“Does she put out?”

“Probably yes, but probably not soon,” Eric Snow told his roommate Jeff Harrington. “You know what I think about that.”

Jeff took a sip from his wasp-waisted six and a half-ounce glass bottle of Coke, which had just enough of the contents of the Rexall Bay Rum bottle on his dresser to give the drink some bite. It had been years since the bottle had actually contained bay rum – it usually contained the real thing, but the bottle was just enough of a camouflage that the housemaster had never figured it out – or if he did suspect the truth, he hadn’t commented on it. Same difference, as far as Jeff was concerned; a little nip would make the stats class he had in a few minutes a little more tolerable. “Yeah,” he grunted. “I’ve heard it before.”

Eric’s opinion, as stated in several dorm-room bull sessions over the last two and a half years, was that most women would put out. The question involved how much investment it was going to take to get them to do it. For some, a couple of dates, which might include a few drinks, would be enough to do the job. For others, a wedding ring might barely be enough.

“Only one way to figure out if it’s worth the effort,” Eric pointed out. Again, it wasn’t anything Jeff hadn’t heard Eric say before. “Besides, it beats sitting around here and doing nothing Friday night.”

“You’re probably right,” Jeff agreed reluctantly. He’d more or less planned on spending Friday evening with half a dozen or so rum-laden Cokes to celebrate the week being over with, but an actual, honest-to-god date, even a double date would make for a welcome diversion. “Who is this chick, anyway?”

“Eunice Dexter,” Eric shrugged. “She’s Donna Tallman’s roommate. I get the impression she doesn’t date much, but Donna wants to take her along.”

“I know who she is,” Jeff replied, still feeling reluctant. An evening with a few of his rum-and-Cokes, maybe with a trip down to the dorm lounge to watch Dragnet on the old black-and-white TV stood a good chance of being more interesting. He couldn’t actually remember talking to Eunice Dexter, but he knew her enough from seeing her around the Meriwether College campus not to be terribly interested in her. She was small, skinny, and plain, with mousy, straight-cut short dark brown hair, and rather quiet and shy. Not exactly a hot chick, like her roommate Donna, who was blonde, stacked up and reportedly hard to get, not that he’d ever thought he’d have a chance with her. “You’re crazy if you think you’re going to get anywhere with Donna Tallman,” he added.

“Well, you’re probably right,” Eric conceded. “But right now, spending an evening with a couple of girls could be fun, even if it doesn’t go anywhere. And who knows? It might turn into some action, just not right away. You’ll never know unless you check it out.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“A movie, I guess,” Eric replied. “The only problem is that Bridge on the River Kwai is playing downtown, and I don’t think that’s something I’d want to take a girl to on a first date.”

“Uh, yeah,” Jeff grimaced. “It’s supposed to be a hell of a good flick, but I don’t think I’d want to see it anyway. Too gruesome, from what I hear. What else?”

“Probably the best bet is to go down to Battle Creek. There was a copy of the Battle Creek Enquirer floating around down in the lounge, and Auntie Mame is playing down there. That’s a romantic comedy, and strikes me as a good one for a first date. It’s a fun, light romantic comedy that might loosen the girls up a little. The alternatives down there are The Vikings with Kirk Douglas, along with And God Created Woman with Brigitte Bardot.”

“I could handle Brigitte Bardot,” Jeff sighed. “What a babe!”

“Yeah, but that’s one that doesn’t exactly strike me as a winner for a first date, either. It’d send the wrong message to the girls.”

“You’re probably right,” Jeff shook his head. “But damn, I wouldn’t mind checking out that Bardot chick.”

“Well, me too,” Eric smiled. “But there aren’t a lot of other alternatives unless we want to go to Kalamazoo. That’s even farther and I don’t know what’s playing. Auntie Mame strikes me as safe and Battle Creek isn’t too far.”

“But to get there you need wheels.”

“Yeah,” Eric nodded. “There is that little problem.”

Students at Meriwether College weren’t allowed to have cars on campus if they were under twenty-one, unless they were commuter students. It was obviously intended to keep the kids from running around too much, and for the most part it succeeded. It was a pain in the neck to get along without a car, and there were some students like Jeff who wanted a car available. In his case, it was to have a relatively safe hiding place for the stock he used to keep his bay rum bottle filled, along with a few other things. There was a car wash a couple blocks away that would allow students to park their cars there for a ten-dollar monthly fee and Jeff gladly paid it.

