I asked Indiana about the song, and she shoved over to my side of the bucket seat. The song, she said after a moment’s listening, was enormously popular on all the local radio stations. Everyone she knew from our school was listening to it, and she heard it everywhere she went—in shopping malls, parking lots, corner stores. She was amazed that I hadn’t heard it before. Maybe, she said, such silliness could be explained by the name of the group in question, A Lighter Shade of Brown, and the fact that by choosing such a name they were saying that they were a shade too dark for her and a shade too light for me.
Excerpt from The Golden Age (Penguin, 2008)
