The Marigny Keepers

Chapter 6

Satisfied that she had found all there was to find in the resources at Loyola, Alene glanced at her mobile phone and noticed that it was almost dinner time. The thought of taking the trolley back to the Marigny in the stultifying dusk heat was unappealing. Furthermore, Alene realized, going back to Miss Briscoe’s and spending the night alone in her room was also unappealing. She wished hadn’t been so quick to turn down Andy’s offer of a movie, but by that hour he was probably reporting for duty for his Friday night shift.

Alene left the library and wished she knew more people in town for the summer. Almost all of the girls with whom she hung out during the school year had gone home to their respective parents’ houses for the summer months. It had been easier not to think about Eric when her girlfriends were texting her to hang out at Juan’s Flying Burritos or to do homework at Rue de la Course coffee shop, where Alene and her friends like Margie Harris and Esther Rabinowitz would refill their ice coffees until nightfall. Margie was at home in Texas working as a counselor at a summer camp for children with disabilities. Esther was in Israel attending a very different kind of summer camp, one where she was learning how to code applications for mobile phones.

Alene sighed when she reached the bus stop, desperate for a good reason to not go back to Miss Briscoe’s just yet. She remembered Dr. Schwartzbach telling her that there was a jazz concert somewhere on the Tulane campus that night.   Listening to some jazz in a crowded venue, even if it was in the familiar buildings of her own university, was strangely a million times more appealing than the long bus ride home and an evening spent alone. Before she even knew what she was doing, she was calling Heather, the other bartender from The Big Easy who had Friday nights off.

“A jazz concert? At Tulane?” Heather asked incredulously. She reacted to Alene’s invitation to join her that evening as if Alene had asked her to accompany her on a trip aboard the space shuttle.

Alene blushed for a moment, reconsidering the invitation extended to her brash co-worker. What had she been thinking? Heather was of drinking age and was super hot. Probably the last thing on earth she would want to do on a Friday night was watch a bunch of skinny, nerdy guys practice jazz in one of the damp auditoriums at Tulane.

“Yeah,” Alene said, wishing she could take back the entire phone call. “I don’t have any other plans tonight and I thought it might be fun.”

“All right,” Heather sighed. “But only if you let me drag you to Robert’s afterwards. There’s this guy I’ve been trying to get with and I know he hangs out there because he went to Tulane.”

An hour later, Heather rolled up to the auditorium at Tulane in her clunky beige Honda. One of the back windows had been punched in and Heather had temporarily fixed it by duct-taping a chunk of cardboard in the place where the window used to be. Alene waited for her curbside as she parked, and watched in delight as Heather struggled with all of her security devices to lock up the car.

“First this,” Heather demonstrated, locking The Club over her steering wheel.

She climbed out of the front of the car and then tapped a bunch of buttons on the remote that hung on her key chain. “Now, the alarm,” she continued.

A loud beep blasted for just a second, indicating that the alarm had been set.

“I know,” Heather huffed, tucking her keys into the bottom of her pink leather purse. “It’s a lot of muscle for a car that I probably couldn’t even give away. But they’re the only wheels I’ve got.”

Alene immediately felt underdressed entering the auditorium with Heather, who was wearing a spaghetti-strap tank top and short pink denim shorts with towering espadrilles. But she was enormously thankful for having an event to attend, and company. Naturally, all male heads turned as soon as the girls entered the auditorium.