It was probably just as well that she’d had the intensely relaxing weekend and that the mellow hung on. If it hadn’t, what happened the next day would probably have sent her winging eastward inMagic Carpet, carrying the largest assault weapon available on a street corner or in a pawn shop in south central LA.

It started with a note that morning from her academic counselor that she found in her mailbox, reading "Drop by and see me some time."

She didn’t think much of it at first, but happened to be near the office later that day. "I had a call from your parents," the woman said. "They’re worried about you, and some of the things they understand you’ve been doing."

Jennlynn’s fur immediately went to full bristle. "It’s none of their damn business," she said. "I’m over twenty-one. They wanted me out of their lives, and I for damn sure don’t want them in mine."

"Would you like to talk about it?" the woman said gently.

"Not really," Jennlynn told her. "I’ve already talked it out more than I want to with people who understand what I’ve had to go through better than you can."

"Jennlynn," the woman said. "I realize there have been some problems, but I get the impression that they’re looking for a reconciliation."

"After what they made me do, I’m not," Jennlynn said acidly. "If they call you again, I don’t want to hear about it. Is that all?"

"That’s all I really had, except to note that I see you had straight A’s on your mid terms. Good work, Jennlynn."

"Thanks," she replied, a little deflated. "Look, I’m sorry I got pissed just now, but after the fucking over I got from them, there’s no healing."

"I’m sorry, Jennlynn, but I understand. You’re not the first student I’ve had who’s had a falling out with their parents."

"I really doubt if you can understand how bad this is," Jennlynn said. "Look, I’ll drop by when I’m in a better mood."

"That’ll be fine," the woman replied. "I won’t bring this up again."

Jennlynn’s semblance of a good temper held long enough to get out the door of the office, but as soon as she was outside it returned in full force. She again considered assault weapons for a moment, but realized almost instantaneously that there would be a very limited amount of hot sex with men available in Florence Crane Women’s Correctional Facility, the Michigan prison not far from Bradford. There’d be even less flying time.

With smoke still just about coming out of her ears, she stormed across campus to her dorm room, pulled out one of the Mustang Ranch souvenir post cards she’d bought months before, one of the front of the building with the sign and the gate. "You lost any chance of reconciliation you might have had when you left me no choice but to push the button on that gate," she wrote on it acidly. "Now live with it, like I have to."

Even dropping the post card in the mail didn’t do much to cool her off. Up until this point, she’d managed to control the hurt and the hate that came from going home the last time, but it had lain there smoldering all this time. Now, it burst into flame. She needed to slap them, hurt them, and let them know they’d been hurt, not just work it out symbolically. There was one obvious answer she’d considered months before, back when she’d been at the Mustang and had been trying to come to grips with what happened, but she’d realized at the time that the time wasn’t right. Now, it was.

Willing herself to be calm, she checked a small notebook in her purse for a phone number she’d gotten last spring. With an evil grin, she mentally rehearsed the points she wanted to make, then picked up the phone.

Back in the spring, when she’d been thrown out of the house, she’d turned to her high school classmate Emily Jones to beg a ride to the airport. She’d known from the summer before that Emily had been married right out of high school to a somewhat-older Kevin Holst; she’d had one infant in arms and another clearly on the way when Jennlynn had begged the ride nearly six months before.

Emily picked up the phone on the second ring. "Hi, Emily, this is Jennlynn," she said cheerfully. "What’s happening in Bradford these days?"

"Jennlynn!" Emily’s voice came over the phone. "This is a surprise! What are you doing?"

"Oh, I’m still at Caltech," she replied casually. "I was just sitting here thinking about home a little and thought I might give you a call. I figured you’d know what everyone was doing."

"I try to keep up," Emily admitted.

Bradford is a small town, less than 3,000 people. Most everyone knows everyone else; Pastor Swift was prominent in the community, of course, and as the valedictorian two and a half years before, Jennlynn had a degree of prominence of her own. Probably every high school class in the country has their class gossip who keeps up on what their classmates have been doing, but in a small town like Bradford the knowledge is more detailed and gets around better. Just remembering the talk in the car last May – Jennlynn hadn’t said much about what had happened with her folks – Emily was that class gossip. This proved it. But there was no point in letting the cat out of the bag too quickly. Have fun with it, Jennlynn thought. "Did you have that baby yet?"

"Oh, yeah, back in August," Emily said. "We named him Jason. He’s a cute little guy, started sleeping all night right away. So what have you been up to?"

"Oh, just taking classes since I got done with my summer job," Jennlynn admitted. "I’m still a junior, so it’ll be a while before I graduate."

"You were doing some kind of engineering, weren’t you?" Emily asked.

