All Our Worst Ideas Read online

  I lean in close to him and whisper, “I’m tied.”

  For a second, he just blinks at me. “Tied for what?”

  I stare at him, my whole face tight. “Tied for valedictorian.”

  Jackson’s still staring at me, and I can almost see the moment that confusion shifts to realization. “Oh shit, Amy. I’m sorry. How can you be tied?”

  I shrug. If I try to explain it all to him, I’m just going to start crying, so I shake my head and turn away. It wasn’t smart to bring it up right now anyway. What did I think I was going to accomplish by bursting into tears in the middle of AP bio?

  “Ames, I know you’re stressed, but everything’s going to be okay.” It’s exactly the kind of thing that I would expect Jackson to say, and maybe on any other day, it would be enough. But today, it feels like empty words.

  “I just need to focus,” I say, taking my calendar back out and setting it on the table between us. “I know we haven’t really been going out much, but I think after final exams, we’ll be good to go. Until then, I really should buckle down. Maybe we could have more study dates for the time being?” My eyes aren’t on him. They’re on my planner, where every day that I’m supposed to be with Jackson has a little J in the corner, enfolded in a heart. But most of them have been written over.

  Jackson’s eyes are scanning the page, and then he sets his finger on a date in a few weeks. “My birthday party.” That’s all he says, and I realize I haven’t even written it in. It’s a Friday night, and I’ll probably have to ask for the night off from Spirits. Such a strange thought.

  “Right,” I say, already writing it into the calendar. “Your birthday party. I almost forgot.”

  He watches me write Jackson’s Birthday Party really big and bold inside its square and then sends me a close-lipped smile before pulling his stuff for class out of his backpack. “You’ve been busy. Don’t worry about it. Bryce has everything planned. All you have to do is show up.”

  “I’ve been a little obsessive,” I say. It’s not quite an apology, but it’s not exactly not one, either, and Jackson just shrugs.

  “I’m used to it.”

  At first I think maybe I heard him wrong, but no. I definitely heard the bitterness in his voice when he said that. “What?” I say because I’m not sure what else to say.

  Jackson sighs, his shoulders falling in that way I recognize that says he doesn’t want to get into something. “Ames, don’t worry about it, okay? Just, do me a favor, and don’t forget that there are things in the world besides class rank.”

  My breath gets stuck inside me. I can’t believe he just said that. “I know there are other things, but this is important, Jackson.” I turn away from him, feeling my face go hot, even as I know Jackson didn’t intend to be mean.

  I see him out of the corner of my eye, bending close to me to say something, but just then our teacher starts to pass out safety goggles, and every time Jackson tries to talk to me, the teacher shushes him.

  OLIVER

  “HERE AT Missouri Baptist University,” the speaker at the front of the room says, gesturing wildly, “you’ll have the opportunity to advance your academic studies while building your relationship with Christ. Everyone enrolled full-time will be expected to attend chapel, and our services are truly moving. We also have multiple mission trips every semester, and I’ve got brochures about our upcoming spring mission trip, if anyone is interested.” She picks up a stack of brochures and waves them enthusiastically as my eyes travel around the room, from the back of one head to another.

  There are only ten people in my tour group, a student-only tour that my mother arranged for me to attend on this beautiful Monday morning, and I’m bored as shit. I should be covering extra shifts at Spirits, and instead, I’m wasting my time here. The guy sitting two rows in front of me has a tribal tattoo on the back of his neck, and I grimace when I see it. I rub the inside of my own arm, where sometimes I imagine I still feel a throbbing pain, even though I got the tattoo back in June.

  “If nobody has any questions, I think we’re ready for our tour.” Our guide smiles wide at us. She’s wearing an MBU T-shirt and jeans, and her blond ponytail swings behind her as she motions for us to follow her out of the room. A tour. Outside. Fantastic. I zip up my jacket and follow her out into the main hall of the building we’ve been in for the past hour. I feel my body seize up when the cold air hits my face.

