Vintage Veronica Read Free

manager.”
    “I am Mr. Singh. Is there a problem?”
    “Well, I don’t know. I haven’t been able to get my order filled. Do you think you could
fill my order
? I asked for a hot sausage in my buns … ooh, I mean my bagel.”
    The man’s darkish face begins to look purple.
    “I think you should leave,” he says in kind of a clipped way.
    “YOU WANT TO GO OUT WITH ME?”
asks Zoe, loud and incredulous.
    “No, I think you should leave. Before I call the police.”
    “Are you threatening me?”
    “Zo?” Ginger pipes up. “Let’s bounce.”
    “NO,” says Zoe firmly. “I will not step down in the face of SEXUAL HARASSMENT. I will take back the night, as will all my sisters. This is not about donuts. This is about OPPRESSION.”
    Every eye in the Mooks is on her.
    “And I will not be silenced. Before I am through, everyone will know that
that
man said that GIRLS LIKE ME DON’T DESERVE TO BE TREATED FAIRLY.”
    “Now wait just a minute, Miss,” says Mr. Singh. It comes out
mees
.
    “AND SOMEDAY,” Zoe continues, “I hope he will learn that ALL PEOPLE SHOULD BE TREATED EQUALLY, WITH COURTESY AND RESPECT. And then and only then will I say, HALLELUJAH.”
    “Hallelujah,” says someone in line behind me.
    “Amen,” chimes in someone else.
    I turn around. The entire store is glaring at Mr. Singh. He leans forward and says something quietly to Zoe.
    “Okay,” she says.
    Then he leaves the counter and comes back with a large Mookie’s bag. He hands it to Zoe, and she and Ginger practically skip out of the store.
    Without missing a beat, the counter girl with the huge boobs looks at me and says, “Welcome-to-Mookie’s-I’m-Carla-can-I-take-your-order?”
    No wonder Claire’s first piece of advice to me was: Never talk to the Florons if you can help it.

don’t end up ordering a donut after all.
    After Zoe and Ginger leave, I just want to get the hell out of the Mooks as fast as I can. Donning my sunglasses, I clutch my purse and my iced mocha smoothie tightly to my chest and march straight from the Mooks to The Clothing Bonanza.
    I brush past the line of Pickers, trying to look as officious and disinterested as possible so none of them will launch into an angry tirade about “cutters” or start riffing on my look. Luckily, Bill sees me struggling with the front door and opens it for me.
    “Must be a full moon or something,” he says, glaring over my shoulder at the teeming masses as I cross the threshold.
    “Or something,” I say.
    Bill shrugs at me, like
What are you gonna do?
He must be pretty used to the Pickers by now. After all, he’s been working at Dollar-a-Pound since the earth cooled. On a positive note, this has given him an unrivaled collection of vintage iron-on T-shirts. Today he’s wearing a baseball-style shirt that says I’VE GOT A MAGIC STICK! and has a picture of a caveman on it.
    About every hour or so, Bill reassembles The Pile with a garden rake and yells “Clear!” On cue, the Pickers shuffle out of The Pile. Then Bill presses a button and a torrent of additional garments rains down from a hole in the ceiling. It’s a loud process, kind of like a subway train running through the store.
    From what I can tell, the common denominator among the Pickers is being very cheap. Or very poor, maybe. Some Pickers are insatiable and root around in The Pile all day long. Some are only interested in one kind of item, like this guy who collects hats. Sometimes I see him sitting at the Mookie’s Donuts next door, drinking a coffee, with a stack of eight or ten hats piled on top of his head. He looks like this picture in a book I had when I was little. And he’s one of the more normal ones.
    The Pickers never go upstairs to the store’s main retail floor, which is called The Real Deal. It’s also a resale shop, but there’s no scale. Clothing is priced by the piece and is organized in a variety of ways: by decade, by color, by theme (there’s a big rack of army surplus, for