Free Girl Rides the Wind by Jacques Antoine Page A

would come through the floor and the bulkheads no matter what. But she still slept soundly enough – in fact, that was the problem. The dreams didn’t come.
    It probably didn’t help that shipboard life put such a crimp in her exercise regimen. Running laps on the flight deck in the odd, quiet hours quickly grew tedious, and she’d devised an elaborate route below decks, up and down ladders, tumbling through open hatches, and weaving in and out of the Phrogs and Harriers stored on the hangar deck. She got yelled at occasionally, and sometimes had to retreat to the treadmills lined up in the second deck training room intermittently reserved for the Marines. She didn’t mind the company, though most of her platoon preferred not to exercise surrounded by the ‘huge’ guys who treated the weight room as their personal domain. Durant had seen to it that none of them would hassle her, though his solicitude wasn’t really necessary.
    “You lifting today, LT?” asked Lance Corporal Stallings. The big grin he wore gave some balance to his “high-and-tight” haircut. It didn’t look that bad, but flashing his teeth at least distracted from the pointy effect the coiffure otherwise produced on top of his over-developed trapezius muscles. “Because I can spot you, if you need.”
    “No, thanks, Tarot,” Emily said, between jerks on the pull-up bar. “That’s not really my thing.”
    The peculiar quality of Marine nicknames never ceased to amuse her, especially since they rarely bore any obvious connection to the physical appearance of whoever’d earned them. You’d have to know how bad a poker player Stallings was to understand why they called him Tarot, especially the pouty look he’d get on his face when fortune frowned on him, as he saw it, since he’d never quite fathomed how anything but malign chance could be responsible for his losses.
    Did they have a nickname for her, one they hadn’t the nerve to utter in her presence? On her first billet, at Camp Schwab on Okinawa, a Gunnery Sergeant had called her Canine, and then immediately apologized.
    “It’s because of the tournament, you know, the one at Quantico,” he’d offered as explanation. “We all saw the video.”
    “What video, Gunny?” she demanded, though she already knew what he meant. Footage like that spreads quickly, she knew well enough, maybe not on the Marine Family Network, though for all she knew some wise-guy had probably sent it along the Marine Corps Enterprise Network.
    “You know, LT,” he said, too carried away with the excitement of his news to notice her changing mood. “When you stabbed that guy in the neck with his own knife, the entire company wanted to call you Vampire, and then it became Elvira… and then it eventually just became Canine… I mean, for the teeth.”
    Emily didn’t say anything about it then, though her displeasure must have been obvious, and eventually the name died out. At least, no one else ever said it to her face again.
    “What’d she say?” Cpl Siegersen hissed a bit too loudly, though she figured it would be best not to notice. The big, quiet Swede everyone knew as Racket had been bursting to tell her something from the moment he’d seen her in the training room a few days earlier. At first, they’d dubbed him Nike after someone informed the platoon that the first syllable of his name meant victory, and this eventually became Tennis, probably folding in a reference to the pontoon-sized tennis shoes he wore. It didn’t take long for this to evolve into Racket, which stuck because of his generally quiet demeanor, irony being another imperative of Marine nicknames. “Did you ask her?”
    “Quiet, you big oaf,” Stallings hissed back. “She’ll hear you.”
    “Okay, guys,” she said, still hanging from the chin-up bar. “Spill. What’s so damned exciting?”
    “Sorry, LT, sir… uh, ma’am,” Siegersen said, tripping over every other word, and staring at his shoes.
    “Eyes,