  “So, I want to take you by our dorm halls so that you can get an idea of which dorm you want to apply for.”

  She keeps talking, but I’ve already checked out completely. I tuck my stiff fingers into the pockets of my jacket and follow along, even though this entire thing is pointless. I promised Mom I would come take a tour of MBU, and I also promised to look at the brochures and the websites and the applications, and I did it all with a smile on my face so that my mom wouldn’t know the truth.

  I don’t even know if I want to go to college.

  When I graduated high school seven months ago, it took everything I had to convince Mom to give me a year off. Gap years aren’t all that uncommon. But it wasn’t really just a gap year. I needed time to decide about college, and the only way I could get it was to promise to go to all the tours and the meetings and whatever else Mom wanted in the meantime. She thinks I’m just having a hard time choosing between a state school and a private university. But my time is running out. I’m supposed to be sending in applications, and I’m pretty sure none of this is for me, but I don’t know how to tell Mom that. I don’t know how to break her heart.

  What’s the best way to say, I just want to move out, keep working at Spirits, and maybe someday own a record shop of my own, because music is pretty much the only thing in this life I care about besides you?

  When I get home that afternoon, Mom’s car is in its assigned parking space, and I hold in a groan. I don’t want to face her right now. I don’t want to have to lie about how amazing the modern architecture of MBU’s campus is or whatever else I’m supposed to say about the place to convince her I care.

  Maybe I can just go straight to work. I’m supposed to be there early today anyway because the new girl starts today, and Brooke wants me to help train her.

  But that sounds only marginally more interesting than talking to Mom about the highlights of MBU’s campus tour, so I go inside.

  She’s running around, already in her scrubs and apparently looking for her other shoe, judging by the fact that she’s only wearing one.

  “Honey!” she says, kissing me on the cheek as she whooshes past. It’s like getting a kiss from Road Runner.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  Don’t ask me about the tour. Don’t ask me about the tour. Don’t ask me about the tour.

  “How was the tour?” she asks. This, she’ll stop moving for. She stands in front of me, a smile on her face and her arms crossed.

  “Oh, um.” I focus on taking off my jacket and hanging it on a hook by the door so that I don’t have to look directly at her. “It was great. The campus is pretty impressive. I just, you know, I don’t know if it’s quite the place for me.”

  This is the same thing I’ve said about the last three universities I went to look at upon her request, and I know exactly what she’s going to say because it’s the same thing she said the last three times.

  “Oli, sweetie, I know you want everything to be perfect and that you’ve taken this year off to make sure you’re in the right headspace for this decision, but I don’t want you to miss out because you waited too long, okay?”

  She says it so gently that guilt settles in my stomach. She’s so good at that—being so kind about trying to micromanage my life that somehow I feel bad for not letting her do it.

  She claps her hands together. “Well, no worries. We’re going to figure this out. But I have to get to work. I’m pulling a double, so you’re on your own for dinner.”

  She says it as if it hasn’t been almost a year since the last time we had dinner together, but I don’t men
tion this, either. I figure if I can just keep her happy, just do what she asks, maybe she won’t be so upset when I tell her that I’m pretty sure I’m not going to any of the perfect universities she wants me to.

  AMY

  “THANK YOU FOR coming in. Have a great day!” I smile at the girl in front of me who just bought a Miley Cyrus vinyl, which I didn’t even know existed before today, while she wears a hat that has bunny ears sprouting from the top. She smiles back and rushes out of the store to meet her mother, standing on the sidewalk in front of the shop.

  When I turn back to Brooke, she’s biting her lip. She’s wearing a bowler hat, which makes her look totally steampunk. I’m just wearing a baseball cap with a Superman logo on it that I borrowed from Jackson because it was the only thing I could come up with on such short notice. It is, decidedly, un-silly.

  “Oh God. I did something wrong, didn’t I? What is it?”

