There was no question that Magic Carpet was well named, for that day the little Cessna flew her into a different world. Coming back to Caltech was a huge cultural change after the summer she’d had, and not an entirely welcome one; she couldn’t get over the feeling that she’d have been happier if she’d just stayed at Bettye’s.

Now, the dream world of the last months was over with, and she was back to the realities of school. One of the guys at the airport was nice enough to drive her over to the storage shed where she’d stashed her full-of-stuff Chevy Monza before heading for Michigan four months before. She filled it even fuller with the stuff from the Cessna and headed for Pasadena.

Checking in took some time, including a stop at the bank to cash her check. As long as she was out and around, she stopped off at the bookstore and got her books for the semester. The Monza was riding low on the springs after that, and she was glad it wasn’t far over to her dorm room.

She’d known that Roseanna was going to be her roommate again this year, but it would be a little different since they were going to be on the ground floor. She got along all right with Roseanna most of the time, and they were more or less friends if not supremely close. They’d been thrown together in their freshman year; a minister’s daughter rooming with a girl who came from another pretty religious family and was pretty religious herself. All that changed in their first couple of semesters; they’d thrown off their religion and discovered men. It had gotten wild at times, and they’d sort of fed on each other. Roseanna was short and heavy, not very pretty, and had a bad complexion, so her easiness had a lot to do with her popularity. Jennlynn had picked up some of that around the edges, then got more deeply involved – and look where it led.

Despite what she’d learned from Claudia and Cindy and the others, she was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt when she carried the first load of stuff from the Monza into her room, and discovered that Roseanna was already there. "I was beginning to wonder if you were coming back," her roomie said, obviously a little down.

"I had some questions myself," Jennlynn admitted. "I almost didn’t, I was enjoying myself so much."

"So, how was home?"

"It sucked big time," Jennlynn snorted. "But I wasn’t there much."

"Jennlynn," Roseanne said softly. "I tried to call you at home one time, but your dad just slammed the phone in my ear. Did something happen?"

"Yeah," Jennlynn sighed. "My folks threw me out of the house the day I got home last spring. I spent most of the summer working on sort of a dude ranch up in Nevada." She wanted to say more, and figured the truth of the summer would come out sooner or later, but right at the moment she didn’t feel like telling Roseanna what had happened.

"Taking people for rides, and like that?" Roseanna asked.

"Like that, sort of," Jennlynn replied dryly.

"Look, Jennlynn," the shorter, heavier girl sighed. "Maybe before you haul all your stuff in, we need to talk."

"Yeah?" Jennlynn said quietly, waiting for the bomb to drop.

"Look," Roseanna said, "We ran pretty wild last year, both years, but if we’re going to be roomies anymore, we’re going to have to cut it way down. I got home, and, uh, my folks were all over my ass about the way we were partying last year. They heard about it from some kid I went to high school with, I guess. After your dad hung up on me, I figured my folks must have called them up and told them, too. I don’t know."

"They had to have heard something from someone out here," Jennlynn shrugged. "They were all over my ass the minute I walked in the door, about the partying, the Cessna, and even just going to school here. They wouldn’t even listen to my side of the story. Then they threw me out on my ass, I mean literally, so the hell with them. As far as the partying goes, I was going to raise the same issue with you. Not because of my folks, but because some other things have changed. I’m planning on keeping my pants on around campus from here on, and I wasn’t sure you were going to go for it."

"That’s fine with me," Roseanna nodded. "Things have changed for me, too. Jennlynn, I . . . uh . . . found someone."

"Oh," Jennlynn grinned. "Found a guy and you want to keep it straight now, huh?"

"Not quite," Roseanne shook her head, and looked a little ashamed. "Please, don’t tell any one, but I, uh, found another girl. Her name’s Norma. She goes down to Irvine. We, uh, pretty much lived together all summer." She looked down at the floor, obviously trying to find words. "Look, all the time I was running around the past two years, well, I knew I was looking for something, but I didn’t know what it was, and nothing worked. Then, I found Norma, and, well, lightning struck. God, I hope you understand and won’t be ashamed of me."

