The electric chime dings when she pushes open the door to the record shop. The air conditioning is welcome after the sticky humidity, her back and thighs sweaty from the bike ride and she stands in the entrance for a minute, looking around, basking. They don’t have air conditioning at home. At the house.
The store reminds her, strangely, of Russia. Of battered shops and bodegas, although this place offers music instead of bread and pickle. It's always a little dingy in here, like no one cleans up but she was here a few months ago with Alexei and an older teenager with dyed black hair was diffidently pushing a mop around the grey linoleum. He wore a bunch of silver rings, a leather cuff on one skinny wrist, and the metal caught the fluorescent bulbs as he pushed the mop around.
He'd grunted when Alexei asked for a cassette tape of a band and a song that Natasha knows is horribly outdated. Something about Alexei's demeanor set the guy to smirking, but he sold them the tape anyway. "We've got it on CD," he'd said. "It sounds way better, if you're gonna listen to that kind of thing."
"You need a CD player," she'd said to him, half cover story and half legitimate rebuke. "That stupid car is going to keep eating the tape."
"They don't pay us enough to have a car with CD," he says, "Plus, I like tapes."
She doesn't roll her eyes, even though she wants to.
The guy with glasses is working today instead of the black haired kid and Natasha's relieved. It should be his shift, but sometimes the owner mixes it up. It's a shit shift, no matter what -- midweek and midday in the summer when the only people inside are bored teenagers or office workers looking to kill time.
No one buys, just browses, but she thinks that probably doesn't bother glasses guy. He's got a battered brick of a laptop open, and a pencil stuck behind his ear wedged into dark curly hair that's too long. He's wearing an ugly plaid flannel shirt despite the heat, and it's buttoned nearly up to his neck. So, not fashion then. A choice. It looks too warm for the day.
He doesn't look up at her, just raises a hand like, "I see you" so she moves further into the store, sliding her fingers over the records in their plastic sleeves.
She heads to her favorite corner, the one with tattered posters of old bands, ones that were only a peripheral part of her preparation for this assignment. They figured she was too young, that the location too suburban. No one thought about her growing up out here, endless expanses of land and sky, casual sports and cookouts and popsicles. That in an effort to make them blend in, and fit in, the best thing she can do is want to stand out. She likes the music that stands out.
Melina doesn't like rock music, so Natasha doesn't buy the actual records. She could only play them on the living room turntable and a lot of the bands don't have records. Not anymore. They cost too much anyway, but she notes the names, the hair cuts: Siouxie Sue, the Slits, Bikini Kill, the Breeders, Jane's Addiction, The Pixies, Belly, Nirvana. The names feels aggressive. The music makes her feel alive. They play it on the community college radio station and she'll switch it on in the bedroom after Melina and Alexei go to bed, when Yelena, too, is at least pretending to sleep and absorbs the names and the lyrics. She buys the music on CD when she can, browsing the used section, and listens on the portable CD player, laying in the backyard and looking at the sky with the headphones loose on her ears.
Sometimes, she steals CDs, along with candy and gum. Just the used ones, just the ones that cost pennies. It's sleight of hand, a trick. She doesn't think any one notices.
She loves music videos, wants to watch MTV, but they don't have cable so she watches at friends’ houses, girls she knows from dance and soccer. She’s not much for trading secrets and playing M.A.S.H., but the access to television is worth giggling discussions about boys in their classes and whether they’ll win medals or trophies, go the community pool or swim at home.
Melina chides her about liking trash. "I'm 11," she says. "I'm supposed to like trash. Not everything has to be Prokofiev."
Melina mutters about boy bands and U2 and Madonna all of the music they've been trained to expect as popular here in America. "Fit in," she says. "The girls in your troupe, they listen to Whitney Houston. They listen to nice music."
Kristen P., and two of the Jennifers were playing the Beastie Boys before rehearsal, loud on the studio speaker. They got in trouble from Barb who doesn’t let anyone but teachers touch the stereo system, but the girls just giggled like it was something deliciously naughty. Rebellious.
She doesn't think they even heard the words, just knew that their parents wouldn't approve. That they were breaking rules, spoken and not.
The older girls on the dance team smoke cigarettes outside and talk about concerts and boyfriends and school and their parents and Natasha listens hard when they do. Her favorite, Caroline, has bright red hair, so red it looks like marker strokes. She told Natasha one day how much she envied her, natural red instead of from a bottle.
The feeling makes her giddy, even if her hair does not. She longs for the unnatural hue, and she and Yelena try to replicate it with Jello. Nothing happens, even when they try blue, except to make her feel sticky. Her hair still has a slightly unnatural cast to it, but it isn't a vibrant pop like Caroline's. She just looks unwashed.
Natasha has a $20 in her pocket that she lifted from Alexei's wallet. Chores and allowances were part of their mission brief, but he'd figured out early on that prices and expectations weren't consistent amongs children or parents so he rarely remembered to give her the money, even though she clears the table and mows the little patch of lawn and takes out the trash every single night. They make so much trash.
