All Our Worst Ideas Read online

  “Hey,” Brooke says, taking a bite of a granola bar. “Didn’t you tour Missouri Baptist today?”

  At the front desk, I hear Amy’s tapping come to a halt. Brooke has shifted so I can’t see Amy, but I know she’s listening. She asked what school I was going to earlier, but I deflected, for obvious reasons.

  I widen my eyes at Brooke, hoping that maybe she’ll get the hint. I’m not talking about Missouri Baptist or anything else like that in front of the new girl, so she should probably just stop talking now.

  Brooke widens her eyes right back and looks over her shoulder at Amy, who I hear immediately start typing again. Brooke glances back at me and then turns fully to face Amy. “You know what?” she says, so casually it’s almost impressive. “Why don’t you go ahead and head out? It’s almost closing time, and you’ve had a great first day.”

  Amy looks over at us, her eyes innocent. “Are you sure? This box still needs to go into the computer, and—”

  “Leave it for tomorrow. You’re all done.” Brooke smiles, like she’s doing Amy a favor, when I know she just really wants Amy out of our hair. Feeling guilty, I focus on the box in front of me. I didn’t mean for Brooke to kick her out just so we could talk about the one subject I absolutely don’t want to talk about.

  Amy smiles, big, and I realize that all this time, her smiles have been genuine, and this is the fake one. “Okay, great. I’ll just clock out.”

  Amy disappears inside Brooke’s office, and Brooke turns back to me. “Dear God, it’s like I shot her.”

  I shrug.

  And then Amy is walking out the front door with her purse slung over her shoulder, and I’m watching her go because it’s like watching an alien, this person who doesn’t really click into place here. But then I feel bad because I’ve never felt 100 percent like I click into place anywhere but here.

  Brooke counts the money in the drawer while I report damages for the day. There aren’t many, just a few CDs that a customer dropped and then accidentally stepped on, cracking the cases.

  We both work in silence, but every few minutes, I see Brooke glance at me out of the corner of her eye. She writes something down and then turns her entire body toward me. “You don’t like the new girl, do you?”

  My hand freezes on the paper, the tip of my pen still pressed down. “Why do you say that?”

  She shrugs and runs a hand down the side of her head that’s shaved. “You’re quiet around her.”

  “I’m quiet around everybody.” I don’t much like people, a fact that Brooke knows perfectly well.

  Brooke is quiet. She stands with her hip pressed to the counter and her arms crossed until I stop writing and look at her. She won’t let it go.

  “There’s something about her that makes me feel like…” I trail off, not really able to explain it.

  Brooke makes a waving motion to tell me to go on. “That makes you feel what?”

  I sigh. “Like she’s judging me.”

  Brooke laughs. “Oh, come on, Oliver. She’s not judging you. She was perfectly nice to you her whole shift.”

  I shrug. “I feel like she’s sizing me up every time she looks at me.”

  “That’s because you’re a foot taller than her.”

  “Har, har.”

  She smiles, something that doesn’t happen particularly often, but Brooke and I are easy around each other. “Is that why you clammed up when I mentioned MBU in front of her?”

  I roll my eyes and go back to the damages. “I’m not talking about this.”

  She throws her hands in the air. “What? I didn’t say anything!”

  I ignore her and keep writing. I’ve never come out and told Brooke that I don’t want to go to college, but I’m sure she’s figured it out, seeing as how I haven’t made any movements to try to downgrade my hours to make room for classes. If anything, I’ve been asking for a fuller schedule. If it were up to me, I would work open to close every day. Actually, if it were up to me, I would probably live here.

  “You don’t have to say anything. It’s all over your face. What, you have some sort of special attachment to Missouri Baptist?”

  She just shakes her head. “I was just curious about whether or not you’ve decided where you’re going, that’s all. Can’t I care about you?”

  I stop writing again. This isn’t about her caring about me. It’s about her trying to get me to admit to something. “No,” I finally say, just to get her off my back. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  Brooke shrugs. “Okay. Well, I’m rooting for you, Oli. You can go once you’ve cleaned up the floor. I’ll stay and do everything else.”

