flipped the cards onto the floor. “Those are your customers, now pick them up.”

Working at the Playboy table as a greeter the way Tina had wasn’t much better, not when her skin broke out into goose bumps whenever someone opened the wide front door. One Saturday, Gloria invited her and a few of the other Bunnies to work their first off-site event at a car show in Janesville, where she stood in front of a Buick Skyhawk like a game show hostess with her feet in a T, her arm outstretched, a smile frozen on her face, and her back killing her. She thought she’d die from boredom, but at least she wasn’t stuck in the dorm.

Val was gone a lot, hanging out in Beloit with Curtis (Ginger called him the “the Pile Prince” and “the King of Shag”), but that all changed when he picked up a second job at the Frito-Lay plant in Beloit to make more money for the carpet store, which meant that he dominated less of Val’s free time. Nights he didn’t work, he’d drive the half hour from Beloit to Lake Geneva to hang out at the end of the bar in the club, where all the Bunny boyfriends gathered. He didn’t have a roving eye; he cared about Val and only Val, and he watched her while she worked, smelling of corn chips, his camo John Deere cap perched low on his forehead.