Read The Four Ms. Bradwells for Free Online Page B

though, simply met Ginger’s look in that very frank Betts way and said, “But think of the possibilities for the morning. Twenty questions: Does your name start with a letter in the first half of the alphabet?” She laughed then, and we all laughed with her.
    Ginger sank completely underwater, her long hair drifting toward me before she reemerged with it slicked back from her pale forehead.
    “So what’s your future, everyone?” she asked.
    And when that evening was over, I still had no idea that Betts was a virgin, that Ginger had indeed once woken next to a guy whose name she didn’t know, that she’d dropped out of college a week later to move toSouth Africa with him. But I did know more about the Ms. Bradwells than I would have imagined learning in just those few hours.
    Laney meant to return to Atlanta after law school, maybe after a few years in D.C. with a politically connected firm, she said, to which Ginger said she ought to run for the Senate someday.
    “Not president?” Betts offered, palming a spray of water in Ginger’s direction. “If Margaret bloody Thatcher can do it, can’t we?”
    I admitted no real idea what I was doing in law school. My childhood dreams had included becoming a guitarist, movie star, news reporter, and Catholic priest. My mom had convinced me to take the LSAT, though, and I’d done well—a perfect 800, I found myself admitting in response to their inquisition.
    “Mia, the Savant,” Ginger said, reaching for the wine bottle at the edge of the hot tub and refilling my glass.
    She, unlike me, had her whole future laid out and she wasn’t afraid to admit it. She meant to join a Wall Street firm, make partner on an accelerated basis, have a weekend place in the Hamptons where she would race sailboats, and marry someone with a fortune to match the one she meant to make herself.
    “The Prince of Wales is still available,” Betts suggested. “The Crown Princess Ginger? Ginger of Wales? Haven’t you always wanted to be ‘of’ somewhere, really? And you wouldn’t have to worry about recognizing him when you woke up. Then you could be beheaded or burned at the stake when you got caught waking up next to one of those guys whose name you didn’t know!”
    “A handsome millionaire,” Ginger insisted. “I don’t care if he’s royalty, although I’m not opposed. And a flat in Paris—I forgot the flat in Paris.”
    “I, on the other hand, just want my head on a coin,” Betts declared.
    We talked for a minute about the Susan B. Anthony coin just out, the first U. S. tender ever to sport a woman’s face. Progress, I said, to which Ginger scoffed, “A dead woman’s head on a coin is progress?”
    “It is a dollar,” Laney said.
    A dollar that would be forever mistaken for a quarter—what does that say?
    “Progressio advenit sensim,” Laney said. “Progress comes slowly.”
    Ginger thrust her hands toward Laney, index fingers crossed at right angles as she juggled her wineglass. “In manus tuas, Domine!”
    “Into your hands, Lord?” Laney said.
    “From Dracula ,” Ginger said. “You know—when they’re about to finish off poor Vlad? In manus tuas, Domine! It’s the phrase the professor uses to ward off evil spirits, evil like Latin spoken outside the classroom. We’ll have none of that in this hot tub.”
    Betts made a finger cross too, then, her Speedo swimsuit puckering over her flat chest, and I followed, both of us mangling the Latin verbal shield, saying something that sounded, between us, like “In manners, too, dominate.”
    “In manus tuas, Domine,” Ginger repeated more slowly, as if she knew at least as much Latin as Laney did.
    “In manners, too, dominate!” Betts and I insisted, laughing as much from the abundance of wine as anything.
    “So your turn, Betts,” Ginger said. “What’s your dream?”
    “My head on a coin isn’t ambition enough?” Betts floated onto her back in the water, looking up into the fuzzy dark sky. “I have