  I glance out at the perfectly arranged and organized sales floor. “Um, your new girl already took care of everything.”

  Brooke glances up with only her eyes. “Shit. I like her.”

  I ignore her comment and reach into her office to snatch my car keys off the hook by the door and my jacket off the coatrack. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

  I’m putting my jacket on when she says, “Hey, if you need to switch a shift so you can go visit some more campuses, let me know.”

  I just nod at her. I don’t know how, but I have to get out of the college visits that Mom is constantly signing me up for. They’re just confusing me even more.

  When I start my car, Sleeping at Last comes out of the speakers, and I remember it playing tonight while I worked in the stockroom, when I looked up at Amy and caught her watching me.

  AMY

  IT’S FAMILY DINNER on Sunday.

  Family dinner isn’t just us—Me, Mama, Carlos, Gabriella, Marisa, Javier, and Hector—an already big family. It also includes my aunts, uncles, and cousins, so many of us that we have to cram into the house. Normally, Jackson would be here, but he’s hanging out with the track guys tonight.

  By the time I’ve changed into something I know Abuela will approve of and get out to the kitchen, it’s packed with family members. Once a month, everyone in my family shows up at our house (the biggest house in the family) and we feast and talk, and usually, I sit somewhere in the middle of the table and try to avoid eye contact so that no one will ask me about school or my love life or anything else I’m loathe to talk about with my family.

  Tonight, like most family dinners, I can’t escape it.

  “How’s school, Amaría?” Tía Marci asks. “Made valedictorian yet?” She asks this absently, just barely paying attention as she passes a plate of Abuela’s famous tamales over to the kids table for them to gobble up.

  From the kids table, Gabriella asks, “What’s a val-dic-toran?”

  “It means your big sister is a genius!” Tío Milo calls back, and everyone at the table except me laughs. In my family, I am something akin to a tower of cards: You know you probably won’t build it to the top, and it’s only fun if the whole thing collapses at some point. To them, Stanford is about as believable as me moving to Antarctica.

  Abuela scowls at me. “You better not get pregnant and have to drop out of college like Rosa did.”

  From the end of the table, my cousin Rosa groans. “I didn’t drop out. It’s not considered dropping out if you never made it to the first day.” She smiles at me, as if we’re comrades in this fact, and scoops Mia, her daughter, into her arms to carry her out of the room, probably to change the diaper I can smell from the other side of the table.

  “I’m not going to get pregnant and drop out,” I say to no one in particular.

  “Well not with that attitude, you aren’t,” Tía Lucia says, winking at me.

  “Isn’t it hard to get valedictorian?” Carmen, one of my other cousins, pipes up. Carmen went to my high school last year and graduated the year before me, even though no one knew we were cousins, because we never told anyone. She was perfectly fine leaving me to be the social outcast at school while she ran with the soccer girls.

  “Yes,” I say. My voice has gotten quieter as their questioning has progressed, and I hate that they can turn me into this, a perso
n who wilts before them.

  “But when do you hear about the school in California?” Abuela asks. “I asked one of the ladies at the bingo hall, and she said that Stanford only has a five percent acceptance rate! Five!”

  Tía Lucia’s eyes go wide. “Five percent? Amaría, why aren’t you just going to UMKC? It’s so close, and the acceptance rate is so high!”

  I’m staring down at my plate, at the pork chop that’s sitting undisturbed on the ceramic. “I find out sometime in April,” I say quietly, because it’s not like anyone is listening.

  “How are you even going to pay for out-of-state tuition?” Tío Milo asks. “You know that’s, like, a lot of money right?”

  No, I want to say. I have no clue how expensive it is to go to one of the best schools in the country. I haven’t told any of them about the scholarship, mostly because I’m afraid I’ll fail. I’m afraid I won’t get it. And I don’t need them knowing about one more failure if I don’t end up making valedictorian or getting into Stanford. It’s bad enough that my parents know.

  My parents are noticeably silent as my family continues to throw unanswerable questions at me.

