Free The Vinyl Princess by Yvonne Prinz Page A

too.
    “Hello. How are you this evening, Miss Allie?”
    “Great, Ravi. How are you?”
    “Very well, thank you. I apologize for calling during the dinner hour but I have something important to tell your mother. May I speak with her, please?”
    I look at my mom and point at her and then at the phone. She shakes her head violently. “Sorry, Ravi, she’s, uh, unavailable right now.”
    “Unavailable?”
    “Yeah.” I move into the kitchen and lower my voice. “She’s sort of on a date. Can I get her to call you later?”
    “A date?” He sounds mystified. “Are you quite certain?”
    “Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
    “Yes, well”—his voice catches a bit and he clears his throat—“perhaps you could ask her to call me as soon as possible.”
    “Will do, Ravi,” I tell him. I follow up with a lame “Have a nice night.”
    He hangs up. That was weird. He sounded so bewildered at the concept of my mom dating.
    My mom scrambles to tell Jack all about Ravi. He seems amused at her description of him. It’s clear she doesn’t want to kick off this relationship with any secrets, and Ravi certainly isn’t a secret.
    I leave them at the table and head upstairs to listen to Billy Bragg, Talking with the Taxman About Poetry . Billy Bragg is featured on today’s blog. I was talking to Bob about him today at the store and he told me that Billy used to work in a record store in England in the eighties. He became the socialist voice of the working class in England, and a lot of his music is highly politicized, which is cool, but then he’ll come at you with a line like, “She cut her hair and I stopped lovin’ her,” and a song like “Must I Paint You a Picture?” probably one of the most romantic songs I’ve ever heard. Then, as if he wasn’t cool enough, he took some old Woody Guthrie lyrics that Woody’s daughter was hanging on to and turned them into these amazing songs that he recorded with Wilco. The first time I heard “California Stars” from the Mermaid Avenue album I thought I would die.
    Between songs, I hear my mom and Jack downstairs, talking and laughing. I’m not sure what I was expecting but this Jack guy seems okay. Before I went upstairs, as I was saying good night, I asked him if he likes pancakes.
    “Well, sure, doesn’t everyone like pancakes?” He smiled like he was humoring a five-year-old. My mom looked at me like I’m an idiot.
    All I can say is that he’d better not be here when I get up in the morning. I’m definitely not ready for that.

Chapter 6
    K it’s elaborate scheme to expose her boyfriend, Niles, as a lying shithead involves several steps, the first of which is the two of us assuming new identities. I sit helpless on the toilet lid in Kit’s tiny bathroom amid a virtual explosion of idling curling irons and other implements of beauty while Kit applies more makeup to my face than I’ve ever worn in my entire life. She pins back my own black hair with bobby pins and attaches a wig to my head. I now have waist-length blond hair with bangs. She digs through her eyeglass collection and hands me a pair of tortoiseshell frames. I put them on and check myself out in the bathroom mirror. I look like a prostitute who can do long division. For my final flourish, Kit applies red lipstick to my lips.
    “Do this.” She smacks her lips together.
    I obey. She looks at me critically, studying her work, and then grins. “You are so hot!”
    “I don’t feel hot. I feel stupid.”
    Kit’s own transformation is a little more restricted, because she’s using her sister Roxanne’s fake ID to get us into the club, so she has to look somewhat like the photo on it. Her wig is red and it’s shaped into a pageboy. She’s also wearing a hat so that she can obscure some of her face. It’s tweed with a narrow brim that she pulls low. I’m wearing knee-high boots with a stacked heel and a short skirt with tights. Kit is wearing a navy pleated skirt with oxfords. Her look is naughty