She fingers the bill as she turns the tiny bottles of dye over in her hands, picking them up, trying to surreptitiously open them.
"You need to bleach it first," glasses guy says. He's got a mellow voice, sounds like all the people around her. "Particular with hair that red."
She looks over her shoulder at him. He's fiddling with his pencil.
"Okay," she says, and goes back to looking at the bottles. That’s not good. That he’s noticed her. But maybe he’s just bored.
He sighs again. "Not that one. The other one. Manic Panic. If you want blue."
She picks it up and reads the label, stalling for time. She has the money, but she doesn't think it will buy this and bleach. She'll have to pocket it.
She flips through the V-section of the CDs. Van Halen, Van Morrison, The Vasalines, The Ventures, Veruca Salt, the Velvet Underground, VisionQuest... That one is $.99. She grabs it, and heads up to pay.
He doesn't even raise an eyebrow as he pops the security tag off the CD.
"You know," he says, "I don't mind the candy, or the crappy cds, but when you steal the hair dye, I have to pay for it. And I only make five bucks an hour."
She controls her blush as best she can, caught. He will definitely remember her now. She doesn't often get caught. Not sure what the best course of action is, she waits him out. A part of her thrills to it. Catch me, she wants to say, call the police. Lock me up.
He just holds her stare, though and finally, unwilling to cop to the theft and wondering why he doesn't just kick her out, she asks, "What are you doing?"
He shoves a hand into his messy hair, and snorts a little. "Trying to finish my thesis for my PhD. You know what that is?"
She nods.
"How old are you? 13? 14?"
She doesn't want to tell him, but finally says, "I'm 12." It's a lie. She won't be 12 until November, but he'll look at her like a kid and she hates that. Has hated it pretty much forever.
"Huh," he says.
"What's it about?"
"My thesis? Biochemistry. Nuclear Physics. The effects of certain types of radiation on cell lines."
He says it like she won't understand, but she nods again. "My dad works at Axio," she says. "But he's not a scientist."
Glasses guy shifts the heavy lenses on his face. His eyes are warm and brown. "Me too," he says. "At night. I'm a fellow, a researcher but they pay shit, sorry, they don't pay very well, so I need to do this, and no one else wants this shift, so..."
"There's no university here," she points out. "Not a big one."
Axio is a place where bad things are happening. Or at least it will be. She wonders what he does there.
His look gets sharper, hands flicking the pencil back and forth between them. "My aunt lives a few towns over. Broke her ankle, and there wasn't anyone else to help out this summer."
She doesn't ask what kind of help a guy working two crappy jobs and writing a dissertation would be because the explanation sounds like a cover. But he's on the defensive now, and letting the issue of the stolen dye alone, so she pushes.
"Do you need any more help here?" she says. "At the store?"
It's a test, and she's not sure why she throws it out there. He swallows a smile, and she dislikes him for it. "Not really, but maybe in a few years, if you're looking to make restitution. It's not a bad job. I get to listen to what I want, and mostly people leave me alone."
They'll be gone in a few years, when she's old enough for menial labor, and she wants to say that she has a job, doesn't need that condescending smirk, but then he says, "I'd have loved this when I was your age. But the owner, he mostly just wants people he doesn't have to tell what to do. Wants guys who will make customers feel bad for not knowing the latest bands, buy stuff to feel relevant. It's kind of a disease, but you gotta pay rent."
In Natasha's experience, that sums up most of the transactions she sees around her. Buy this, don't get left behind. Melina is practical at her very core, beyond even the training Natasha knows she has. She penny pinches, ignores all products outside of necessity unless it supports their cover but Alexei is often awash in the wonders of American consumerism and Yelena is frankly just a pain to take to K-Mart of JCPenney.
"So what will you do?" she asks, "That's so different?"
He sets his jaw, and says, "Make things better. Make people better."
Natasha is a person made. Even at this age, she knows that. But here, in this store, looking at posters and squirrelling away hair dye, she wants to make herself. It's hard to make people better. They resist it. She is. Well, she wants to.
She holds his gaze, and he shifts uncomfortably.
The door chimes, breaking the stale mate and he looks away. She feels oddly gratified.
"Anyway," glasses guy says, as a few older teenagers come in, jostling each other, one holding a skateboard like a prop. These guys are likely to steal a lot more than hair dye. "I'm leaving in a few weeks. So if you do finish your hair, come back and show me."
She returns at the end of the month, hoping, even when she shouldn’t, that he’ll remember her. Her roots are growing out and Melina is fussing about how to dye it back to red before school starts. The air is changing, everything is changing.
Glasses guy isn't at his post, just the skinny kid with the jewelry. "Nice hair," he says, and she tilts her chin. "Where's the other guy," she asks. He shrugs. "Back to Virginia," he says. "School. He left early and I’m stuck covering his shift ." He makes a face, like it's baffling.
She steals Yelena another copy of that stupid tape, just for spite.