  “You have a backup, though, right?”

  “Are your grades really good enough to make valedictorian?”

  “What about your boyfriend? Is he going to Stanford, too?”

  But I’m not listening to any of their questions because I already have all my own doubts, and I don’t need to hear theirs, too.

  AMY

  “OLIVER! AMY! Back door!”

  I sigh and roll my eyes, but when I look over at Oliver, hoping that he’ll commiserate with me over Brooke’s annoying shouting, he isn’t looking at me. Or at least, I don’t think he is. Today’s discount stipulation is eyewear, and I can’t see Oliver’s eyes behind his “Tom Cruise in Risky Business” sunglasses.

  My sunglasses are pink, heart-shaped, and just a little too small as they belong to Gabriella.

  I have learned exactly two things in my first few weeks at Spirits: One, Brooke is a grumpy individual who seems to like me; and two, Oliver is a grumpy individual who seems to hate me.

  Where Brooke trusts me and gives me challenges to help me learn the ropes quickly, Oliver likes to pretend I don’t exist, and if I have to ask him for help, he often does so silently. He hasn’t spoken a word to me since my first day.

  Brooke stands by the open back door of the shop, her arms crossed and her eyes on a van parked in the alley. She’s talking to the owner of the van in quiet tones when Oliver and I join her. “He’s got a load of vinyl in the back. Haul them in and sort them, please.”

  The guy looks rather pleased with himself, and I follow Oliver as he goes to wait by the guy’s trunk. I haven’t actually dealt with a customer bringing in used merchandise, and I don’t know what to do. So, I just do what I always do: I follow Oliver.

  When the door finally opens all the way, Oliver lets out a low whistle. The entire back end of the van is crammed with boxes. “That’s a lot of music,” he says, probably to himself, but I feel a little satisfaction that he’s spoken in my presence at all. He rolls up his sleeves and leans forward to pull a box from the van. He loads it onto the dolly, and I scramble to help him.

  It takes half an hour just to get all the boxes into the back room, and then we stand in the little stockroom, surrounded by shelves and merchandise. When Oliver finally closes the door behind us, plunging us into silence, I feel a little nervous. I’ve never been alone with Oliver, not like this, and it feels like a test, somehow. Like I’m getting one shot, and I better not blow it.

  We open the boxes one by one, removing record after record, some of them dusty and all of them in less-than-perfect shape. We try not to trip over each other, but occasionally, in all our dancing around to get to our specific shelves, sorting the records first by genre and then alphabetically, my shoulder finds his breastbone or my elbow finds his rib cage.

  “Sorry. I’m sorry,” I say for the tenth time.

  His mouth is a straight line. “It’s fine. You don’t have to keep apologizing.”

  “Right. Sorry.” I roll my eyes at myself and set another record on a shelf. I’m not sure why there’s no speaker system in the stockroom, but there’s no music back here, only the sounds of our breathing and the soft hiss as cardboard covers slide against each other. We could open the door to hear the music in the shop, but for some reason, neither of us has.

  I glance over at the box he’s sorting through. My box is filled mostly with traditional country western music and Broadway soundtracks, but he has a whole stack of dusty Beatles records in his hand.

  When he reaches down into the box again, my eyes catch a glimpse of a tattoo on the inside of his arm. I can tell that it’s words, can make out the cursive script, but I can’t read what it says while he’s moving. I grab a handful of records and walk to his other side, pretending to look through the stack while trying to read the words on his arm, which is easy to be subtle about thanks to the sunglasses. He stops moving momentarily, and I finally get a good look.

  the things that we have right now are the best things that we’ve had yet

  “Is that ‘Molly’?”

  Oliver’s head comes up, and he turns toward the door, his brow furrowed. “Who’s Molly?” he asks.

  I point at his tattoo, hidden again by the sleeve of his shirt. “On your arm. That’s ‘Molly,’ isn’t it?”

  His head turns toward me, and I feel like he’s probably looking at me, even though I can’t tell, and the longer he stands there like that, the more nervous I become, until I’m on the verge of twitching. I was very clearly wrong about the tattoo. “I’m sorry. I must have read it wrong.”