It had not been easy for Eric to get a date with Donna, who in addition to being good-looking was more than a little aloof to the common run of guys. The only reason he’d managed it was that Donna had made bringing Eunice along part of the price of dating her in the first place, so the chances of some first-date action were nil across the board.

“Oh, all right,” Jeff conceded. “I’m not totally thrilled with the idea of dating Eunice Dexter or seeing Auntie Mame, but you’re right – you never know what’s going to happen until you check it out. I suppose that means dinner, too.”

“Probably wouldn’t hurt, but that will mean the early showing if we’re going to make it back for curfew.” The Meriwether College housemasters locked the dorm doors at midnight on Friday nights. You could get back into the dorms later than that but you had to have a damn good explanation to the housemaster to do it, and be sober, too. The housemothers in the girl’s dorms were even stickier. “But there’s an Italian joint down there that isn’t too bad. We might even get lucky. I hear they have one of those new McDonald’s places there, and the girls might like to check it out for something different.”

“Fat chance of that,” Jeff snorted. “God created women so men could spend money on them.”

“Great,” Eric smiled, ignoring Jeff’s cynical comment. “Life is kind of like being a turtle. You have to stick your neck out a little if you want to make some progress. I’ll catch up with Donna somewhere later today and tell her it’s on.”

Jeff took a long swallow of his rum-laced Coke, “Might as well,” he said as Eric gathered his books – he had an econ class coming up pretty quickly, too. “Who knows? It might not be a total loss.”

“You never know,” Eric said as he headed toward the door. “Finding out is the general idea.”

Jeff got up from his bed, where he’d been slouched. He gathered up his own textbooks and notebook and took the empty Coke bottle with him when he left so he could leave it in the rack by the machine downstairs – the housemaster got snippy if students let too many pile up in their rooms.

Jeff had never been much of a person to make friends, even back in high school, but somehow the two of them had hit it off. This was the third year Jeff and Eric had been roommates at the rather conservative Methodist College. Eric was the spark plug of the two; he was tallish, just short of six feet, blond-haired and good-looking in an athletic sort of way. Jeff was several inches shorter, rather dumpy by comparison, with thin brown hair and glasses.

Eric usually got reasonable grades; sometimes he was on the Dean’s List, and other times not, but usually not far from it. On the other hand, Jeff was not that good a student; the only way he’d passed several classes in the past two and a half years was by Eric pushing him and tutoring him. Jeff thought he’d been lucky to draw Eric as a roommate – much though he disliked Meriwether College. If he’d been admitted to Western Michigan like he’d hoped, it was clear by now that he would have flunked out without the help of a friend like Eric. Providing wheels once in a while was a reasonable price to pay in return; when it got right down to it, he owed Eric a lot of favors.

That evening Eric told Jeff that the date was definitely on, and that the girls thought Auntie Mame was the best of a limited selection. He couldn’t quite sell them on the idea of going to the new chain hamburger joint, but that was no surprise. “No big loss,” Eric explained. “It makes us look flexible, not cheap. It never hurts to give in on a point once in a while.”

Since they had to be back in plenty of time to make the curfew, that meant their date had to start early. Although Eric had offered to do the honors, Jeff was the one who hiked the several blocks over to the car wash to pick up the car while Eric went to meet the girls. Jeff’s car was not exactly one that a college student would be proud of; it was a five-year-old ’53 Nash Statesman four-door that had seen better days years before. But, as Jeff’s father pointed out, there was no point in having a snazzy car if it was going to sit around unprotected all the time. Realistically, Jeff had to agree. While he felt he’d like to have a nicer car, having any kind of running wheels at all around Meriwether made it almost as good as a Thunderbird.

Eric and the girls were waiting in front of their dorm when Jeff pulled up in the Nash. Since Eunice was at least technically Jeff’s date, Eric had her get in front with Jeff, while he and Donna got into the back. “Wow,” Donna said as Eric walked around the car to get in the back seat on the driver’s side, “it’s going to be good to get off campus. I’ll bet it’s been a month.”