  Brooke’s mouth turns down, and her eyes scan over the register. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Actually, you did everything perfect. You are a fast learner. It took Oliver two weeks before he could make a sale without screwing up.”

  “I can hear you!” Oliver shouts from the stockroom, where the door is propped open and he’s pulling down boxes.

  “Yeah, I know,” Brooke mutters before turning back to me. “Why don’t you hang out in the back room with Oliver? He can show you how pricing and inventory haul work. I have to fill out payroll paperwork.” She grimaces.

  I nod. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Her eyebrow crinkles. “You don’t have to call me ma’am. My wife owns this place. She’s the ma’am around here, not me.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  She disappears inside the office, and I’m left in the store with nothing but the sound of Oliver clanking old CDs and tapes together, and Sleeping at Last playing over the speaker system. I tap my fingertips on the countertop and glance over at the stockroom. Oliver is sitting on the carpet, glaring down pretty seriously at a record. Great. I’ll just hang out with Oliver. Oliver, who hasn’t spoken a word to me since I got here.

  It isn’t until he looks up that I realize I’ve been standing here too long, watching him. I scramble away from the front desk and go into the stockroom. There’s something about Oliver, about his silence, that makes me feel like I need to make as little noise as possible. Like he’s a bird perched peacefully on a branch, and if I make too much noise, he’ll fly away.

  I take a seat on the low shelf beside a stack of earbuds in plastic cases, and he hands me something, big and bulky and shaped like a tape gun.

  “Price stickers,” he says, moving on.

  “I don’t know how to use this,” I say. I almost feel embarrassed, even though I shouldn’t. Why should this be a skill I have in my arsenal when I’ve never had any use for it?

  But Oliver doesn’t look at me like I’m stupid or roll his eyes or give any indication that my not knowing how to use a sticker gun makes me inferior to him. He scoots a little closer to me and gently takes the gun from my hand.

  “Watching?” he asks. I nod, and he dispenses the gun against the CD case. A little orange sticker attaches itself to the plastic. “The sticker gun is only for sale items.” He explains the pricing system to me, the way the back room is organized, and I’m amazed at how efficient he is with his words, like he’s practiced in the art of saying as few as possible. He pushes a stack of CDs over to me, and I start putting stickers on them.

  “Do you go to East?” I ask him, mostly to make small talk, but I also want to know because I go to East, and I’ve never noticed him in the halls before. Or at least, I don’t think I have. I’ll admit, I’m not likely to look at faces around school, because I don’t care much for being social. I care about getting to class on time and getting my work done.

  His eyes flicker to mine and then down again. “No. Graduated from West back in June.”

  When he’s quiet too long, I ask him, “Where do you go now?”

  He doesn’t look at me, his hands moving quickly over his work. “Nowhere.”

  I don’t feel like I can press him for more information. He turns his back to me, just slightly, and goes silent again.

  “Hello?”

  A voice in the shop catches our attention, and Oliver looks over at me. “Think you want to handle that?”

  I shrug. “Yeah. Okay.” No, I want to tell him. I do not want to handle a customer on my own after only working here for three hours. But I straighten my spine and go anyway because I’m confident that I can do this.

  “Hello, sir,” I say to the guy in front of the register who has his fisted hands pressed into the countertop.

  “Yeah, I put some vinyl on hold over the phone last night. Came to pick it up.” He leans one elbow on the counter and looks around, his eyes flitting behind me while I work with the computer. No one showed me how to do holds, but the system is pretty simple, so it only takes me a second to find the tab where the list is.

  The guy is already impatient by the time I ask for his last name, his fingers drumming on the counter and his shoulders tense beneath his flannel shirt.

  I’m looking at the screen, trying to figure out exactly how the system is arranged, when he asks, “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  I can’t tell if he asks me this because I’m taking too long, because it’s obvious that I’m new, or because I’m a girl. But either way, my fingers stutter over the keyboard. I won’t let him trip me up.