"Yeah, electrical engineering," she replied. "Pulling straight A’s, too. So what do you hear from anyone?"

"Oh, lots. You remember Dayna Berkshire, don’t you? How she used to go into the mall with her guitar, sit down in front of the fountain and play for the money that people would throw in her gig bag?"

"Oh, yeah," Jennlynn smiled. "She was pretty good. I caught her several times."

"Well, she was going to Central, but she dropped out and took off with this girl, Sandy, from up in Warren. That’s basically what they’re doing, just playing in malls and renaissance faires and like that for the money people throw to them. Kevin and I went up to the Silver Leaf Renfaire in Kalamazoo last summer, and we saw them there. They both had on real tight corsets, and the only thing that kept their boobs from popping out was sheer luck. I guess they do bar gigs now and then. They’re supposed to be making out pretty good, but Sandy’s folks are pisssssed."

"That’s got to be a happy-go-lucky, carefree life," Jennlynn grinned, reflecting that a corset like that would look really cool in a lineup; she’d have to remember that. "I got a bit of that last summer. There’s nothing like getting paid for something you enjoy doing, rather than having to keep your nose to the old grindstone for minimum wage."

"Yeah, that’s for sure," Emily sighed. "God, I’ve been working down at the Spee-D-Mart for not a lot over minimum. That stuff sucks pretty quick."

If you hadn’t been so goddamn anxious to get married and start hatching kids, you could have a hell of a lot better job, Jennlynn thought. But no, you got fuck struck. Tough luck, Emily. "Yeah, I was making a lot over minimum," she admitted, resolving to deal the truth out a little at a time, and that was enough for now. "So, what do you hear about Scott Tyler?" she said, pulling a name out of midair in order to change the subject.

"He’s still going to State," Emily reported of the class dreamboat. "Oh, God, that’s a story. Shelly Waltz, she goes up there; she said he’s engaged to this girl from Detroit; she’s just as black as the ace of spades. His parents are supposed to be pretty pissed, too, but they can’t say anything without looking racist as shit. Shelly says she’s really a nice girl, though. Are you seeing anybody?"

"Nothing serious," Jennlynn admitted. "There really isn’t time to do much here but study. I had some fine times last summer, and some neat dates this weekend, but that’s the first time since school started."

"I was talking to Vicky Varney a while back, she’s going to Central. She says it’s really dull, she can’t even buy a date, and everybody she meets is a jerk."

"Picky, picky," Jennlynn said. "You have to take what’s available. Sometimes the weirdest guy who picks you out proves to be pretty neat." Oh, let out a little more string, she thought. "Let me tell you, we had some weird ones coming in, too, especially up at the Mustang."

"Mustang?" Emily said with a frown that Jennlynn could hear over the phone.

Just then there were some strange sounds over the phone. Emily quickly said, "Hang on, the baby is fussing about something, I’ll be right back." After a minute or so, "Hey, I’m back. He had his foot caught under him. You were saying something about a Mustang?"

"The Mustang Ranch, up near Reno," Jennlynn confirmed, wondering if Emily had ever heard of the place, or could connect it. Might as well give her a couple loose facts to put together later. "I only worked one shift there, that was three weeks, and then I moved to another place down south. Didn’t do quite as well there, but the people were cooler. But I did pretty good. I’m not complaining."

"Is this like a dude ranch, or something?" Emily asked with intense curiosity.

Jennlynn heard more of, what she now identified as baby noises, in the background. "Well, sorta. I took people for rides," Jennlynn giggled and changed the subject on Emily again. "How about John Engler?"

"He and Mandy Paxton have been engaged and broke up with each other three times now," Emily said, and changed the subject right back. "Hey, Jennlynn, when I took you out to the airport that day last spring, you seemed pretty down. Is everything all right with you and your folks?"

"About as well as can be expected, under the circumstances," she replied, trying to put as positive a sound into it as she could. "I did what they expected me to do. I didn’t want to do it, but after they pushed me into it, it worked out all right. I made almost forty grand over the summer, so I guess I really don’t have much room to complain."

"Forty grand? Jennlynn, what were you doing?"

Just to be perverse, she ignored the question and changed the subject back. "You’d think Mandy would get the message and tell him where to get off, instead of putting up with him hanging around girls who can’t keep their pants on." And I’d think you’d get the message with the line I just laid on you, she thought, but you’ll put it together sooner or later.

"I don’t know how she puts up with it," Emily temporized, the confusion clear in her voice.

One more hint, Jennlynn thought, and that’s all the help I’m going to give her. "I don’t either," she sighed. "But he’s the kind of guy who makes hookers rich. Speaking of Mandy, the last I heard was that she was going to Western. That’s still on?"

