In the bathroom the plastic shelves are stocked with fluorescent lightbulbs and printer paper and a dozen two-gallon plastic tubs once used to store a cream sauce the franchise no longer offers. She removes her hat, her apron, her once-white tennis shoes and ankle socks. She unpins her name tag from her patriotically colored collared shirt, and pulls the shirt off over her head. Yellow grains of cornmeal sprinkle into her eyelashes and along the part in her hair. She steps out of her khaki pants, stiff with dried doughwater and dark, unidentified oils.
She stands before the mirror in her bra and underwear, listening to the hollow, slow-motion clangs at the triple sinks. She steps out of her underwear. Suzie bellows from up front, and someone’s nonmarking sole screeches against the tile. In the sink, using the granulated pink soap from the dispenser, our girl scrubs the smell of herself from her panties. Later, the dampness left from this washing will remind her of the pizza parlor and of poor pathetic Jeremy the delivery boy, and other remnants of a life she already wishes she could forget.
She waits for Lena on the bench in front of the counter, watching carryout mothers waddle from and to their idling cars with their pizzas and their slippery, foil-wrapped cheese sticks. Six and a half hours ago, in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart across the highway, Kyle Peterson, a tenor sax in their school’s jazz band, dumped Lena, his girlfriend of nearly a year, for the first-chair flutist, a freshman and a thinner, looser version of Lena. Two hours later, our girl wiped mascara from under Lena’s rubbed-raw eyes in the Sheetrock bathroom and asked her whether she wanted to get the fuck out of this shit town. Two hours after that, when she was certain her mother and stepfather had left for their Friday-night twelve-step meeting, our girl dialed her own phone number. She told the machine, I’m going to Lena’s after work to stay the night, and, I love you, which is what she always says after she lies to them. By the time Lena gets off, they’ve both got an uneventful adolescence’s worth of recklessness welling inside them, and one of them has a driver’s license and a like-new Dodge Neon and it’s just the tip of summer, which means there are college boys from places like Chicago and Florida and New York City wandering the Strip, sixty miles away, boys who came to Las Vegas looking for girls willing to do the things she and Lena think they are willing to do.
At eight o’clock Lena changes out of her uniform and wets her hair and underarms at the bathroom sink and then the two walk out into the parking lot with their soiled uniforms balled under their arms, their apron strings trailing along the asphalt, as though they don’t have to be back for tomorrow’s dinner rush, as though they don’t have to be back ever again.
On the road, all there is is desert and night and the taillights of the cars ahead of them. The radio comes in and out. Once, without taking her eyes off the road, Lena says, I should have done it with him. I don’t know why I didn’t. Our girl says nothing, only nods. When Lena swings the Neon around the final curve of the mountain range separating their town from Las Vegas, they see light sweeping across the valley floor like a blanket made of lights, like light is a liquid and the city is a great glistening lake.
Lena sucks a little saliva from her over-large teeth and asks is it okay if they turn the radio off. She has never driven in the city. Our girl says, That’s cool, because the radio is suddenly nothing compared to the billboards and limos and rented convertibles and speakers embedded in the sidewalks emitting their own music into the air, and because she’ll say anything to soothe Lena, to keep her driving.
Our girl directs Lena to park on the top floor of the parking garage at the New York New York. It is June 2001. This is the Las Vegas that has recently given up on becoming what they were calling a family-friendly vacation destination. The waterslides and roller coasters and ice-skating rinks that were once part of the megaresorts have been torn down to make room for additional hotel towers, floor space, and parking garages like this one. Lena pulls hard on the parking brake, the way her mother taught her. She moved from Minnesota her freshman year, when her mom was offered a job as the Nye County health nurse. Her parents have been divorced since before she can remember. She sees her father, an accountant, on Christmas and Easter, and lives with him in St. Paul for five weeks during the summer. Lena doesn’t know anything about what was once Wet ’n’ Wild or MGM Grand Adventures. Our girl spent her birthdays and end-of-year field trips in such places and could be saddened by their vanishing, could consider it the demolition of her childhood. But thoughts like these will not come to her for years.
Lena has a tube of waterproof mascara and a peacock blue eyeliner pencil in her purse. Our girl has vanilla-bean body spray and kiwi-strawberry lip gloss and gum in three different incarnations of mint. All these they trade in the front seat of the Neon until both are eyelined and fragrant and fresh-mouthed. From the parking structure they walk through the New York New York. The shops in the casino are façaded with half-scale fire escapes and newsstands and mailboxes with graffiti replicated on the side. They sell Nathan’s Famous hot dogs or tiny Statue of Liberty erasers and key-chain taxicabs and all varieties of shot glasses.
Our girl leads the way. The floor is busy carpet or plastic cobble. Tacky, her mother would call it, dully. The ceiling is lit to suggest stars glittering at twilight, as is popular along the Strip at this time. A bulbous red glittered apple rotates above a stand of slots. Our girl ignores the directional signs, which point down circuitous routes pitted with pocket bars and sports books. Once, Lena touches her lightly, thinking they’ve lost their way. Our girl says, Trust me, and Lena does.
Outside there is a breeze threading through the warm night and a jubilant honking of cars and all those billions of bulbs flashing in time, signaling to the girls that they are, at long last, alive. Across Las Vegas Boulevard is an enormous gold lion posing regally in the mist of a fountain. The lion is the property’s second; the original—a formidable openmouthed beast forged in midroar—was replaced because it frightened some Chinese tourists and was considered bad luck by others. Down the expansive block is an unimpressive aging Camelot, and beyond that a black glass pyramid, the apex of which emits a thick rope of light supposedly visible from space. The girls set off in the opposite direction, toward an ever-expanding ancient Rome and, across the palm-lined, traffic-clogged boulevard, the Eiffel Tower, where our girl’s stepfather poured concrete during phase two. They cross a Brooklyn Bridge, its waters strewn with coins, and pass before the wood-toothed mouth of a grinning Coney clown that will be demolished long before either girl reveals the happenings of this night to anyone.
The weekend crowds are dense on the sidewalks and mostly foreign or Midwestern. This allows the girls to amuse themselves at intersections by grasping hands, stepping off the curb against a red light, and glancing backward to see the crowd follow in their wake, taxicabs honking wildly. They have a teenage sense of their surroundings: They wander unknowingly into the photos of strangers, and twice Lena tramples the heel of a Japanese tourist walking in front of her. But they feel men and boys before they see them, poking each other in the ribs, perking for button-ups and baseball caps and oversize jerseys, whirling around at the sound of a skateboard.
Soon, propped on the rubber handrail of a down-bound outdoor escalator, our girl stares unblinkingly at a cluster of young men headed in the opposite direction. When they pass, Lena turns and waves to them, but our girl dismounts the escalator coolly and without turning, wielding the fearsome magnetism of ambivalence. When they reach the top, the young men turn and descend the escalator.