“It gets pretty boring, but the way the weather has been this winter sometimes it’s just as good to stay on campus,” Jeff observed. “But now that it’s March, those days are coming to an end. I figure seven more weeks till the semester is over with.” He turned to Eunice, trying to be a little personable. “So how are things with you?”

“Pretty much the same,” she replied from well over on the passenger side. “I think I’m going to be just as glad to have school out, too.”

“Do you have any plans for the summer?” he asked the girl. She was plain-looking – he’d already known that, of course – and wearing a shin-length cotton dress that gave no hint of what kind of figure she might have underneath it. Probably not much of one, he thought, remembering seeing her dressed in different clothes from time to time – nothing tight or sexy, of course; it wouldn’t go over well around Meriwether.

“Not really,” she sighed. “I’ll probably just sit around the house this summer. Maybe I can come up with some kind of a job, but I don’t want to bet on it.”

“I know I’ve talked to you before,” he fibbed – he was pretty sure he hadn’t, but there was no point in not trying to be personable – “but I don’t remember what it is you’re studying.”

“Accounting,” she replied softly. “I’m not sure it’s what I want to do, but then I don’t know what it is I want to do.”

By now Eric was in the back seat with Donna, sitting a little closer to her than Jeff was to Eunice, but by no means snuggled up to her, either. “My brother says that whatever you study in college, the odds are you’ll wind up doing something different.”

“That’s what my mom says,” Donna agreed. “She went to the normal school in Ypsi back before it became Eastern Michigan University, and she’s never taught school a day in her life. I’m just not interested in being a housewife and a mommy, at least not for a few years. I’m studying secondary education but it wouldn’t surprise me if I found something else to do. How about you, Eric?”

“I’m about the same way,” he snickered. “Although I don’t expect to have any problems avoiding being a housewife and a mommy.”

That brought a round of laughter around the car, with Jeff’s private thought that Eric never seemed to have trouble in producing a laugh out of nothing much.

“What about you, Jeff?” Eunice asked. “Are you as indecisive as everyone else?”

“Fortunately not. Well, maybe unfortunately not, I don’t know,” he sighed. “My dad owns a heating oil distribution business and I’ll be working there. I don’t necessarily know that it’s what I want to do, but I guess I don’t get much choice.”

“Look on the bright side,” she told him. “At least you know you have a future.”

“Such as it is,” he replied glumly. “It might be interesting to do something else, too. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good business and I ought to be comfortable with it. It’s a job, most likely a career, and I guess I’ll just have to call it good enough.” Most of the time he was satisfied with the inevitability of it, but there were times it irritated him a little, too. “So where are you from?”

“A little town called Amherst, down near the state line,” she explained. “I suppose you’ve never heard of it.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of it,” he said. “I’m from Wychbold, that’s what? Twenty miles east of you? Thirty? Something like that.”

“Something like that,” she agreed.

“Dad bought out the local oil company in Amherst a few years ago,” he went on to say. “So we’ve got a lot of accounts there.”

“Harrington Oil? I think my folks get their fuel oil from them,” she replied, now sounding a little more interested in him.

“Yeah, that’s us,” he agreed. “The profit margin isn’t huge but it keeps the company in business.”

“It’s probably better than my family business,” she sighed. “My dad is in the oil business, too. He runs a Sinclair station with a used car lot on the side. My mom was the one who wanted me to go to college.”

“How about you, Donna?” Eric asked. “Where are you from?”

“Meridian,” she replied. “That’s east of Wychbold a ways, maybe twenty or thirty miles. I don’t suppose you’re from Indiana border country, too. How about you?”

“Swartz Creek,” he replied. “That’s a little town over outside of Flint.”

“What does your family do?”

“That’s not easy to answer,” Eric sighed. “My dad is dead. He died in New Guinea back during the war, and my mother, well, she didn’t handle it very well. I was mostly raised by my grandparents, and then by my older brother. He works at GM Truck and Coach in Flint.”

“That’s a ways away,” she smiled. “How did you wind up at a place like Meriwether?”

“Let’s just say it involves a trust fund from my other grandfather, and a trust fund administrator who went to Meriwether and thinks it’s the greatest place in the world,” he shook his head. “So I didn’t get a lot of choice. How about you?”

