Boy Shopping by Nia Stephens Read Free Book Online

tomorrow,” Kiki said.
    â€œYeah,” she answered, and took another sip of her drink. Kiki was not convinced that it was just diet soda. But Jade was a weird woman regardless—she seemed unable to focus on anything but the music business, and she focused on that with the same intensity Kiki saw in her own father when he was examining brain-tissue slides. If it weren’t for Jade, they definitely wouldn’t have a deal with RGB Records. Unlike Franklin, who cared about Temporary Insanity but cared more about having fun, Jade didn’t care about anything but the business side of the band, and Kiki knew they owed their success to her obsession.
    â€œSo what do you want to do?” Mark asked on the way back to his car. The sun was already setting, though it was just past five o’clock.
    â€œGet dinner, I guess.”
    â€œLoveless Café? Come on, it’s great!” he promised when she groaned. The Loveless Café made the must-see list of every tourist who hit the city, but Kiki had never gone. Her parents were from New York, and their idea of comfort food was greasy pizza or take-out lo mein, not hash brown casserole and red-eye gravy. And by the time Kiki was old enough to go out without them she had become a vegetarian, and she had heard rumors that the Loveless put lard in everything.
    â€œI’ve heard that even the biscuits aren’t vegetarian!”
    â€œBiscuits don’t eat meat, Kiki.”
    It was an old argument, and they both laughed on cue. Mark had been making fun of her vegetarianism since the day she stopped eating meat two years ago, on the way to a show in Athens, Georgia. They had stopped at a little country store so Jade could get some more Diet Coke, and Kiki had wandered around back, wondering if they had an outhouse—it was her first visit to a really small town. The little towns outside of Nashville were more like suburbs, and when they visited other cities, Kiki’s family always flew. She thought that the town, called Butler’s Grove, was cute.
    There wasn’t an outhouse in the back, but there was a chicken coop full of silky white hens and little yellow chicks. They all rushed up to Kiki, hoping she was there to feed them. She didn’t have any food, obviously, but she managed to pick up one of the chicks anyway. It was the softest, fluffiest thing she had ever held. She had not eaten a single McNugget since that day, or a burger either. This was tough on the road, when Mark and Franklin inhaled every cheeseburger they could find, but Kiki was as stubborn about her vegetarianism as she was about everything else.
    â€œHow about Waffle Hut?” Kiki suggested.
    â€œAs the lady commands.” They both got in Mark’s car and shut the doors gently, so that they didn’t fall off, and bounced on non-existent shocks all the way to Waffle Hut, their favorite twenty-four-hour diner. There were locations all over the South-east, but none in nice suburban neighborhoods like Franklin’s, so they went to “their” Waffle Hut, in the heart of downtown.
    Early in the evening the restaurant was always deserted, though it was a madhouse after 3:00 AM , when the clubs closed. The waitresses were always glad to see Kiki and Mark, because they had never skipped out on a check and were more than generous with their tips. Since a full dinner came to no more than five dollars, it was easy to add a little more than twenty percent, even on Mark’s budget. Of course, he now had more than one hundred thousand dollars in the bank from RGB, but his parents wouldn’t let him spend a penny until after college.
    They split a plate of hash browns drowning in cheese and fried onions, and joked about the terrible country songs playing on the radio in the restaurant’s kitchen. It was, Kiki thought, as if that morning had never happened. But that wasn’t quite true. Everything was a little too intense—funny stories