Blue Stars Read Online Free Page A

“Here’s what we’re going to do. Get your calendars, come on.” Felicia and Martine, sad and in lingerie, hadn’t moved. Lacey went and got their purses and dropped them in their laps. “You remember what that crazy girl did last time? From our group?”
    “Which one?” Martine said, and Felicia had to laugh. There was a mostly unspoken divide in their military wives support group between the more mature and settled women like themselves and what they called the “girls”—nineteen- or twenty-year-olds who had married too young, got pregnant before they should, and generally went haywire in one way or another after their PVTs shipped out. They bailed out of college courses, partied too much, mismanaged the budget, or Skyped soldiers nonstop with daily complaints. Lacey thought of it as her job to teach them how to behave, how to earn the trust and respect a military family deserved. She may have been new to the army herself, but it had given her life more purpose and meaning than she’d ever known—except for raising her son.
    “You know which one. Went with her girlfriends to Ladies Night at that topless place on North Avenue? Brought in by the cops for—well, I don’t know what exactly. Being a drunk fool.”
    “Lewd acts in public,” Felicia put in glumly. “Wandering around the parking lot with her boobies out.”
    “It got online too.”
    “Most of them can’t handle the pressure of being on their own for a year,” Lacey said.
    “Quickie benefit marriages.” Martine scowled.
    “Maybe so. Either way, they’re in it same as we are. So it’s up to us, unless we want these girls causing drama and embarrassing us all.”
    “She’s right,” Felicia said. She shrugged out of her silk robe and pulled on a sweater. “I’ll head up Bible study again, unless you know of someone else.”
    “No, that’s perfect.” Lacey flipped around in her daybook. “And I was thinking, Felicia … do you feel like doing something about Facebook, social media—what’s appropriate, what’s not? Either a onetime workshop or a short class?”
    “Yes, please, ” Martine begged. “They post dates and locations of missions. All the wrong info, of course, but still. ‘Godspeed two/three! Send good thoughts, they’re heading out tonight in Anbar!’ Makes me want to throttle someone.”
    “I don’t know…” Felicia said. “I’m not on Facebook much. Now that my teenagers are all over it.” She thought a minute. “But my team did a security presentation at work last month. I could adapt that for us, probably.” She tapped quickly on her phone’s screen.
    “I’ll run the kiddie co-op again,” Martine said. “I had a toddler in diapers during last deployment, got another for this one. Kill me now.”
    “And the parenting support groups,” Lacey said, consulting her list. “Break it down by ages again? Think we can get a few speakers this time?”
    “Sign me up for the smart-mouth teen group. I’ll bring the wine.”
    The studio assistant handed out copies of their receipts and then pointedly began to straighten up her desk and switch off lamps.
    The women put on their coats, exchanged hugs, laughed at the prospect of getting their portraits in the mail. They went out to the street and hugged again in the windy dark, under a streetlight. Martine and Felicia went arm in arm to their cars around the corner. Lacey watched them go.
    Rush hour traffic didn’t get really bad until she crossed Nereid Avenue. Lines of red headlights waited to crowd onto the Bronx River, crossed with white headlights backed up getting off the Cross Bronx. Plus you had Metro-North, people picking up commuters at Nereid or the Wakefield stop. In her overheated Pontiac Lacey used the time to mess with her bangs, arranging and rearranging them in the visor mirror. She kept the radio on scan, singing along to almost every scrap of song before it disappeared. Redid her lip color. Got honked at for lagging. Honked at some guy