Free Revenge of the Cootie Girls by Sparkle Hayter

pipes cleared, your spine aligned, your aquarium cleaned, an ancient Latin document translated, buy oxygen, and be tried and convicted twenty-four hours a day in this town. You used to be able to get your hair coiffed twenty-four hours a day too, but that place cut back its hours.
    During that week, Julie went out with George every night, and I went out with them, and whichever of his handsome young friends he could dredge up for me, almost every night. What really struck us, or me at least, was how friendly everyone was to us. We were so popular. Men were constantly mistaking us for models.
    Chuck and Lance came back from Florida tanned and swaggering with a few cheap souvenirs and a few more notches on their studly belts. Julie and I came back from New York with an extra suitcase each, bought at a Going Out of Business store in midtown just to carry all our free stuff home. But more than that, we came back changed.
    After that trip, any glimpse of New York would set my heart soaring, from the opening credits of “All in the Family,” “Rhoda,” or “Taxi” to an on-location shoot-out scene between cops and drug dealers on “Kojak” reruns. Julie and I began to wonder if we couldn’t be like the young Manhattan career women in Mademoiselle and Vogue who had glamorous jobs, furnished their tiny apartment kitchens in French provincial on an editorial assistant’s salary, and transformed themselves effortlessly from Tailored Professional to Boldly Dressed Party Girl, against various Manhattan backdrops. We imagined a dynamic love life, different men every night, play openings, dinner with dashing ambassadors and princes. You too, Robin Hudson, can be an INTERNATIONAL BON VIVANT!
    It had been such a great time, and seeing Chuck again was so anticlimactic. The men we met in New York were so exciting, and Chuck didn’t seem to get my enthusiasm about New York. My visions of being married to and redeemed by him started fading, though they seemed to infect Chuck, who was suddenly saying he thought we should get married, and as soon as possible. Lance, though, was still intransigent on the marriage-to-Julie question, which confused her, because he had chased her for a long time before she finally went out with him. I figured he was playing hard to get. “But no matter,” I said to her. “You don’t need Lance.”
    When we did marry, the new daydream went, we would marry handsome big-city men (who would be completely supportive of our glamorous careers), live on Park Avenue, and have citified daughters whom we would take to revivals of Annie , followed by ice cream at Rumpelmayer’s or Serendipity.
    I can’t have kids, so there was no Serafina Hudson-Whatever to eat ice cream at Serendipity with Ramona Goomey-Whatever. It made me wonder. I knew Julie had finally married Lance at the beginning of 1980 and moved to Ohio, only to get divorced a couple of years later. When her family packed up and left Ferrous for good, I lost track of Julie completely. Not that I hadn’t thought about her a lot, and heard rumors. She was remarried and living in Canada. She was working as a stripper in Vegas. She was in a mental institution in Florida. She was in jail for forgery in Texas, which seemed really unlikely, given her horrible handwriting. Something about Julie had always inspired a lot of gossip.
    Was Julie remarried? Did she have kids? Even though she always talked about having kids, I had never pictured her with them. As a child, she was always forgetting her dolls at the playground, where they’d be scavenged by other kids, or torn apart by packs of wild dogs. Oh, wait. That was me.
    And what about Billy and George? I’d thought about looking them up when I moved to New York but, remembering all the lies I’d told them, I didn’t bother. By that time, disco was dead or dying and I was in J-school at NYU, hanging out with snotty bohos, filmmakers,