ALICE Ch 198

The hotel bar is busy at this hour; it’s the night before a race. Lots of people want to have fun with the excitement, and the people with skin in the game want to take the edge off. Those who are allowed to, at any rate. Lora can absolutely do her job with a hangover, so she’s quite comfortable striding up to the bar and claiming a stool.

It takes her a moment to realize that the slim blonde morosely draped over the bar beside her is Kylie. That’s a hell of a coincidence. It seems like there are a lot of secrets among the staff of FUTA Racing, and this is just one more of them. Lora and Kylie aren’t really colleagues. They met years ago when Lora’s family started summering on Kangaroo Island. Lora was the bookish girl annoyed to be away from her friends, reading sullenly under an umbrella at the beach. Kylie, meanwhile, had been the quintessentially hot blonde lifeguard and party girl, complete with a red one-piece suit and half the coast drooling over her. Lora had met a boy and Kylie had stolen him, albeit without meaning to; she’d rescued some drowning child who’d yanked on her swimsuit causing a wardrobe malfunction that Lora’s boyfriend hadn’t been able to ignore.

The next summer they’d quarreled over another boy, and Lora had lost. Spending the last days of summer knowing that Kylie was having sex with the guy that she liked had put her into the deepest depression of her life.

But Lora came from money and Kylie did not, so Kylie had never perceived the power differential between them the same way. She’d been thinking of herself as the scrappy underdog in their conflict, which was profoundly ironic.

The next summer, Lora had been delighted to learn that not only had Kylie been dumped, but she’d also gained weight. Unfortunately, Kylie’s perfect genes ensured that weight only made her more attractive, and they’d fought again, this time over another Haitian tourist called Benoit. Convinced that Benoit was well aware of how insanely hot he was and merely toying with them, Lora had matured and objected on moral grounds to the battle. In her mind, she likened herself to Alexander Hamilton firing his pistol into the air.

Triumphant, Kylie had promptly walked in on Benoit being intimate with Jeffrey, an equally hot but insufferable local. So he hadn’t been toying with them after all. All the same, Kylie’s self-esteem had never been particularly high. She’d found it quite moving when Lora comforted her after all that, and from there they’d been the closest friends. Back then, Lora had spent more time with Kylie than with her own sister, Kathy. Indeed, it was because of Lora that Kylie was on contract with FUTA Racing. Kylie had no credentials to speak of; she wasn’t a qualified trainer or nutritionist. She was just a lifeguard who’d spent her summers in the right place at the right time to know somebody on the inside.

It's probably not FUTA’s juiciest secret, but it has to stay a secret all the same. Even if they haven’t been very close lately. Kylie’s been all wrapped up in Alice and Lora’s been the same way with Glynda. This is work, not the summer. And they aren’t teenagers anymore.