One night, Sherri was feeling sorry for herself because she had nothing to do after Carmen, the girl who’d gotten into trouble with Gloria when Sherri had interviewed, canceled plans. Carmen was gregarious and fun—and a total mess. Nobody wanted to be her roommate, so she’d somehow managed to have her dorm room to herself. It was cluttered with mounds of clothes, half-empty cans of soda, and dirty ashtrays. She was the girl who always seemed to have a piece of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of her shoe, or a glob of ketchup on her shirt. She’d been at the resort for over a year and kept getting demoted, which meant she hung around with the new recruits while most of the other Bunnies stuck with the girls from their training groups. “I can’t help but get into trouble,” Carmen told Sherri. “I’m an All World Division One talker.”

Carmen explained that she’d started working a second job at the Sugar Shack one night a week. The club was on a rural road on the outskirts of Lake Geneva, and became briefly famous for adding male strippers to the lineup even before Chippendales dancers were a thing.

“You’re going to be a stripper?” Sherri asked, awed not just that Carmen could do that job, but that she knew a real-life stripper. She couldn’t stand to be seen naked in the shared shower in gym class, much less in front of leering men who threw singles on the stage. Carmen wasn’t the prettiest Bunny by a stretch. If anything, she was “normal.” Sherri was just beginning to see that the line that separated “those girls” from “us girls” was thin and permeable.

“It’s for my brother,” Carmen said. “The stupid little fucker goofed around with some friends and put gasoline into the carburetor of his Mustang, and it exploded. His face looks like a pan of lasagna. Now he needs skin grafts, and my mom, she works at a diner. She can’t even afford the ointment he needs. It’s three hundred dollars a jar because it’s made with real silver.”

“What about your dad? Can he help?”

“He died in Korea. I’ll happily jiggle my tits in a stranger’s face if that’s what it takes to make Mark beautiful again. He’s my brother bear.”