"No, she transferred," Emily said distantly. Jennlynn could hear the gears grinding in her head. "Her folks dropped in on her a lot, so she said the hell with that and transferred up to Northern, where it was a long drive."

That would be a tickle for another hint, Jennlynn thought, but she’s had enough for now. "Boy, I hope she likes it up there," she said. "I talked to a girl once who went up there for a year. She says that when the snow gets deep there’s nothing to do but drink and screw. That’s one thing I like about Caltech, they never heard the word snow."

"It sure must be a lot different out there in California."

"It sure is, Emily. You can’t imagine how different it is from Bradford. It was the right move for me. I could never have had a life I enjoy so much back there."

They went on talking for several minutes about kids they’d known in school. Several times Emily tried to draw Jennlynn back to the subject that she’d been hinting about, but each time Jennlynn deflected the prying and changed the subject. She knows there’s something there I’m not saying, but I’m not going to come out with it. Let her put the pieces together; the gossip will be better that way.

After maybe ten more minutes, Jennlynn thought she’d strung it out long enough. "Hey, Emily, good talking to you," she said. "I’ve got to get back to studying, but it’s kind of fun to hear what’s going on back home, and feel free to say hi for me to any of the kids I knew in school. I probably won’t be back till our tenth reunion, if then." Oh, hell, one final hint. "But if John Engler gets out this way," she said in a sultry voice, "Tell him to come up and see me some time." As Jennlynn heard a sharp gasp come over the phone, she realized that Emily had finally gotten the message. Well, damn, it took her long enough; I was going to have to hit her over the head with a brick if I had to go any further. "See you sometime."

"Bu . . . bu . . . bu . . . Jennlynn," Emily stammered.

"You take care, and be nice to that baby," she grinned, and hung up the phone.

As she was hanging the phone up Jennlynn mused that she remembered Emily as being sharper than she’d come across today, Maybe the baby was distracting her, she thought.

Though she had no desire to go back to Bradford, ever, not even for her tenth class reunion (unless she went in work clothes), and she didn’t care a thing for her reputation in her old home town, Jennlynn would have given a great deal right then to be a bug on the wall of, say, the Chicago Inn out by the overpass at the edge of town tomorrow morning. The phone lines are going to be hot in Bradford today, she thought, and by tomorrow morning it’ll be the talk of the breakfast tables in every restaurant in town. It would be all over town before her folks heard anything about it. She leaned back, smiled, and wondered who would have the guts to tell them. Oh, to be a bug on the wall when that happened . . . the message would get garbled, of course, and would just get worse, not better. Maybe, just to drive it home, I could send Emily one of the Mustang Ranch postcards, she thought. Maybe the one with the view of the whole building, I could draw an arrow to a window and write on it, "This was my room."

But no, she grinned evilly to herself, I never clearly admitted the truth. It’ll be better that way.

* * *

The day before Thanksgiving, Jennlynn was in a much better mood than she’d been in the last time she headed for Bettye’s, if for no more reason than she hadn’t let it go so long. The weather was brilliant, and once she threaded Magic Carpet out of the crowded parts of southern California and headed out over the desert, she felt very relaxed. It was a little different route than she’d done before, a little longer and required getting a little higher than she’d done in the past; the cooler weather of fall made it a little easier.

By now she had built up a fair amount of cross-country time, and it didn’t seem like quite the adventure that her first short cross-country out to Riverside had been a year before. She’d flown the big trip to Michigan and back, unhappy though the second half of it had been, but that trip had taught her something, too: Magic Carpet’s seat was a good place to think. Granted, she was flying at over a hundred miles an hour, which in a car on the ground would be really moving out, but even at a low altitude it seemed slow. Flying cross-country during the day, mostly following roads and radio signals didn’t take much of her attention. There were no phones or people knocking on the door or whatever to interrupt her. She was able to pay attention on the rather limited amount that the plane demanded, but there was plenty of time to sit back, stare at the scenery – and it was pretty good – and just reflect on things. Life seemed simpler and more orderly from the pilot’s seat ofMagic Carpet as it crawled across the ever-changing countryside.

She had much to think about, and the reason for this trip was one of those things. Back in May, when she’d first flown into the Mustang, it had seemed like she was grasping at straws, and the easiest and best one that would build a wall against her parents, spite them in the only way she could. But it had worked out for the best, and she enjoyed it, enjoyed it to the point where she’d really thought about giving up school. Still, she had to keep it quiet – Roseanna was the only person at Caltech who knew about it – mostly because there was a hell of a stigma involved. Once you were a prostitute, you were branded for life, and she’d realized it well before Eileen told her that up at the Mustang. Maybe she ought to pull out of it now, just go back to a little casual sleeping around on campus – but that would start the whole cycle again with guys sniffing around and interrupting her, while at least at Bettye’s she was away from all that.