"Hey, don’t worry about it," Jennlynn smiled. "I did a girl a couple times this summer. It was OK, but I’d still rather do guys."

"It’s not quite the same thing," Roseanna shook her head, tears running down her face. "My folks think we’re just friends, roomies, but damn it, I’m in love, and it’s real hard to even tell you. I mean, it’s wonderful when I’m with her, but I’m even ashamed to admit it to you. I can’t imagine what you must think of me."

"Roseanna, I’m happy for you," Jennlynn shook her head and took the now sobbing girl in her arms. "You deserve someone."

"Yeah, but, damn, Jennlynn," Roseanna sobbed. "To have to tell you that, especially if my folks caused things to get wrecked between you and your folks, I’m just so ashamed I can barely stand it."

"Hey, no problem," Jennlynn said soothingly. "What happened, happened. I understand you didn’t have anything to do with it directly."

"You’ll keep it a secret, about me and Norma, not tell my folks or anyone?" Roseanna cried.

Jennlynn let out a sigh. It was going to come out sooner or later; maybe this was the best time. "Roseanna," she said quietly. "I’ll keep your secret if you’ll keep mine."

Roseanna turned her head up to look at her. "Your secret? You mean, about your folks?"

"No," Jennlynn shook her head, freed her arms, and reached for her wallet. "What they drove me to do." She fumbled in her wallet for a moment, then came up with what she was looking for and handed it to Roseanna.

"It’s an ID card," Roseanna shrugged, looking at the plastic-sealed card with the Polaroid photo through tear-filled eyes but obviously not really seeing it.

"Take a closer look," Jennlynn smiled.

Roseanna looked a little closer . . . then her jaw dropped, her eyes grew wide, and she let out a loud gasp. Jennlynn figured that she’d seen the words across the top:

"But . . . but . . . Jenn . . . you said you worked at a dude ranch, taking people for rides . . . "

"Well, I did," Jennlynn grinned. "I grossed about thirty-eight thousand for the summer. That’s why my partying days around campus are over. I learned how much I gave away for free, and that’s the end of that shit. I’m only going to do it where I can do it legally, and that means Nevada, not here."

Roseanna cocked her head. "You’re not kidding, are you?"

"No, I’m not," Jennlynn sighed. "My folks figured I was a prostitute anyway, there’s no point in making liars out of them."

"Do they know about this?"

"I hope so," Jennlynn said bitterly. "I’ve made up my mind that I may have to remind them from time to time what kind of a daughter they’ve raised."

Roseanna shook her head as she handed back the card. "Don’t we make a lovely pair, a lesbian and a prostitute? I’ll keep your secret, Jennlynn."

"It may not be a secret forever," Jennlynn sighed. "I was pretty amazed that I didn’t see anyone I knew from campus up at Bettye’s all summer, but it could happen when I go back."

"You’re going back?"

"Probably over the holidays," Jennlynn said as she put the card back in her wallet. Normally the cards were kept in the office of the houses, at least when the girls were in the house; her Storey County card was presumably still in the office at the Mustang. But, Shirley told her to hang onto hers – it might be useful some time. She’d just been proved right. "Let me tell you, there’s a good group of people there, and we all had a lot of fun. The woman who runs the place is just about like a grandmother to me, except that she’s a grandmother who’s been a hooker for half a century. It’s about as close to a home as I have anymore." She let out a sigh. "So, if you don’t mind being roomies with a hooker, let’s head out to the car and start hauling in my stuff."

"Fine with me," Roseanna laughed. "So long as you don’t mind being roomies with a lesbian."

* * *

In a couple hours, all of Jennlynn’s stuff was out of the Monza, unpacked and put away. The girls didn’t have tons of stuff like other students often did, and that helped. "I’m glad to have that done with," Jennlynn said as she put the last of her things away. "I could stand for a decent dinner and a glass of wine."

"Oh, you’re drinking now, huh?"

"Just a little wine with dinner," she replied, and explained how the cooking was done at Bettye’s and that Claudia often served wine with her Cajun dinners.

