LITMIR.BIZ

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Misty put her thumb over the lip of her Coke bottle and pretended to spray me. “I have a rumor to spread.”

      “Wow,” the rest of the group said in chorus. Misty was usually the last person to hear anything. Not that she was ditzy; she just didn’t pay much attention to gossip.

      “My mother was on the phone talking to Dean Patrick. She was whispering, but I got the drift of the conversation. Sandy Sorenson is getting married. Her daddy’s on the faculty, you know.” She paused for dramatic effect. “Sandy has to get married!”

      “Sandy Sorenson,” Mary Alice whispered. “Oh, my God, she is so beautiful.”

      Sandy was in her freshman year at the University of Texas, and rumor had it she’d taken the campus by storm.

      “Who’s the guy?” Not that I was prone to telling tales, but I figured we might as well get all the facts.

      “I don’t know. When Mom saw me she went into the laundry room and closed the door.” Misty frowned. “Isn’t it awful that Sandy has to get married?”

      Her comment sent me into my women’s lib mode. “Why would anyone ‘have’ to get married in this day and age? Please!” Talk about making me crazy. We weren’t living in the 1950s. I Love Lucy and its archaic view of sex was nothing more than a TV rerun.

      I was about to continue my rant when I noticed that Bunny was curiously silent. Usually she was the first to jump in on a good story.

      Mary Alice piped up instead. “A baby needs parents who are married.”

      Our sweet little friend was getting annoyed. Normally she was fairly open-minded, but on the topic of babies and pregnancy her church background came to the fore.

      “Billy Tom said he’s ready for tonight,” Bunny commented. That girl was the queen of the non sequitur, and this was a subject that definitely needed to be changed.

      So Sandy Sorenson took a backseat while we discussed our upcoming adventure. Although it took some world-class wheedling, we’d finally convinced our buddy Billy Tom to help us get drunk for the first time. As a group, we had a well-earned reputation for being “goody-two-shoes”—no booze and no pot. Since we were all heading to college, we decided to take a walk on the wild side…in a safe environment. And you couldn’t get much safer than being with Billy Tom. It wasn’t so much that he was benign; it was the fact that we had a ton of blackmail material on him.

      “He paid some guy five bucks to buy us three six-packs. That’s four apiece.” Bunny was our soiree coordinator. “I’m not sure any of us will be coherent after four beers.”

      Neither was I, but I was certainly no expert. Most of the kids went out to the river to drink and neck and God only knows what else. Daddy was well aware of the kegger parties and periodically sent a deputy to patrol the area. Needless to say, I had never attended one. If my daddy had caught me there, I would’ve been grounded until I qualified for social security, and that wasn’t in my game plan. I had people to see and places to go.

      “What did you tell Charlie we were doing tonight?” Mary Alice directed her question to Bunny. She was referring to Bunny’s boyfriend who was, unfortunately, the love of my life. But that was a secret I wasn’t about to share with anyone, not even my best friends, or to be more specific, especially not my best friends. Charlie, darn his hide, treated me like his buddy.

      Charlie Morrison and Bunny had been a couple for almost a year, and in my opinion it was an ill-fated liaison. The Bennetts despised him, more than likely because he wasn’t rich and his family wasn’t socially prominent.

      When Bunny and Charlie first started going out, her parents made the mistake of issuing an ultimatum, which was like waving a red flag at a bull. Tell the girl she couldn’t do something, and she went full steam ahead. So all year she used her friends as an excuse to get out of the house.

      I’d known Charlie’s parents almost my entire life and I thought they were fantastic. They owned a fishing camp/restaurant down the road from our house. Looking back, I suppose it was little more than a beer joint but Mrs. Morrison’s Friday Night hush puppies and fried catfish bash was famous throughout the county.

      I’ll never forget when I met the Morrison twins. It was my first day of school and Mama made a huge production about me riding the school bus. That was also the day Bubba Hawkins decided to make my life a living hell.

      To give it a nice spin, he was a big, fat bully, and like all tyrants he homed in on the vulnerable. What he hadn’t expected was Charlie Morrison. After Charlie and Colton, his fraternal twin, got through with Bubba he never bothered me again. That was the day I fell in love with Charlie.

      When we were in elementary school, the Morrison twins and I spent most of our summer days playing cops and robbers in the pecan orchard by the river. Colton was a great buddy, but even then I knew Charlie was special.

      It seemed like my entire life consisted of a collage of Charlie memories. He risked life and limb teaching me to water-ski—I wasn’t the most coordinated person in the world. And when I got my learner’s permit, he instructed me in the art of driving a stick shift. Again, a scary proposition.

      But it was in the pecan orchard on a sultry summer night after our freshman year that he truly stole my heart. That was my first kiss, and what a kiss it was. My life would never be the same. Too bad the feeling wasn’t reciprocated. Darn it, the idiot never kissed me again!

      “I told him I was busy. He got all snotty. He’ll just have to deal with it. It’s not like we’re joined at the hip,” Bunny groused.

      If Charlie wanted to stick to me like glue, I’d have been a happy, happy girl. But he was a passion I needed to ditch because obviously it didn’t have a chance in H-E- double toothpicks of going anywhere. We were another Romeo and Juliet, except Romeo wasn’t enamored of Juliet.

      So there I was, a seventeen-year-old virgin (in more ways than one) planning to sneak off to the drive-in with a bunch of girls to slurp suds. And we were going to pull off this great misadventure in Billy Tom’s ’57 Plymouth that didn’t even have a working radio.

      How pitiful was that?

      Chapter 2

      “Shake a leg, you guys!” Bunny commanded.

      We were doing our hair and makeup while she was issuing orders. That girl was Simon Legree in a Shirley Temple body.

      Misty’s head was on the ironing board while Mary Alice tried to press her friend’s long curly hair into submission.

      “I hate you, you know that.” Misty was referring to my Cher hair that was long, straight and very black.

      “Tough titty said the kitty, but the milk’s still good,” I retorted. “At least you have boobs.” A good offense makes the best defense.

      “Enough of that!” Bunny yelled. When had she started taking lessons from Mama? “We have to get going or we’ll miss Billy Tom.” She was on a roll. “We’ll take my car to the Pink Pig and he’ll pick us up there.”

      Bunny had a cool red VW convertible. We loved to cruise around town in that baby. I had a rusty Ford station wagon and Misty and Mary Alice were sans wheels.

      The Pink Pig was situated so you could drive in a circle around the building. Bunny made one perfunctory loop, but it was early so our audience was limited. Darn it! She parked under the awning next to one of the speakers and punched the call button. Did I mention we had the top down for maximum exposure?

      “Can I take your order?” A tinny voice came from the speaker.

      “Four burgers, four orders of fries, two Cokes, a Dr Pepper and a chocolate shake,” Bunny answered, pushing the off button. Then she made a face at me. “I think it’s disgusting that you can drink milk shakes and never gain an ounce.”

      “It’s one of the few advantages of being tall enough to play with the Boston Celtics,” I said. Much

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