by Yvonne Prinz
Halfway through dinner, Pierre appears at the top of the stairs, watching us a moment. Then he slowly descends like royalty deigning to move among the commoners. He pads over to the sofa and leaps up to the spot that Estelle recently vacated. He curls up and closes his eyes. My mom and I look on, amused. I guess we’re better than nothing.
When it’s time for Zach to leave, Estelle hugs him and kisses him hard on the cheek like he’s her long-lost grandson. She’s already invited him to attend a lecture series she’s organized out at the compound and he’s graciously accepted, schedule permitting.
Ravi follows shortly after. His classes start in the morning and he has to work on his syllabus. Estelle leaves too, reminding us that she brought the food so she shouldn’t have to help clean up.
My mom and I sit on the sofa next to Pierre, who seems mildly annoyed at first but stays where he is. I find the remote and turn on our tiny TV in time to catch the ten-o’clock news. They rerun the Bob & Bob story. We watch Bob, standing in front of those stupid banners, speaking into a microphone held by the reporter with her dyed blond hair and her overwhitened teeth. Bob’s shoulders are stooped and he looks defeated as he explains about record stores dying out across the country and how it’s become impossible to make a living selling music. Shorty and Jam appear behind him, hyperaware of the camera, wearing black cocktail dresses and black armbands in solidarity. They stand solemnly side by side, like funeral attendees, nodding in agreement with Bob and waving drunkenly to the camera. The reporter finishes with Bob and the camera zooms in tight on her face.
“Well, Janet, I guess that means we’ll all have to download our music now. You heard it right here in Berkeley. Record stores are a thing of the past.” She says it with a smile, like she’s describing something new and minty fresh.
The camera cuts back to Janet, the anchorwoman.
“I guess so, Diane. I’ll have to get my son to teach me. He’s a computer whiz and he’s only eight!” She chuckles and they move on to the next story.
I turn off the TV and my mom and I get up and start to clean up the remains of dinner.
Chapter 25
I’ve been avoiding Bob’s for weeks, taking a different route to school, pretending that the events of the summer haven’t altered me, but I finally got up the nerve to walk past it today on my way home from school. Clouds are bunching up in the sky and rain can’t be too far off. Approaching Bob’s, it feels like I’m visiting someone for the first time in a graveyard after I’ve buried them. I’m not so keen to see it in its new “condition.” There’s a big for lease sign in the window with the Realtor’s name and number on it. I peer into the darkened windows at the empty space. With all the bins taken out it looks pretty big in there. Years of concert posters are still plastered all over the walls. I know each one by heart. The emptiness of the place overwhelms me with sadness. I stand there with my forehead pressed against the grimy glass for a while.
A lot of homeless people have taken up residence in front of the store. There’s no one to tell them to move along and the wooden overhang keeps the sun off them. Among them, sitting on the pavement with their backs against the empty store, I see Shorty and Jam. They’re in rough shape. Their eyes are glassy and unfocused and they don’t even recognize me. They’re wearing stained jeans and T-shirts, nothing pretty from the free box. Cool nights and rain lie ahead, and being homeless on famous Telegraph Avenue will probably start to lose its appeal.
I saw Bob one more time just before he left for Florida. He was at the post office putting in his change of address. Dao had already gone down there to start getting them set up. He looked happy to see me. We stood there for a few minutes and talked about the new life he was heading to and I wished him well and told him that I hope he catches a lot of fish. For a second there it looked like we might start up a good “blah, blah, blah, fill in band,” but it never happened. I watched him walk toward his old van and I felt like I might sit down and cry but then it passed. I was okay.
After Bob’s closed, the only half-decent job I could find was at a coffee bar across from campus run by a crazy Italian guy named Agostino. He taught me how to pull a good strong espresso and foam the milk perfectly. The place is really busy and I barely get a moment to catch my breath during a shift. The tips are lousy too. Zach has deemed it filthy but he still comes to visit me whenever I’m working. There are two almost cool things about the job. One is that I get to pick the music we play. The other is that Agostino lets me distribute my zines there, not as ideal as a record store but they’re getting out into the world. Some of my old Bob & Bob’s customers come in from time to time but we hardly ever talk about music.
Kit still works at the vintage-clothing store. She sees Nelson but she’s quick to tell you that she’s not in love, and she doesn’t call him her boyfriend even though he calls her his girlfriend. She says she’s not ready for anything heavy right now so he just has to deal. She spends a lot of time planning our road trip in the not-too-distant future and she’s all signed up for driving lessons.
