Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Jessica Knoll
- Language: English
- Genre: Women’s Psychological Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 3.54 MB
- Price: Free
Tallahassee, Florida
January 14, 1978
Seven hours before
On Saturday nights, we kept our doors open while we got ready. Girls went in
one room wearing one thing and came out wearing something shorter. The
hallways were as tight and restricted as the passageways on a navy ship, snarled
with chatter about who was doing what and going where and with whom. Hair
spray and nail polish fumed our personal ozone layer, the blast of blow-dryers
raising the mercury four, sometimes five degrees on the analog thermometer
mounted to the wall.
We’d crack the windows for fresh air and mock the music
coming from the bar next door; Saturday night was disco night, which was for
old people. It was a statistical impossibility that something bad could happen
with Barry Gibb cheeping in his far-reaching falsetto that we’d all live to see
another day, but we are what mathematics models refer to as outliers.
A coy voice accompanied the patterning of knuckles on my door. “I think it
might snow.” I looked up from the volunteer schedules papering my hand-medown secretary’s desk to see Denise Andora standing on the threshold, hands
clasped girlishly at her pelvis.
“Nice try.” I laughed. Denise was angling to borrow my shearling coat.
Though the winter of 1978 had brought a deep freeze to the Panhandle that
killed the azalea trees along the Georgia border, it was never cold enough to
snow.
“Please, Pamela!” Denise put her hands together in prayer, repeating her plea
over red fingertips with crescendoing urgency. “Please. Please. Please. Nothing I
have goes.” She turned in place to prove her point. I only know the minute
details of what she was wearing that night because later there was a description
of her outfit in the paper: thin turtleneck tucked into snap-front jeans, suede
belt and suede boots in matching chestnut brown, opal earrings, and a beloved
silver charm bracelet.
My best friend was approximately one hundred feet tall
and weighed less than I did as a child, but by senior year I’d learned to manage
my envy like a migraine. What triggered that star-seeing pain was looking too
closely at Denise when she decided she needed attention from men.
“Don’t make me beg.” She stomped her foot a little. “Roger asked some of
the girls if I was coming tonight.”
I put my pencil down. “Denise,” I admonished.
I’d long ago lost count of the number of times Denise and Roger had called it
quits only to encounter each other out at night, however many warm beers and
deep lovelorn glances it took to forgive the spiteful things they’d each said to and
about the other, but this most recent split didn’t feel so much like a split as it did
a severing with a dirty kitchen knife, quite literally infecting Denise, who
vomited everything she ate for nearly a week and had to be briefly admitted to
the hospital for dehydration. When I picked her up at the curb, she swore Roger
was out of her system for good. I flushed twice for good measure, she’d said,
laughing feebly as I helped her out of the hospital-mandated wheelchair and into
the passenger seat of the car
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