Front Lines (Front Lines 1)

“He’s not my cutie-pie!”

“He got his notice. He ships out next week.”

“What?”

“Drafted. As in, Greetings: You are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States.”

Strand suddenly looks different in light of this development. He’s a good-looking boy, a serious boy with dark hair and skin only lightly afflicted by adolescent pimples. Now he looks at once younger and older. Too young at barely eighteen, and yet old enough legally. Too old for school books, too young for a rifle and a helmet.

She pictures him in an olive drab or khaki uniform. She imagines polished brass buttons and a hat with the brim riding low over his eyes. Yes, he would look pretty sharp in that uniform. He has the shoulders for it, and the narrow waist. But Jenou is still talking, so Rio has to break off contemplation of just what else Strand would look good in.

“If you enlist, they say you get to choose what you do. You know, like are you a typist in an office somewhere, or are you getting shot at. If you wait to get drafted, it’s straight to the front with bang-bang and boom-boom. You know I can’t stand loud noises.”

Rio has heard this before, everyone has, it’s common knowledge, though Rio’s father bitterly dismisses it as nonsense. “I was in the last war,” he said. “Believe me, the army sends you wherever they want you, and if you think you’re arguing about it, then you don’t know the army.”

“I guess if I was to be drafted, I’d want to go to the front,” Rio says. She wants to sound bold, to match Jenou and Strand, and Rachel too. Is Jenou serious? Surely not. But Strand doesn’t have the option of being unserious, does he? Not if he’s gotten his notice.

“What? Oh, you think you’d kill some Jap for what he did to Rachel?” Jenou nods knowingly and pops a fry into her mouth.

“Maybe,” Rio says, defiant. But it troubles her to think that revenge would be her motivation. It isn’t really true either. Sure, she would like to find a way to somehow deal with her sister’s death, but she really has no desire to kill anyone, not even a filthy, cowardly Jap.

No, if she were drafted then she’d want to do her part. That’s it: a desire to do her part.

Her part.

Her part.

The entire conversation is now making Rio uneasy. It feels almost as if Jenou is tempting her. It wouldn’t be the first time, and now she’s remembering that time at the gravel quarry, she and Jenou walking along the edge high above eerily green water of uncertain depth. Jenou had jokingly suggested jumping, and Rio had been seized by a sudden desire to do it. She hadn’t, but for a few seconds she had wanted to.

It bothered her at the time; it bothers her now as she recalls the emotion, that “what the heck?” feeling. A sense of reckless liberation, of breaking away. The freedom of foolishness. Had Jenou jumped in herself, Rio would have followed.

Now Jenou is considering jumping. And Rio feels the pull again.

Everyone would be amazed.

Who? Rio? Rio Richlin enlisted? Why, I never!

“It seems to me,” Rio says, not really even talking to Jenou anymore, “it seems to me that this being the first war where they let girls fight, we ought to make a good account of ourselves.”

Rio enjoys the way Jenou’s exquisitely shaped eyebrows rise.

“They let us fight? Let? Funny how I never even knew I was deprived, not going off to war.”

Rio nods sli

ghtly, discreetly, to indicate Strand, who is behind Jenou but who Jenou can still somehow see with that all-around, three-hundred-sixty-degree boy-awareness Jenou possesses. “Why should he maybe get hurt and not me?”

Jenou shrugs. “It’s how it’s always been, up until now. But you don’t have to sell me, honey. I can see all the advantages in being far from home and surrounded by healthy young males. That’s why I’m enlisting.”

It’s Jenou’s first definite statement, and even though she’s been talking about it for the last five minutes, Rio is still caught off guard. She hadn’t quite believed it.

Jenou really is jumping. Rio sees it in her eyes: defiance, anxiety, a little sadness. But excitement as well.

It’s that hint of excitement that tempts Rio.

“Look,” Jenou says, spreading her fingers palm-down on the table and leaning in. “First of all, they’re not going to send women to the front lines to get involved in all of that. They’ll have us typing forms, answering telephones, and driving trucks. I figure the war’s on for another six months or a year at most. So I spend the first part of it checking out the available stock of masculine animals, and the last part closing the deal.”

Rio shakes her head in mock despair. “For you even a war is just another excuse for being boy crazy.”