  “I’ve got it right here,” I say, ignoring his question. “I just need to…” I don’t know where the holds are kept, so I turn toward the stockroom, ready to ask Oliver. He’s sitting on the shelf, across from where I was sitting moments ago, a tape in each hand and his eyes on me, like he’s letting me do this alone but is also making himself available if I need help, and a fondness for him sparks inside me.

  Before I can even get a word out, the guy in front of me leans across the counter, until I have to back up to get out of his way, and calls out, “Hey, bro. Think you can help us out here?”

  I see the hesitation on Oliver’s face at the same time I feel the heat in my cheeks. I’m not embarrassed. Just angry. Oliver sets down what’s in his hands and comes to the counter. I step aside, but I feel a shock when Oliver puts a hand on my arm to stop me. He doesn’t say anything to the customer, just waits.

  “We need some help with a hold,” the guy explains, just as Oliver seemed to know he would. “She doesn’t quite seem to know how to do it.”

  Oliver’s face is blank. “It’s her first day,” he says by way of explanation, not that he owes the guy one.

  The guy scoffs. “Yeah, I think that’s obvious.”

  Oliver just stares at him for another second and then he turns to me. “What’s the problem?”

  It isn’t often that people can make me feel small, even if I am barely more than five feet, but right now, between the way the guy is looking at me like I’m a bug he found in his shower and the fact that I already have to ask Oliver for help, I feel minuscule. “I don’t know where you keep the holds.”

  Oliver nods and then walks over to a shelf at the end of the counter, hidden beneath the ledge. He points. “They’re right here. Sorted by last name.” He reaches down and pulls the records the guy is asking for, and I can feel the discomfort pouring off him. It makes me like him more. He hands me the records, holding my eye longer than he has since I met him.

  When the guy sees that Oliver has handed the transaction back over to me, he grimaces. “Maybe you should do that, man. I’m in kind of a hurry.”

  Without thinking, I try to hand the records back to Oliver. The customer is always right, right?

  Oliver crosses his arms and nods at the computer.

  For a split second, I just grip the albums in my fingers, and then I finish out the transaction, which I’ve already done several times tonight.

  The guy across the counter squishes his lips together in a tight frown.

  Oliver stands
beside me, and while the guy is swiping his credit card, Oliver says, loud enough for the guy to hear, “You’re doing a great job.”

  I look up at him, but his eyes are on the register in front of me, so I look away quick to see the guy rolling his eyes. I offer him a plastic bag, but he lifts his chin, grabs the records, and stomps toward the door.

  As soon as he’s gone, I expect Oliver to say something, whether in the defense of customers in general or in criticism of the guy that just left, but he doesn’t. He just walks around me, back into the stockroom. I follow him in and take a seat on the floor.

  Without a word, he hands me the sticker gun. I take it, and we go back to work, silently.

  OLIVER

  IT’S HARD FOR me to go back to stocking after dealing with that asshat. Brooke always says that I would be great in customer service if only it weren’t for all the customers. But I can be cheerful when I need to be. I can smile at a customer and convince them that they’re the most important person on the planet if I have to. But I don’t like it. Especially not when pigheaded douche canoes come in and talk to my coworkers like they’re idiots.

  But the new girl doesn’t seem too discouraged by the whole thing. She’s beside me in the stockroom, smelling like strawberries and humming along with the music like nothing happened.

  She’s definitely going to be better at the whole customer service thing than I am.

  We work in silence for more than an hour, only occasionally having to stop to check out customers, which I almost exclusively let her handle, since she’s so much better at fake smiling than I am.

  Later, she takes a box of records that I’ve priced out to the register just as Brooke comes out of the office and leans against the stockroom doorway. I can see Amy behind her, her fingers moving quickly over the keyboard of one of the computers, shifting the CDs and tapes from regular inventory to sale inventory. I didn’t even show her how to do that. She just knows.