"I doubt like hell we can get Cajun anywhere around here," Roseanna protested.

"Maybe it’s just as well," Jennlynn laughed. "It makes you fart like a bull. You haven’t lived until you’ve been in a lineup with four other girls and all of us having gas so bad that we’re just about ready to explode into a farting contest."

Roseanna shook her head. "Just think back," she smiled. "Two years ago, could you ever have imagined us having this conversation?"

"Not even four months ago," Jennlynn agreed. "Look, I do want to go out, but I really have to have a shower and change clothes. I must stink to high heaven, and these clothes are really only fit for hauling stuff, horseback riding or like that."

"I could stand one, too," Roseanna agreed. "But you go first."

A few minutes later, Jennlynn was out of the shower while Roseanna headed in. She pulled on underwear, a garter belt and hose, a conservative print skirt, and a black sweater top with a low neckline. Just something casual as she’d come to think of it after all of Claudia’s and Cindy’s influence. She started in on her makeup. Nothing heavy, just a little lipstick, eye shadow, and some work on her lashes.

She’d just put on a Navajo silver necklace and was putting on matching ear rings when Roseanna came out of the shower. "My God, Jennlynn!" she cried. "You look gorgeous! I thought we were just going to go out and have a casual dinner."

"Well, this is casual for me, anymore," Jennlynn shrugged with a smile. "This is something else that’s changed. This is how I intend to dress for classes, because I’ve discovered I don’t like looking like a slob. I mean, I could dress in work clothes, but that might be overdoing it."

"Work clothes . . . oh, my God," Roseanna shook her head. "You mean . . . oh, shit, I guess you do. You’re right, Jennlynn, you’ve changed. But then, I guess I have, too. I tend to dress a little more butch than I did last year. I have to say I love how you look, and I love your hair."

"You better watch it, or I’m going to make Norma jealous when I kiss you," Jennlynn snickered. "Maybe we’d better not let her know that I don’t mind doing girls anymore."

"That might not be a bad idea," Roseanna replied, shaking her head as she started to search her closet for something that wasn’t blue jeans, just to try to stay in sight of her glamorous roommate. "You know, we are both going to have a problem. I mean, with our reputations in the past, we’re going to get hit on a lot."

"I realize it’s a problem," Jennlynn agreed. "We’re just going to have to say no a lot."

"Some guys aren’t going to want to take no for an answer," Roseanna observed.

"They’re just going to have to learn how," Jennlynn said firmly. "I can see the time coming when someone is going to get me so pissed off that I’ll tell them if they come up to Bettye’s over break and bring lots of money, I’ll do them. But I think instead, we’d better say that our grades and our folks were such that we had to clean up our acts and turn over a new leaf."

"I think we’d better try to make that work," Roseanna agreed thoughtfully, pulling on a wine-colored skirt. "The alternative, well, I don’t think you want to be known as a Nevada hooker on campus, and I don’t think I want to be known as a lesbian."

"Actually, if I thought for one minute that it wouldn’t interfere with getting a good job after graduation, I wouldn’t mind," Jennlynn said. "And if it comes to that, I may let the truth come out, and tell an interviewer that it’s a story I let get out to keep from being hit on. But we’re both going to have schedules busy enough that I think just hitting the books and avoiding the party scene will do the job."

"I hope you’re right," Roseanna nodded, pulling on a nice blouse. "If we’re even going to have wine with dinner, maybe we’d better get off campus a ways."

"Works for me," Jennlynn agreed.

They headed off campus and downtown until they found a nice Italian place, talking less about what they’d done over the summer than about prospects for their classes in the fall. Like Jennlynn, Roseanna was an electrical engineering major, and was sharp indeed, although her tastes ran a little more toward chip design than they did circuit design and interfaces, which was Jennlynn’s focus. It was nice to get back to business, Jennlynn thought, and think about things that really meant something.

They ordered a plate of light spaghetti and red wine. "Uh, ladies, can I see some ID?" the waitress asked.

"Sure," Roseanna replied, and both of them pulled out their student IDs.

