Road to Paradise. Paullina Simons

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      “What about him?”

      I watched her apply another coat of black mascara. “Must be some fun you’re thinking of having with four coats of Great Lash. Didn’t you just say you’re going to California to marry your boyfriend?”

      “Fiancé. He asked me to marry him before he left.” She waved the mascara wand, licked her lips. “I love Eddie. He’s the only one I want. But he’s been up to no good.”

      “How do you know?” And is that how it worked?

      “Oh, he confessed. He didn’t like having the burden of his wrongdoing on his conscience. To make himself feel better, he told me.”

      My throat went kind of numb. I said, “Told you …”

      “His little thing with Teresa. You know Teresa, the county slut? God. He justified it, as he justifies everything, by saying it was my fault. After all, he said, I had a boyfriend I refused to break up with when we first got together.”

      “Huh,” I said carefully, throat less numb. She did actually have a boyfriend she refused to break up with when she and Eddie first got together. He was the tallest jock in school. Eddie was short.

      “I know. But I was in love with Eddie, and he knew it. Still am. I just didn’t know how to break it off with John.”

      “So how’d you break it off?”

      “Don’t you know anything? Agnes isn’t doing her job. I didn’t. He broke up with me. So then Eddie and I were supposed to be exclusive, but now he’s gone back to Bakersfield and I know there’s a girl there he used to, like, date.”

      “How do you know?”

      “He told me. He doesn’t like to keep that stuff to himself.”

      “Really?” I wasn’t looking at her, and she wasn’t looking at me.

      “They’re sitting by streams, on rocks, picking flowers, reciting poetry or some shit. When we talk he tells me they’re hypothetically talking of what it might be like to be married. After all, that’s what they talked about when they were twelve.”

      I didn’t know what to say. “Does he know you’re coming?”

      She nodded. “I called him before I left, told him I’m on my way. He said, please come as soon as you can. Please. Save me from myself. I think I may accidentally end up marrying her.”

      I blinked.

      “I don’t want to talk about it any more with you,” Gina said. “All I’m saying is, he hasn’t been good. And he doesn’t have to know about tonight. Come on, let’s go. Let’s get us some real rowdy.” She smiled. “How do I look?”

      “Great,” I said. “But the dogs are outside. They’ll start barking. They’ll hear my car.”

      “The dogs are already barking.” Gina winked. She messed up the bed and put towels and pillows under the sheets to make it appear as if two sleeping forms were underneath. “I’m sure my aunt’s out by now. It’s eleven; way past her bedtime. Don’t worry. They’re both none too swift. Ready?”

      Dolled up, done up, I hitched my mini-skirt, adjusted my tube top, made sure money and ID were in my pocket, and crawled out the window into the side yard littered with broken lumber. We tip-toed our way to the car; of course the tiny dogs, mistaking themselves for German Shepherds, snarled like we were about to rob the house.

      I put the car into neutral and released the handbrake. In her heels, Gina helped me back it out the drive, I started it on the road, and we drove off, giggling like kids. “Why are you wearing underwear?” she said in the car on the way to South Bend. “I’m not.”

      “I know.”

      “Come on. Trust me, you feel completely different without underwear. Like anything’s possible.”

      “Oh, I’m sure,” I said. “But my skirt’s too short. I’ll get arrested for indecent exposure.”

      Gina said her mission was to make out with a cute college guy. She’d never had a college guy. She wanted to test if that thing they said about men and women was true.

      “What thing is that?”

      “That when a woman wakes up she can say to herself, today I will get laid. And have it be true. But when a man wakes up, he can say, I may never get laid again. And have that also be true.”

      I laughed. I hoped it was true. We were wearing shiny lipstick, and had on lots of drugstore perfume, Coty and Jean Naté. Gina’s jeans were tighter than my skirt, but that was only because I was thinner. Too much running, though not since being on the road. Felt weird not running every day.

      In South Bend, we cruised the noisy strip of bars, looking for a boisterous place where the patrons were neatly dressed and young. Gina didn’t want to go to Vickie’s (“Only girls there”) or McCormick’s or Corby’s (“The Irish get too drunk and pass out”). We debated between Linebacker Lounge and Library Irish Pub. She wanted the former, I the latter.

      “Are you joking?” she said. “Library Pub? You want them to talk to you about Hardy and Yeats? Or do you want them to look like linebackers? That’s really the question here.”

      “I want them to be able to speak.”

      “That’s the only thing they’ll be able to do at Library Pub,” Gina returned.

      “I would like,” I said, “a better class of boy.”

      We had to play rock, paper, scissors to decide. We played best of three. I won. “If only all decisions were that easy,” said Gina, as we pulled into the Library parking lot.

      “What do you mean? That’s how we used to decide everything.”

      “Everything, Sloane?”

      Two preppy, clean-cut guys walking inside saw us getting out of our car and whistled. “Nice ’Stang, girls!” And I, Shelby, smiled, because it was my Shelby. I may have kept my underwear on, but I had a nice ’Stang.

      “That was so easy,” Gina whispered to me, as they were walking up to us. “Maybe you were right about this place.”

      “Yeah, the car’s a stud magnet,” I whispered back. “Even with bookworms.”

      The car, the mini-skirt, Gina’s moniker and panty-free manner combined with two or seven Sloe Gin fizzes was enough to hook us up with two sophomores from Indiana State, English majors and on the lacrosse team. The music was too loud, we couldn’t talk. We just sipped our drinks, smiled, and stood close. They kept leaning toward us to hear the words we weren’t saying, like, “You come here often?” and “Yes, I’ll have another drink. And another.” I laughed too much and too loud, which is what I do when I get a little tipsy, and thought everything they said and didn’t say was so funny. And every time my boy spoke, I touched his arm. Alive and Kicking were holding on a little bit tighter, baby, and Blondie was dancing very close cuz it was rapture time.

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