My mom and Ravi are madly in love.
My dad quit Hong Kong High after only three gigs. He said the final straw was when the bass player barfed into his kick drum after a gig just because it was round and looked vaguely like a toilet. He picked up a gig playing in a backup band for a jazz singer who works in casino cocktail lounges and fancy nightclubs around northern California and Nevada. Her name is Leona Miles. She’s fifty-seven.
Kee Kee is due in the spring. My dad will be a father for the second time in his life . . . that we know of.
I rarely think about M/Joel/William anymore, but when I do, I try to think of him not in a jail cell but living the life I imagined for him in South Carolina with his big happy family and his dog. I hope he’s sitting on a wooden porch swing writing in a journal or maybe reading his way through the classics. The other day I came across the drawing of him that the sketch artist copied for me that day at the police station. I decided that it was time to throw it away. I really hope M gets another chance at his life.
Pierre has started sleeping on my bed at night. We jockey for position and I usually end up clinging to the edge while he sprawls out luxuriously. He seems to be over the whole Suki thing, but if he could talk he would probably say, “I miss her.” But then if he could talk, he probably could have talked her out of leaving.
Akiko has added a lively element to our household. She owns more beauty supplies than Paris Hilton and she has her own extensive collection of CDs. She constantly dazzles us with her wardrobe choices, and her shoe and boot collection should be in a museum. She also doesn’t seem to mind the mess but she does insist that we vacuum from time to time to keep Pierre’s dander to a minimum. She’s learned to say the word allergic really well. The vacuuming has reunited us with a lot of lost items.
Zach and I are moving tentatively toward something that could be conceived of as a relationship if you don’t look too closely. We see each other whenever we can and, while he may not be Joey Spinelli or M/Joel/William, Zach knows a thing or two about the female anatomy. Who knew that Zachary Joseph Zimmerman, a totally neurotic, skinny nerd with OCD, could have me sighing with pleasure? He also has a way of making me feel beautiful, and let’s face it: He’s seen me at my worst. We openly admit that our love for each other is primarily based on the fact that we’re the only two people we know of who can talk about music for fourteen hours straight and wake up in the morning ready to start all over again.
My blog is going strong. I’ve had over forty thousand hits, and a steady stream of new readers arrive daily, and Elliot and I are designing a Vinyl Princess T-shirt. A few days ago, I got an email from this guy who runs a couple of big-time music blogs with tons of ads on them. He told me that he’d been reading my blog and watching it explode and he wanted to know if I was interested in selling it to him and I could still write it. He called it a “partnership.” He said it could be a real moneymaker if we sold some ads on it. I deleted the e
mail. There’s only one Vinyl Princess.
The day that Bob finally closed Bob & Bob’s for good, Zach and I took a blanket and we hiked up the long hill to the Lawrence Hall of Science and sat on a bluff watching dusk fall over all of Berkeley and the bay beyond that. It was a clear autumn night, the first of many to come. We didn’t say much. Lights started to come on below us and stars flickered into the sky. The neon sign at Bob & Bob’s stayed dark for the first time in twenty-three years. Zach took my hand in his.
“You got a blog figured out for tomorrow, Veep?” he asked. He calls me Veep now, short for Vinyl Princess.
“Bob Dylan, Nashville Skyline, and Bob Marley, Uprising.”
Zach nodded. “Cool.”
Eventually, a chill crept over us and we folded up the blanket and made our way down the hill together in the dark.
That night I finally finished Zach’s mix CD, and I was right: It blew his mind.
Copyright
The Vinyl Princess
Copyright © 2010 by Yvonne Prinz
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harperteen.com
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Prinz, Yvonne.
The Vinyl Princess / by Yvonne Prinz. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Allie, a sixteen-year-old who is obsessed with LPs, works at the used record store on Telegraph Ave. and deals with crushes—her own and her mother’s—her increasingly popular blog and zine, and generally grows up over the course of one summer in her hometown of Berkeley, California.
ISBN 978-0-06-171583-9
[1. Sound recordings—Fiction. 2. Music—Fiction. 3. Blogs—Fiction. 4. Zines—Fiction. 5. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 6. Berkeley (Calif.)—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.P93678Vi 2010 2009014270
[Fic]—dc22 CIP
AC
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EPub Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780061990571
10 11 12 13 14 CG/RRDB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
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