Re: Webster's Vinyl: Harper & Daniel
Harper was young enough to think she could do anything her mind went thinking it wanted to do. She was raised rough, but cared for, and her hangups weren't about ma or pa, nothing like that. It was skin and being someplace small, and she didn't fit right. She had ink lining places that ink wasn't meant to be. None of it was tattoo-parlor classy, all trailer jobs and men let out of jail with pens vibrating on duct-taped rigs. Navy dots on a wrist, arrow and cross on the other, moons and dots on her fingers, a star or two over a knuckle, and those were just the ones visible. Pierced, too, and her septum piercing was silver bright, new metal, and her hair hid how pierced up her ears were. Deliberate, maybe, looking different in a town where being brown made you more outcast than having a hooker for a ma.
The man halted, and Harper glanced toward the stairs and scoffed. "If I had the ghosts of Como and Sinatra up there, I'd be making bank." She looked back at the man, and she didn't smile or try to tell him anything else good in the joint. She wasn't much of a seller, which was obvious in the utter lack of selling she was trying to do. She wanted to make the place profitable, but she was inexperienced enough to think owning it meant keeping it. No one'd told Harp and Ceil about taxes or keeping lights on.
Typing was more important than getting the man into decent tunes, and he was too white to fly like geese, so she couldn't imagine him booking it with some wax up under his arm. So, she typed, no worry on features too young to even think of lines, corrected a few sentences, and looked up at Mister White, considering. "What makes you feel more mack? A girl trying to get all up on it, or a girl that's chill and parlayin?'" she asked opportunistically. Her fingers were stopped mid-con, and it was evident his response would determine what she said to the mark sitting on the other side of that screen.