“Pretty much the same thing,” she nodded. “My dad went here and he wouldn’t hear of anything else. He seems to think it’s a nice safe place to send his little girl, where nothing horrible could ever happen to her. I’ll grant him that, but sometimes it just makes me want to scream!”

It took perhaps half an hour for Jeff to drive the Nash down to Cassini’s, a low-budget Italian restaurant in Battle Creek – it was really more of a family place than a date place, but the prices were right. Most of the way the four of them talked about how much they didn’t like Meriwether College and how they wished it had worked out that they could have gone somewhere else. It seemed to Eric that Eunice was the least dissatisfied of the four of them; she thought it would do, if nothing else.

Auntie Mame proved to be a fairly good picture. It was a comedy, and was actually pretty funny, just bawdy enough in spots that it could provide some laughs, without anyone actually considering it dirty. It was, as Eric had figured, an excellent first-date movie, and they were all in a good mood when they came out of the theater.

Because of the curfew at the college, they’d caught the early showing of the movie. “We’ve got plenty of time before we have to get back,” Eric commented. “What do you say if we just go back and have some coffee or something? Bummie’s is open until midnight tonight.”

It didn’t take much discussion. Once again Eric and Donna were in the back seat, sitting a lot closer together than they had done on the trip down to Battle Creek while being well short of snuggling or making out. Jeff and Eunice were in the front again and were sitting closer together, too – again not actually snuggling or anything, but at least holding hands, which was a lot better than Jeff usually managed by this point on most of the few dates he’d actually had. Eunice may not have been the prettiest girl on campus, nor the smartest, nor the most outgoing, but she seemed to be a nice girl – so all in all, at this point Eric thought Jeff had little reason to complain about how the date had gone.

They still had plenty of time at Bummie’s before they had to get back to the college, but of course they had to complain about it. “With any kind of luck this should be getting close to the end of having to put up with a lot of that jazz,” Eric told the girls at one point. “We’ll both be turning twenty-one over the summer, and that means the college can’t force us to live in the dorms. We’re looking for an apartment for next year.”

“From what I hear they don’t come cheap around here,” Eunice pointed out.

“They’re not too bad,” Eric explained. “If we get an apartment that means we don’t have to pay for meals at the college, either. We think we can live a little more cheaply by the time everything is said and done.”

“If it’s only a little more expensive, we can afford it and it ought to be worth it,” Jeff agreed. Eric knew without asking that Jeff didn’t want to say it out loud to the girls, at least not yet, but turning twenty-one and living off campus would mean that he could buy a bottle or two openly and legally and keep it around the apartment. Presumably the apartment would have a refrigerator, so he could keep his Cokes or whatever mixer he wanted cold, too. That was worth a little extra money from Jeff’s viewpoint. “It would be nice to not have a housemaster breathing down our necks all the time.”

“I suppose,” Donna sighed. “It would be nice for me, too, but there’s no way in hell my dad would go for it.”

“It’s different for girls,” Eunice agreed. “But it’s only one more year, so I suppose I can survive it.”

Eventually the hands of the clock got around to eleven. It was time to be wrapping things up so the girls could be back in the dorm in plenty of time, and the guys could get the car back to the car wash and get back themselves before the housemaster locked the door. They got back in the Nash, and drove over to the girl’s dorm. Eric couldn’t help but notice the girls were sitting even closer to the guys than they had before. That was promising . . . if not for tonight.

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” Eric said as Jeff braked the Nash to a stop in front of the girls’ dorm. “But I had a good time. Maybe we could do it again. I saw from the playbills that they’re going to have Vertigo down there next weekend.”

“That’s supposed to be pretty scary,” Eunice pointed out.

“Well, it’s supposed to be a thriller,” Eric said. “And from what I hear it’s pretty good. But there are others, and we’ve got time to look and see.”

“It sounds like a reasonable idea,” Donna said. “But see if you can figure out what the alternatives are.”

“I’m not turning down Vertigo,” Eunice added to clarify herself. “It’s just that I’d really rather not be chewing my nails all evening.”

“We’re bound to be seeing each other around the dining hall next week,” Jeff said. “Maybe we could make a point of getting together there about six-thirty Monday evening to work it out.”

