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eyes and ears twitchy to every movement around me. I felt personally responsible for keeping the rest of my bunkmates safe. Irit waited three days before pointing out that the guys get to patrol the outer perimeter of the real base and that everything we were doing was just pretend. That took away a lot of the excitementof guard duty. After that I really didn’t take it seriously.
    Once the thrill was gone, I tried to laugh at our Makit’s seriousness, her melodramatic insistence on aggressive perfection. I felt foolish for ever believing this was serious business. I tried to maintain the mocking pose I was so famous for in high school.
    “These people need to remove the sticks from their asses. It’s not as if we’ll ever see combat,” I grumbled to Leah. Quiet and easygoing, her pale skin full of ginger-colored freckles, she never got boiling mad the way Irit and I did.
    She shrugged, her moon-face unusually serious.
    “You never know,” she said.
    That’s the thing about Leah. She was quiet, but she had a way with words. I shut up and stopped complaining … at least about that.
    When the three weeks of boot camp were finally over, we had a “breaking of the distance” and all the instructors who had been distant and aloof came over and gave us big hugs and said we were a great group, one of the best they’d ever taught. Irit rolled her eyes at Leah and me, but I just smiled. It turned out that our Makit, who’d been training us, punishing us, and occasionally praising us for the past three weeks, who was so commanding and stern, was only three months older than me. I’d been sure she was at least two years older.
    The same day, most people received their assignments. I’d already been told the week before that I’d be sent to a one-week administrator course. What mattered was the assignmentafter that. On impulse, I requested a posting “away from home.” My parents lived in Haifa, but I was hoping to get posted near Tel Aviv. My aunt lived in the heart of the city and it would be fun to live there with her. There was always a lot going on in Tel Aviv, and between concerts and comedy shows and funky shops, you could count on finding something fun to do on the weekend.
    Both Leah and Irit had requested to be stationed near their homes. With her high scores, Leah was assigned to a military-intelligence course. Irit, like me, got the administrator’s course.
    One of the girls from our squad had a camera and she took our picture, right at the end.
    I loved the picture, the three of us slim like Leah predicted, and tanned, arms draped over one another, looking very comfortable in our khaki uniforms.
    Six of us from our barracks received a week’s leave, and Irit invited us to her parents’ house on the banks of the Kineret.
    Irit put on MTV’s greatest hits, and the whole room throbbed with the bass from the speakers mounted on the walls. In the kitchen Leah made mystery punch. I was well into my third drink when someone bumped into me and the bright-red punch sloshed out of my cup. I watched, fascinated, as it arched out, hung suspended for a moment, and then came splashing down on the white marble floor.
    I started laughing, which got Leah’s attention. She looked so funny like this, loose-limbed and graceless. She tripped over a kitchen chair trying to get a closer look. Irit tried to help asLeah fought to right herself, but she was laughing so hard that Leah fell twice more, completely tangled in the chair legs.
    “I’m gonna pee in my pants,” Irit shrieked while poor Leah, struggling to right herself like a bug on its back, tried to stand.
    I helped Leah up and Irit leaned against the kitchen counter, gasping for breath, trying to stop the occasional giggle that kept escaping.
    “Wait,” she gasped. “Wait a second. We should mop this up.”
    Leah and I studied the red stain.
    “How about a towel?”
    “It’ll get dirty.” Irit frowned.
    That seemed profound.
    “I know!” Leah raced to