And, even though she’d done well last summer, it still wasn’t enough to get her through the rest of this year’s school, which included the more-expensive advanced flight courses, and still live halfway comfortably. Even a few weekends over the next year would take care of that and leave her some reserve funds; if she spent the next summer up at Bettye’s, she ought to have a fair chunk of change in the bank when she entered the job market. That was starting to be a concern, too; it really would be better if she could get a decent internship someplace, rather than just spend the summer at Bettye’s. It’d have to pay at least something; she really couldn’t afford working for free. But if she could keep some income going – it wasn’t a simple thing to think through, and wasn’t a decision that had to be made now, but it was something to be thinking about. The circles went round and round in her head, but the decision was pretty clear by the time the familiar little dirt landing strip came into sight: she’d work on developing her real career, but until something happened she’d keep a finger on her current one, rather than turn her back on it.

It was good to taxi up to the tie downs out in front of the main house, get out of Magic Carpet, and just smell the clear, unpolluted, sweet Nevada air under the big blue dome of sky overhead. It was just about as completely different a world as possible from Los Angeles, made even more sweet by the fact that, since May, she was coming to what was just about the only home she had.

The place was relatively empty; only Shirley, Claudia, and Tina were around from the women who had been there over the summer, and Megan, a girl who had been there the month before, was the only other one there. Even Cindy had gone home for the holiday, along with a couple other girls. "At that, we’re probably overstaffed," Shirley shook her head. "At least for tomorrow, though it usually perks up for the weekend."

It felt good to be home again, as much home as she had, and Claudia cooked a light Cajun dinner to welcome her, but there was a bit of moroseness that hung over all the girls, including Shirley. "I don’t care how much of a professional you are, or how long you’ve been doing this," Claudia said. "A whorehouse is a hell of a place to spend Thanksgiving. Except for you, Shirley, the rest of us don’t have any family to spend the holiday with, but at least we can spend it with friends."

"True," Shirley sighed. "I’d have liked to have gone over to the ranch at least for dinner tomorrow, but the county is watching us too close right now. The bishop of the Mormon Church pitched another bitch."

"What’s the problem?" Jennlynn asked.

"There’s a county ordinance that the house manager has to be on the premises overnight," Shirley explained. "In the past, when Bettye could fill in, I could get away overnight, and before the bishop started splitting hairs I could sneak off, but I just don’t dare to right now."

"You could start first thing and drive over for the day," Tina suggested.

"Sounds good, but it’s a good five-hour drive over there," Shirley said glumly. "The roads don’t run right, and the last forty miles are over two ruts that are rough as a cob. I’d just about get there, have to gobble dinner, and head right back."

"Shirley," Jennlynn piped up. "You showed me on the map one time where the ranch is. It’s only a couple hundred miles, not more than two hours or so in my plane. Is there any place right near the ranch where I could land Magic Carpet?"

"There’s no airstrip closer than Ely," Shirley shook her head.

"I don’t need an airstrip, I just need a flat quarter mile or so that’s not a whole lot rougher than the strip here, and where there’s nothing to hit, like a phone pole or something."

"Yeah," Shirley said, brightening. "You could just about land on the road out front, or in the front yard, even."

"Good," Jennlynn smiled. "Go call your kids and tell them you’ll be there. We’ll leave at first light, and we can be back by dark."

"Jennlynn," Shirley shook her head. "I can’t ask you to do that."

"Why not?" Jennlynn retorted. "Shirley, how many favors have you done for me in the six months I’ve known you?"

"Let her do it for you," Claudia chimed in. "Jennlynn, I’ll even pick up the cost of the gas."

"I don’t know," Shirley said. "For everything else I’ve done, I’ve never been in an airplane."

"It was a lot more scary for me when you let me ride Patches the first time," Jennlynn snorted. "It’s really pretty smooth and calm, less motion than riding a car down a highway."

"I don’t know," Shirley protested. "I think I’d be scared."

"Shirley, it scared the hell out of me the first time I stood in a lineup," Jennlynn laughed. "Wasn’t it a little scary for you? At fourteen, for God’s sakes? I’m still a little scared to stand a lineup; you don’t know what’s going to happen. But how the hell many have you stood over the years? It’s got to be in the thousands."

"Easily," Shirley nodded. "All right, you win. I really hate to miss at least seeing the kids, and the whole family is going to be there."

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.