“Sure,” Donna agreed. “That sounds like it would work. Hey look guys, Eunice and I had better get moving. Thanks for a great evening.”

“Yes, thank you,” Eunice said softly to Jeff. “That was a lot more fun than sitting around the lounge in the dorm watching TV.” She leaned close to Jeff, and pulled his head toward her, giving him a little kiss on the lips – nothing long, nothing sexy, just a friendly little kiss. “I hope we can do it again sometime.”

Back in the back seat Eric didn’t even get that much of a rise out of Donna, although both of them had seen the brief kiss between Jeff and Eunice, but that wasn’t enough to tempt Donna to follow along. The two guys made a point of being gentlemanly about walking the girls back to the front door of their dorm, then got back in the Nash and drove over to the car wash, where Jeff parked the car and locked it.

“That went pretty well,” he commented to Eric as they started walking back toward the dorm.

“Yeah, it did,” Eric agreed. “And I take note of who got kissed and who didn’t.”

“Just the way it worked out,” Jeff replied modestly. “You know, she’s not a bad girl at all. A little shy and a little plain, but nice. I don’t think I’m going to mind seeing her again.”

“Do you think she’s going to be worth the effort?” Eric grinned.

“I don’t know, but maybe. There’s no way of knowing without going and finding out. What do you think about Donna?”

“I doubt it’s going anywhere, but women have surprised me before.”

“I don’t want to say that I fell in love with Jeff on our first date,” Eunice said as she took a sip of her rum and Coke. “But he was a nice enough guy, and I liked him. Well, I didn’t dislike him, anyway. “

“You liked him well enough to kiss him on your first date,” Eric teased her.

“I surprised myself with that,” she admitted. “I guess I just saw it as a friendly little kiss, a reward for going on the date. I mean, I thought it was what a girl was supposed to do. It was the first time I ever kissed a boy, at least even mildly romantically. Like I said, I wasn’t head over heels in love with him or anything, but he’d been a nice guy, a little interesting. And of course, being that he was from the family that owned Harrington Oil and planned on working there meant something, at least to me. Not that he was rich or anything, but solid. He was a good prospect, better than anyone I felt like would take an interest in me.”

“I remember you as being pretty shy, and not having a lot of self-confidence. But you grew out of that.”

“Jeff helped me do that a lot,” she admitted. “But you played your part, too. You were so much more, uh, worldly I guess you could say, that you were a little bit threatening to me, at least in comparison to Jeff. You were more the kind of guy that Donna hung out with. Jeff was shy like me, and didn’t have much self-confidence, either. That was something we had to work out for ourselves.”

“I remember the two of you getting pretty comfortable with each other pretty quickly,” Eric said, letting his mind go back to those long-ago years. How distant they seemed! “But maybe my mind is compressing it.”

“Actually, we did move along pretty quickly, at least for us,” Eunice nodded. “We were both pretty shy, so I’m still surprised it went as quickly as it did. I think we sensed right from the beginning that we both had quite a bit in common. After our first date, we started seeing each other at the dining hall, oh, several times a week. It wasn’t every meal, and since there was no pre-planning we often didn’t show up at the same time. You and Donna were also there with us, perhaps a couple times. That was where we agreed to see Vertigo in Battle Creek the next Friday night. I wound up liking it better than I thought I would.”

“That wasn’t a bad movie at all.”

“No, it wasn’t. But I think what really turned the corner for Jeff and me was when he invited me to ride down to Amherst with him the next day. Double dates were fine, but I was beginning to get to the point where I felt like I could dare to be with him without Donna around, so when he asked me in Bummie’s after the movie, I accepted. I had some spring outfits at home I’d wished I’d brought back when I came back to school after Christmas, and it was a good opportunity to get them.”

“I guess I vaguely remember some discussion about that. It strikes me I was mostly trying to pin Donna down to a one-on-one date, so I wouldn’t have been paying a lot of attention.”

“I know she was starting to get interested in you,” Eunice smiled. “But I wasn’t paying much attention to that, either. Anyway, Jeff and I decided to meet for breakfast in the dining hall, and take off from there. Of course, I didn’t realize what Jeff really had in mind.”

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