“Didn’t say she wasn’t. I own all her shit. It’s just that I’m the rare records buyer for this store, and that includes any signed stuff, so I know what we have and what we don’t.”
“Why don’t you let me tell you what I want before you decide it for me?” she said, tiny brows lowering to make a tiny V.
I crossed my arms and waited. “Go.”
“I’m looking for a particularly hard-to-find piece of vinyl.”
“If it exists, I can find it,” I informed her.I will find anything for you.…
She tapped her middle finger on the glass.Tap, tap, tap.As if she were matching time with a slow metronome in her head. Something was definitely different about Jane.
Just when I thought she might not respond at all, she said, “Only twenty-five existed in 1984. One is in a jukebox in a Highland Park bar on Figueroa. One is owned by their former lead singer, Henry Rollins. One went up for sale last year online, but I got way outbid at the last minute. A few are supposed to be floating around the state with private collectors, and nobody knows where the rest are.”
Huh. Okay. I ignored the tapping and the odd way she was matching the cadence of her voice to the rhythm of those taps. I even tried to temporarily forget about the fact that she was my long-lost Ophelia. My Jane.
Just the girl who’d haunted my thoughts for the last couple of years.
No big deal.
But I did my best to pack all that baggage up and try to look at her now as a stranger. Which she was—when it came down to it. And when I thought of her that way, as someone I didn’t know anymore, I was simply standing in front of a girl who wanted to talk vinyl. A pretty girl my age, not some cracked dude older than my dad who smelled like weed and cheap aftershave.
This was exciting. It didn’t happen every day.
“You’re talking about Black Flag,” I said. “The Double Deuce pressing ofMy War.”
“Correct,” she said, speeding up her tapping a bit. “First pressing was screwed up and had ‘Side 2’ printed on both sides of the first twenty-five copies.”
I leaned closer to her. “Some say the Double Deuce doesn’t really exist.”
“It does, though. Trust me. My dad is a Black Flag fiend. They were a little before his time, but he saw Rollins Band play on the first Lollapalooza tour in 1991, when he got home from the Gulf War. It was a huge awakening for him.”
My hands were starting to sweat. It was strange to be this close to her again after living with her inside my head for so long. I tried to pretend that she was another Jane. A random Jane. “Can’t go wrong with Henry Rollins.”
“You know, a lot of people assume Henry Rollins is this super intense, scary dude.”
“Right. Because he’s Henry fucking Rollins.”
“But he’s really a decent guy, if you haven’t met him.”
“Oddly enough, I have not.”
She stopped tapping, and her eyes met mine. “You obviously know who I work for.”
I nodded.
“Once, he made the kitchen give us ice cream sundaes and sat down and ate with me.” She smiled and shrugged lightly with one shoulder. “I was an eleven-year-old kid and was having a bad day. He was just… kind. That’s all.”
“Sure, sure,” I said as the funny-faced, hairless dog whined near her feet. “Relatable. I think most folk can say that Henry Rollins magically appears like a fairy godmother to conjure ice cream sundaes.”
She laughed once, softly; a really nice laugh that instantly made me feel warm inside. Like it was used to you. That was my Jane. The Jane I used to know.
How could she not remember me? Had I changed that much in two years?
“You into old L.A. punk yourself?” I asked.
She shrugged, pulling out a dog toy from her bag—something that looked like a green dildo. When I gave it a long look, she held it up so that I could see it had a face and was wearing a pirate hat. “This is Captain Pickles. Her favorite toy.”
I cleared my throat. “It most certainly is.”
