The Lost Girls by Heather Young

with, after all. I finished my Coke, draining the dregs in a noisy gurgle. They ignored me.
    Before long Harry and Ben came over, and then the entire gang. They pulled in more chairs and resumed their party, but now with Lilith and me at the center of their crowd. Or, rather, Lilith. I sat with my arms folded over my flat chest, my little-girl legs skinnybelow my skirt. But Lilith talked as though she were one of them. She, who normally ignored everyone but me, talked about the movies they’d seen as though Father had let her see them and the music they liked as though Father let her listen to the radio. Her hands gestured and her wide smile beckoned. Through the open button of her gingham blouse the tops of her new breasts glowed with an early summer sunburn. The boys darted looks at them when no one but me was watching.
    When the last of the supper crowd was gone, Abe came out to wait on them, and they kept him busy wiping up their spills, bringing them French fries, and refilling their pops. He moved among them with barely a word. Though he was the same age as the other boys, he was bigger in every dimension: taller, his arms more muscular, his shoulders broader. Lilith smiled at him when he took her order, and I noticed he served her first when he brought the trays of pops and fries. I thought about Father, and what he would say about this whole business, and my stomach clenched. I wanted to leave, but I was stuck between Lilith and Ben, and of course I wouldn’t have gone without her anyway. So I stayed, listening to their silly talk about the dance hall that had opened in Lexington—everyone seemed to know someone who’d gone, but none of them had ever been—until Mr. Miller told them it was closing time.
    The boys shoved one another as they walked up the path. Jeannette linked her arm through Lilith’s, and Betty walked on Lilith’s other side. I trailed behind, watching their heads bend close together as they talked. When we got to our house they called after her: “Good night! See you tomorrow!”
    In our bedroom, Lilith was giddy almost to the point of mania, twirling about the room so her nightgown wound around her thighs. “Did you see Charlie bought me two Cokes? And Ben couldn’t stop looking at me. I would love to go to that dance hall.Can you imagine?” She didn’t notice I said almost nothing in return.
    After that, she went to the lodge every night Father wasn’t there. When supper was over, she went upstairs and primped, leafing through the Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar magazines Jeannette and Betty loaned her, studying the models while I sat on my bed in silent misery. She’d never look like them, of course; not with her hair that Father wouldn’t let her cut and the babyish dresses Mother bought for her. This gave me some comfort, though secretly I wished she’d offer to do my hair in the new style she devised: swept back and pinned in a glorious mass that gave the illusion, at least, of short hair. I knew I’d never be pretty no matter what anyone did. But I would have liked to feel her fingers in my tangled curls and have her eyes meet mine in the mirror.
    â€œWhy do you want to go?” I asked her one night.
    â€œIt’s fun,” she said. I told her I didn’t see what was so fun about playing cards and drinking Cokes for hours on end. She stopped in the middle of pinning her hair and turned to face me. Pressed against the dresser, with her hands gripping its edge and her face set in tense lines, she didn’t seem like someone who was about to go have fun. “I’m practicing.”
    â€œPracticing for what?”
    Her pupils were large in the blue fields of her irises. “I’m getting out of here, Lucy. I’m going to go far away, and live a fabulous life. To do that, I need to make people notice me. So I’m practicing.”
    I looked at her raven hair, her bold face, the graceful young