One night Monica found herself watching Sheila intently, by way of a fly-specked mirror behind the bar of the Swedesboro Inn, thinking, What is she doing? and why? Sheila was dancing with a trucker named Mick, or Mike, a former state trooper (why former, no one knew), her left arm slung across his shoulder and her right arm crooked tight at the elbow, the man’s arm—beefy, thick, covered in dark hairs—pressed hard against the small of her back. The music was drawling, throbbing, standard country-and-western from the jukebox; the air was stale with smoke; the dancers were both slightly high, their cheeks touching, their bellies, their thighs. Their feet scarcely moved. Watching them, idly, yet intently, her eyes burning from the smoke in the air, Monica told herself that she wasn’t embarrassed for her friend, or annoyed: Sheila was only joking, pretending, behaving like a teenaged girl with her first boy friend . . . or like a teenaged slut. Monica saw the man sway suddenly, as if he were about to fall; she saw Sheila grip him hard to hold him upright; she heard Sheila’s strident laughter. The man then kissed her, or made an attempt, half-clowning, yet surely seriously, and Sheila eluded him; she simply pushed him away. It was all good fun. It was all fun. Wasn’t Sherrill Ann after all wearing a “suede” cowboy hat that evening, slanted rakishly across her forehead, and very tight boy’s jeans—which she claimed to have found somewhere at Edgemont, left behind by a forgotten guest?

She returned to Monica, she interrupted the man who had been talking to Monica (about the insult of his salary check being garnished, for alimony payments, by order of the Swedesboro County Court), she said laughing: “Okay, Mary Beth, knock it off—you two lovin’ it up here—our babysitter’s going to give us hell if we don’t get our asses out of here now.”

Sometimes on their way home Sheila talked Monica into stopping impulsively for a pizza (a “freak pizza” with all the works), sometimes for a stack of pecan waffles topped with whipped cream, or the Strawberry-and-Almond Baghdad Surprise, at the International House of Pancakes—though Monica could do no more than take a few bites, and Sheila rarely got through half of what she ordered. It was the idea, after all. It was the atmosphere of the pizzeria, and the pancake house.

All innocent, Monica thought. And fun.

If a little crude.