  “You know the Front Bottoms?”

  I look up at him. He still wears that bewildered expression, and I’m almost not even sure he really asked the question.

  But he waits. I shrug. I still have a stack of Brooks & Dunn albums in my hand. “Sure. I’m actually surprised you know it. ‘Molly’ was only on their first EP. I never hear anyone mention it.”

  “It’s my favorite.” He says it almost like a question, and something about the tone of his voice, the way it seems to make the entire rest of him soften, makes me smile.

  “Mine, too. I mean, it would be great if their band wasn’t named after the female genitalia, but, you know, what are ya gonna do, right?”

  He’s still staring at me, and I know for sure this time, because he’s reached up and pushed his sunglasses onto his head, and then the door opens and Brooke sticks her head in.

  “Amy, could you help me up front?”

  I step around Oliver to get to Brooke, and just before I close the door, I shoot a look over my shoulder at Oliver, who’s still standing in the middle of the room, looking at me like I’m a completely different species.

  OLIVER

  I INADVERTENTLY WATCH Amy for the rest of my shift, even when Brooke moves me out to the floor with Morgan and I can only see Amy through the open stockroom door. I’m not trying to be skeevy, but I feel like I’m seeing her completely different now. It’s not just that she knows my favorite song by my favorite band, and well enough that she recognized an obscure line from it that I just happened to have tattooed on me.

  I guess, more than anything, it’s this knowledge that I misjudged her, and somehow, she seems more like a stranger than she did before.

  So, later, when she grabs her stuff from Brooke’s office and comes back out swinging her bag in that overly cheerful way that she does, with her heart-shaped sunglasses still on, even though it’s dark outside, I can’t seem to take my eyes off her.

  “So, I guess I was just wondering what you thought about the idea?”

  And then I realize that Morgan is talking to me, and that I have absolutely no idea what she said. I tear my eyes from Amy and look down at her. Morgan has been working here for almost a year, but I don’t know her very well. Mostly because I don’t know anyone very well.

  �
��I’m sorry, what idea?”

  Morgan, who’s going through the hold shelf to pull out anything that’s been sitting longer than the three-day limit, looks up at me, and I’m thankful when she doesn’t look annoyed that I wasn’t paying attention.

  “Karaoke night. I’m thinking about pitching it to Brooke. Like, sing karaoke and get twenty percent off. We could do it next month. I totally have a karaoke machine.”

  “Oh, uh.” The idea of having to listen to customers sing karaoke all night makes me want to gouge my eyes out. “Sure. I mean, if Brooke thinks it’s a good idea.” I send Brooke a telepathic message to convey how awful something like karaoke night would be for all of us, but especially for me.

  My eyes slide back to the front door, and I realize that Amy is still standing there. In her blue jeans and her black coat and those heart-shaped sunglasses, she stands on the sidewalk right outside the shop, glowing just slightly red from the sign that hangs above the door.

  But she’s not alone. She’s talking to someone.

  She’s taken her sunglasses off now, and they dangle from her index finger as she angles her chin to look up at the guy she’s with. Is that her boyfriend? Amy is looking at him in this timid way, like she’s unsure of something as the guy speaks to her, his mouth moving quickly. But then she smiles down at the pavement, and the guy steps forward to put his hands on her shoulders.

  “Do you think I should talk to her about it now?” I hear Morgan ask me this, but I can’t bring myself to look away from what’s going on outside the window.

  “Oliver?”

  “Yeah.” I turn to look down at Morgan. She’s not as short as Amy, but she’s shorter than I am by quite a few inches. “Sure. I think Brooke is mopping the bathroom. You could go talk to her about it.”

  Morgan bites her lip and nods. She walks around me. Just when I think she’s gone, and I’ve turned my attention back to where Amy and that guy are still by the door, this time with his face low beside hers, maybe whispering something in her ear, I hear Morgan’s voice from behind me. “Maybe we can do a duet or something.”