Sirens by Janet Fox Read Free Book Online

brother. Whatever Pops had gotten himself into he’d dragged me into it as well, and I’d have to find my own way out.
    The only room in the apartment in which I felt comfortable was the windowless library off the foyer. Books lined all four walls, and the chairs were dark leather, the lighting just enough for reading. I settled in and opened one of the books and read until Melody roused around eleven, heading to the kitchen for a cup of coffee.
    She was a different person in the daylight hours, without her makeup and with her eyes like slits and her skinny frame wrapped in an oversize robe. I tried to hide my surprise, which reappeared when she emerged from her rooms an hour later, primped and wide-awake and put together. She peered in the library door, squinting.
    “There you are. Hiding. It’s time we put you right,” she said as Istood up, and then she looked down at my old black shoes. “Good grief. First order of business is new shoes. And for pity’s sake, take off those awful stockings before we leave the apartment.”
    “I’m not a flapper,” I said.
    “Yeah? Well, we can fix that,” she responded. “Come on.”
    I heard Pops’s voice in my head berating flappers—and then I felt a tiny thrill of rebellion, so I let myself be led by Melody. She treated me to a shopping trip that changed me from top to bottom.
    We started at the hair salon.
    When the hairdresser took hold of my thick dark locks, she said, gleeful, “Snip, snip!” And with a few bold cuts she held twenty-four inches of my former glory in her hand. As she worked, shaping and thinning, she spun me away from the mirror. Melody nodded approval, and when the hairdresser spun me back so I could take a good look, I gasped.
    I looked older. Heart-shaped face with blue eyes. Dark hair that now formed pleasing angles to frame my face. I sat up and lifted both my palms against the blunt-cut ends, feeling as if a weight that had tied me down had been lifted.
    I wondered what Moira would think, what the other girls would say. I wondered if I might see them again next fall and whether they’d treat me differently, whether the boys might notice me for the first time. I smiled at that thought, then promptly shot it down. Modern was fine. Turning into some silly, moony flapper swooning over boys was not.
    Still, I couldn’t help it; I was happy with the bob. Thrilled, in fact.
    As if to echo my reaction, the hairdresser said, “Honey, I’d swearI was looking at the next big moving-picture star.” She smiled, shook her head. “Just dreamy.”
    “It sure is a change,” Melody said.
    It was a change, all right. I was shedding some old skin that I’d outgrown without knowing it.
    I touched my hair again. One of Teddy’s favorite things to say about me had to do with my stubborn determination. Tenacity, he said; I had it in spades. Like the ornery mule he’d had to buck around that summer out at Great-Aunt Elizabeth’s, or maybe like old Aunt Lizzy herself, whom Teddy claimed I took after. When I wanted a thing done, Teddy said, that was the end of it.
    Although that tenacity fought with niggling doubt. Hair was just hair, right? Or in this case was hair a link in a long chain? A long chain leading me to foolish thinking and foolish behavior? I bet Teddy would approve. Even if Pops would give me the business.
    Well, too bad. I put that thought straight out of my mind.
    Melody took me to Macy’s next. Shoes first—sweet, pale little pumps with straps—and flesh-colored stockings, of real silk, rolled up above my knees. I already had the closet full of her cast-off dresses. After buying me a soft green cloche, a pair of gloves, and what she called “the right clutch,” she plunked me down at the cosmetics counter, where, over my feeble protests, a salesgirl painted my cheeks and colored my lips and eyelids. Melody held up the hand mirror, and again I was taken aback, but I did kind of like what I saw, even as my cheeks grew pinker all on their