"I’m sorry, but we need something besides your student IDs," the girl said. "There’s a bunch of fake ones floating around."

"No big deal," Jennlynn said, handing her another card out of her wallet.

The waitress gasped, gulped once or twice as her eyes grew wide, and Jennlynn realized that it wasn’t her driver’s license that she’d handed the waitress. "I . . . I don’t think I’ve ever seen that kind of ID before," the woman gulped as she handed the card back.

"Better money than waiting tables, and you’re not on your feet as much," Jennlynn said as coolly as she could.

"Yeah . . . well, yeah, I guess," the flustered woman said. "I’ll go get your wine." In an instant she turned to go, not even bothering to look at Roseanna’s driver’s license.

"Come on, be honest," Roseanna grinned. "You liked doing that didn’t you?"

"I didn’t do it intentionally," Jennlynn protested. "But yeah, in a way, that was fun. You know, I haven’t really thought this out, but while I’m not anxious to publicize what I did all summer, in a way I’m proud of it. I mean, I’ve done something that most women would never think of having the guts to do in any situation. I did a good job and made out pretty damn well. I’ve done it legally and clean, knowing what I’m doing. I thoroughly enjoyed it and did my damndest to give my clients the best time they possibly could have, and I have reason to think that I’m pretty damn good at it. So, yeah, there’s a part of me that is a little proud. I can’t deny it."

Roseanna shook her head. "I don’t think I could have done it in your shoes, even after everything that happened the last two years."

"It was a hard decision to make, but I pretty well had it made for me before I started," Jennlynn said. "It worked out well for me. It might not for you or most anyone else."

* * *

Classes got under way the next day, and they were busy right from the start. Both the girls were taking a huge load of tough classes, and there wasn’t a lot of time for partying, anyway – especially so in Jennlynn’s case since the commercial pilot instruction took a lot of time. Magic Carpet proved its worth right from the beginning, since it took Jennlynn right out of the hassles of scheduling planes. There were still hassles in getting instructor time set, but it was minor by comparison.

It was clear to both the girls that the best way to kill the "party girl" image they’d developed over the first two years was to stay in their room and study. It was more than an excuse, it was the real thing. They still got hit on, and a lot, but the study excuse could be understood in a place like Caltech, where the study quotient was high in any case.

But still, for months, they got calls from guys while they were studying, several times a night for a while. Although it tailed off after the two made it clear that they weren’t available, the calls and propositions in the halls and around classes never did go away completely in the rest of their time at the school.

Jennlynn, and to an only slightly lesser extent Roseanna, had always been pretty serious about their studying anyway, and tended to focus very severely on what they were working on. Jennlynn especially got irritated at being interrupted for unnecessary reasons, like being hit on, and as the semester went on the phone going off in the room made her temper get vile. Reasoning that acting severely pissed off at a request from a guy to go out and have a drink or something with the obvious intention of leading to a bed would reduce the odds of the request being repeated, so Jennlynn didn’t hold back on her temper. In fairly short order, she got the reputation of having permanent PMS, despite how good she looked most of the time, and that held things down. Even Roseanna began to get the idea that it wasn’t a good idea to bother Jennlynn unnecessarily when she was studying – and unnecessarily meant anything short of the building burning down. The two were reasonably friendly as roommates, but there was a limitation to their friendship; they more occupied the same space than they were actual friends.

It was only a few days into the school year when Jennlynn met Norma. The two took an instant dislike to each other, probably because Norma saw Jennlynn as a threat to her relationship with Roseanna. Jennlynn sensed the rancor, and that added to the distance between the two girls. Still, they tended to be reasonable enough with each other that when Roseanna wanted to spend a Saturday afternoon alone in the room with her lover, Jennlynn could usually find something to do, even if it was nothing more than to wash down Magic Carpet and put another coat of wax on her beloved Cessna.

