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Show Anting Alone Page 217 always tell when she was building up to something important; she tried so hard to speak perfectly.) "You know how much fun we had in Mexico? Remember? The beach and the monkey mushrooms and all? Well, I got to thinking, you know, wouldn't it be nice if we could travel all over the place like that for a whole bunch of the time? So I took a page out of my cousin's book." She paused, smiled, and said, "I enlisted." "You enlisted what?" "Huh? In the army. The proud Iron Horse Division, and stuff like that." A joke. This was a joke. "C'mon, Shanny. You're too small. They'd never let you in." "Hunh-yunh. I got me thirty silver dollars in paper rolls and I wound them in my hair. I ate bananas in the bus all the way to Lincoln. I was plenty fat enough to join. See?" She pulled her teeshirt up. Her little belly was swelled up. "I'm going into the program where they teach you how to be a dental assistant. The army's program is ten times better than Bryman School, because they pay you, not you pay them." "Dental - ? " "Yeah. You're helping people. And I'd make such good money and we could travel all over the place on weekends. The place they'll send me first is Fort Carson. They got really nice on-base housing for - urn - married couples." She glanced at her fingernails with great casualness, and then resumed talking at her normal rate of enthusiasm. "I seen - I saw pictures. Real nice trailers they got. They're all different pastel shades of color, |