“Yeah, as it happens we don’t sell much, uh, Coca-Cola,” he said. “And, okay, I guess I shouldn’t drink it, but I do.”
She looked surprised for a second, then smiled and shrugged.
“I like this place. It’s great,” she said, again smiling. She didn’t look as young to him now. Maybe it was the way her expression lingered in her face even after she stopped smiling. It was playful, wasn’t it?
“Are you the owner?” she asked.
“Nope.”
She looked at him as though she wanted him to elaborate, and when he said nothing more, she laughed again.
Miranda started to hang around the store at the beginning of the summer. Sissy brought her, or they knew each other. He guessed Miranda was another well-fed suburban girl; usually they look like that when they first move to the city, a little too soft and a little too anxious. Her arms perpetually folded across her chest, legs crossed and then crossed again with her toe hooked under her ankle. Her round face and heavy-lidded dark eyes were offset by a constantly working, overexpressive brow. A little bit of a scowler, this girl, until she suddenly broke into that easy all-points, grownup woman smile. He decided he liked her. She always said hello to him and cleaned up after herself. She studied the flyers and even started to come to a few of the tester meetings.
Only months earlier Nash had inaugurated the night meetings with a few groups he helped organize, and already it seemed everyone was an organizer. Instead of starting a band, these kids started collectives and fronts and miniarmies. The store even had a wait list for some of the slots. He let Sissy handle all that.
Nash should have felt Prairie Fire as meeting space was a great success, but he found too many of these groups indistinguishable. They wanted to demonstrate in front of a senator’s office with placards. Or they wanted to march papier-mâché effigies of the president to city hall. Some groups tended to be unimaginative and self-serious in Nash’s estimation. This inspired Nash, against his better judgment, to continue devising some groups of his own.
Right after he finished his first real conversation with Miranda, he held a meeting of the Church of the Latter Day Drop Society, which was his neo-yippie, post-situationist group, with an open-ended policy to let anyone who happened to be in the shop participate. A whopping eight kids straggled in. He noticed Miranda stuck around as he put his boxes of books away and cleared the table for the meeting. After her one moment of chastising Nash for his soft drink choice, she didn’t speak but seemed to be pensively listening.
She sat in the farthest seat in the back, in the corner, blowing on her chai tea, legs crossed. Her laceless sneakers had thick white rubber soles, on which she had written slogans and drawn graffiti-style pictures with a black marker. It struck him as sweet, the youthful gesture of writing on your shoes. A strange form of self-expression similar to writing on your school binder: half-motivated by declaring your difference to the world (an important thing) and half-motivated by a desperate enslavement to what other people thought of you (the terrifying thrall to presentation that intensified everything crappy about being an adolescent). She charmed and distracted him with her shoes, and he actually tried to decipher the slogans, which was impossible.
She began coming in most days for her tea. Nash also noticed her on the street one afternoon walking arm in arm with Sissy. They smiled at him and waved, and then did that thing that young women do — fall about in giggles as soon as you wave back, as if you disappeared after the moment passed and they were now alone, critiquing it. She turned up again the following week at another of his groups, the Kill the Street Puppets Project, an antipuppet guerrilla theater group. That got a big crowd, as many people seemed to have a secret aversion to papier-mâché and chicken wire. She sat again in the corner, her limbs double-crossed, her face stern and serious, and earnestly took notes. It wasn’t until her third week of attending his group meetings that she finally spoke up. This was during the Brand and Logo Devaluation Front meeting.
She wanted to hijack labels on Nike shirts.
“We could alter them to indicate that they were made in China under appalling conditions. Make it look exactly like a Nike label, but instead of saying one hundred percent cotton, it says made from sixty percent Chinese prison labor, forty percent child labor.”
“Yeah, and I think product tampering is like a major felony,” said a guy in a slightly unraveled, fuzzy alpaca vintage sweater worn with an oversized trench coat. He had on a hand-knit cap and never sat or removed his hands from his coat pockets, as if to say, “I’m not really here,” or “I am almost not here, I’m just going to stay long enough to try to make everyone not want to do anything.”
Miranda furrowed her brow and gnawed at the edge of her fingernail. She had the raw, swollen nail beds of a chronic biter. It was always these self-devouring types who ended up here, hating Nike. (Nike, like Starbucks, originated in the Northwest and then exploded in horrendous global ubiquity. The local kid culture obsessively focused on these formerly local corporations. They had a sense of entitlement when it came to making them targets, even as they still loved and desired the products on some level, too. That love seemed to increase their desire to undo the corporations that made them. It used to be you had to make munitions to piss people off. Now it was enough to be large, global and successful. That made it a more radical, systematic critique, Nash thought. And more futile, naturally.) Nash figured there were worse ways for these kids to expend their anger and energy. Way worse ways. So he listened to them rant and plot against Nike, and it was good.
Nash’s head throbbed; he couldn’t sleep after the previous night’s late meeting. Despite his fatigue, he caught himself looking around throughout the day for Miranda. He sat at the common table drinking coffee and sorting used books when he saw it happen again. And again it was Davey D. Again it was one of those extreme magazines sealed in plastic. It couldn’t have been more than three weeks since the previous incident. Nash sat with clipboard and pen, surrounded by stacks of old books. He sneezed the whole time he priced the used books. These were books donated to them or acquired at estate sales or at flea markets. Many of them were mildewed, all of them were dusty. Sometimes it seemed to him the more unusual or valuable the book was, the more likely it would have acquired the stench of decay. He usually quarantined the bad ones. They infected the good ones. But he didn’t throw them out. The main reason the mildew grew there in the first place was because the books were neglected — unread, uncracked even, for years. Admittedly many of these books were from small, do-it-yourself-type presses: cheap, disposable productions with high-acid paper that began decaying right from the get-go. There really wasn’t a remedy for the mildew — he would end up putting those books in the free bin in front of the store.
Davey D.’s first theft was not particularly a blow, but its repetition, and the fact that it was right in front of him again, made it unusually upsetting. He didn’t even want to carry these types of magazines, but some of the kids loved that crap — the semi-retarded, tiny subversion of extreme, physically expert but mentally unchallenging subcultures. He called it brat refusal, that skate-rat rebelliousness, but it was still alternative in some way, it still had the energy of resistance. And he was not convinced that these compromises were a bad thing, not convinced that the thinnest veneer of rebellion wasn’t still preferable to none at all.