Jennlynn soon came to realize that part of her steadily growing worse temper was the direct result of the deliberate decision to keep men out of her life while she was on campus. When she’d first come to Caltech she’d been aware of the fact that she had a sex drive, but had kept it under control all through high school, except for a rather chaste kiss at the Senior Prom. But the newfound freedom at Caltech soon led to a bed, and had unlocked the raging beast in her. She’d always suspected that once she got into it she’d be hooked, and that proved to be the case, even in her first semester as a freshman. Her first summer at home from college had been near hell from lack of action and having to keep it hidden from her parents; she’d been nearly biting nails out of horniness by the time she’d pointed the Monza back to California. She and Roseanna had been more active their second year and still weren’t getting enough, and then, over the summer, she’d had more sex than she’d ever dreamed possible, previously having had her fill of it only rarely and temporarily.

Now, she had cut it off entirely, but the hormones still raged in her and had to be held in check. No wonder her temper was vile! Even Roseanna was getting more than she was getting, and from a woman who she dearly loved. Jennlynn could only watch from a distance and occasionally drive the desires back a bit with one of the more expensive and serious vibrators available in a place like Los Angeles – which is to say about the best available. By the end of October, she was close to punching holes in the cinder-block walls of their dorm room.

Roseanna knew, of course, what was going on with Jennlynn and tried to live through it, even though it got very hard at times. Finally, after one particularly serious tirade, she told her roommate, "Jennlynn, you need to get seriously laid!"

"Don’t you think I realize that?" Jennlynn replied icily.

"What I can’t understand," Roseanna said as calmly as she could manage, "Is why you don’t call up Shirley and see if you could fly up to Bettye’s and work for a weekend."

"But I’ve got to study," Jennlynn protested.

"How much quality studying are you getting done the way things are now?" Roseanna pointed out.

Jennlynn started to say something nasty in reply, but the wisdom of the message struck her silent. She paused for a second, then picked up the phone to call Shirley.

It proved to be not much of a problem; she had to have a medical, but Shirley faxed her the form. She got the test done right in Pasadena and could take the results with her when she left for the weekend. The following Thursday she cut her last class of the day, and in the late afternoon raced darkness northward in Magic Carpet on her way to Bettye’s. She didn’t know, and only found out later that, while she was in the air, Roseanna made a precautionary phone call to Shirley: "You’d better hook her up with someone strong and horny," she warned her, "Because anyone else, there’s a good chance she might fuck them to death."

"It’s been that bad, huh?" Shirley asked.

"No, it’s been worse."

"Well, thanks for the warning, and there might be someone I can fix her up with," Shirley smiled.

"I hoped there might be," Roseanna told her. "It sounds like you have a pretty neat place up there."

"Well," Shirley laughed, knowing from the course of the discussion that Roseanna was pretty well clued in on what was going on. "If you want to check it out some time, you’re welcome."

"Probably not," Roseanna sighed. "I’m not all that pretty, and I’m a lesbian, anyway. But thanks for the offer."

Jennlynn had just tied down Magic Carpet and hadn’t even changed into her work clothes when Shirley introduced her to a strong young truck driver she thought well of. Jennlynn accepted his first offer without a hint of negotiation, hauled him back to the first available room, and nothing much but grunts and moans and screams were heard from either of them for the next three hours. Jennlynn came out afterwards dressed for work and noticeably more relaxed, while the truck driver was nearly staggering. "Holy Christ," he muttered to Shirley. "I didn’t know a woman could get thathorny."

"Lots of things you don’t know that women are capable of," the older woman grinned. The truck driver needed a restorative beer from Shirley’s private stock and a rubdown to relax before he got back into his eighteen wheeler. Presumably, there was good word of mouth by CB thereafter, for there seemed to be a lot of trucks in Bettye’s parking lot for the rest of the weekend.

To say that Jennlynn was considerably more mellow when she walked into the dorm room Sunday evening would be an understatement. "Roseanna," she said contritely. "I’m sorry about the way I was acting the last couple weeks. You were right. I needed to get seriously laid."

"I understand," Roseanna grinned. "Just one thing. Don’t let it happen again."

"I won’t," Jennlynn promised. "I’m scheduled up there over Thanksgiving, then the holidays, then we’re going to try to do a weekend a month."

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