All Our Worst Ideas

by Vicky Skinner

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  For Mom,

  who gave me music

  JANUARY

  AMY

  I’VE BEEN STANDING outside my favorite record store, Spirits, for half an hour.

  More accurately, I’ve been standing across the street from Spirits, leaning against the front window of the tutoring center, listening to Spirits run through my favorite Flaming Lips album over the outdoor speaker system, and deciding whether or not to go inside.

  I came here to get a job at the tutoring center because when my mother asked me what I had planned for today, and I told her my only plan was to turn in my application to Stanford, she told me that I needed to get a job.

  Actually, what she said was, “Carlos got laid off last week, and we need you to get a job. Go downtown. And put a load of clothes in the washer before you go.”

  There wasn’t even a moment for argument, and what would my argument even be? If they need help, I have to help. Carlos has been working as a mechanic for as long as my parents have been married, and now he’s being laid off?

  And of course, the most selfish part of me thought, What about Stanford? Because no matter how hard I work for the Keller Scholarship, if I get it, it isn’t going to pay for clothes and extra-long sheets.

  So I came to the tutoring center to get a job. But instead of actually going inside, I’ve been staring at the HELP WANTED sign in the window of Spirits. The bright red SPIRITS sign over the door isn’t lit up, but it shines in the sun nevertheless. Maybe a job won’t be so bad. For just a second, I close my eyes and remember the first time I ever heard this particular Flaming Lips song. I was thirteen, walking through a carnival with Mama, the lights flashing and swirling while this played so loud from one of the game booths that it was almost deafening.

  My phone buzzes, and I open my eyes. It’s Jackson, my boyfriend, who’s currently looking for new track shoes at REI, and who just texted me to Go for it! What are you waiting for?

  What am I waiting for? I have zero extra time for a job.

  But it’s not like this is a choice. It’s not like we can’t afford to eat, but we’re not nearly as well off as some of the people I know, including Jackson, so if Mama says she needs me to get a job, then I have to get a job, even if I feel like I might explode from the overwhelming prospect.

  So, it’s between Spirits and the tutoring center. The tutoring center would look good on my application for the Keller Scholarship, but working at Spirits would be like living in a daydream. Besides, everyone I know will be trying to get a job at the tutoring center because people are still trying to pad their applications, but absolutely nobody I know works at Spirits, which is an argument in favor of, not against, working there.

  My feet take me across the street. When I step into Spirits and walk down the first aisle of records, grazing my fingertips across the cardboard sleeves as I go, I feel like I can breathe for the first time in months. Between SAT scores, getting my Stanford application ready, and trying to prove that I deserve the Keller Scholarship, I haven’t stopped to smell the vinyl.

  There’s a boy behind the counter, and I sneak a look at him as he goes through a tall stack of records. He examines each one, his face giving away no emotion, and then promptly files them into one of two stacks. As I pick up a Nick Drake album and scan the back of it, my eyes pop up to the boy again. He’s easily more than six feet, has red hair, pale skin, eyes that are just a little too wide-set, and is wearing a faded maroon T-shirt with a breast pocket. I’ve seen him before, standing behind that counter when I came in to look for new music, but I’ve skimmed over him the way I skim over most people.

  As I’m watching, a girl comes out of a back room. I recognize her, too, from my frequent visits. She looks like she might be in her mid-twenties, but I can see from where I’m standing, right at the end of the aisle, that she has a badge pinned to her clothes that says MANAGER. Half her head is buzzed close to her scalp, and the other half is slicked back. She walks straight over to the boy, slaps a stack of papers on the counter beside him, and sighs.

  “I have got to stop hiring college kids,” she says. “I can’t take going through this stupid process every time a new semester starts.” She rifles through the papers in front of her. “I know I’m not supposed to be judging them on their musical taste, but dear God, the last girl couldn’t name all four Beatles.”

  The boy laughs. He has a nice smile. And then his eyes flicker up to me, and I look away quick. I don’t want him to know that I’m eavesdropping.

  “I have to get someone in here on the weekends,” the manager goes on, and something strums in my chest. “It’s getting too hard for just you and Morgan to be running cash wrap. Don’t you have music-savvy friends who want to work here?”

  The boy snorts. “Maybe you should lower your standards.”

  I open my mouth. “Excuse me?” I haven’t even realized I’ve walked up to them until there’s nothing but the counter between us. They both look up at me. “Um, you’re hiring?”

  The boy taps his fingers on the counter and regards me. I don’t miss the way his eyes slide down my body in a completely stoic way, like he’s just sizing me up.

  His manager is regarding me, too, but her eyes are wary. “You want a job?”

  I nod.

  She bites her lip. “Any experience?”

  I have tons of experience. I’ve spent years tutoring and volunteering, picking up trash on the side of the road, reading to children, and taking handmade blankets to the nursing home. But running a register? Not so much. I’ve always been too busy making sure my college applications are perfect to even think about a job. “Um. Not exactly. But I’m a fast learner.”

  The guy smiles, but he looks away when he does it. Is he laughing at me?

  The girl reaches across the counter, holding a hand out to me. “I’m Brooke.” She nudges the boy with her elbow. “This is Oliver.”

  I shake her hand, but Oliver doesn’t offer his. He just nods at me in greeting.

  Brooke puts her hands on her hips. She’s curvy and pretty, and she nods her cleft chin in my direction. “The shirt. You listen to the Lumineers or you thought the design was nice?”

  I can see in her eyes that my answer is going to tip the scales on her judgment of me. I look down at my shirt. I tug nervously at the hem. “They’re my favorite band. I’m going to their show this summer.”

  Brooke reaches across the counter and slaps an application in front of me. “Fill this out for our records, but you’re hired. You in college?”

  I reach into my purse for the pen that I keep in there. “Senior in high school.”

  “Nights and weekends?”

  “Sure.” Something creeps into the back of my mind. How am I going to fit a part-time job into my schedule? My hand pauses, my pen sliding to a halt.

  “Something wrong?” Brooke asks.

  “Um. No.” I go back to the form and scribble the rest of m
y information down.

  Brooke glances down at the application when I slide it back to her. “Can you start Monday night? Five o’clock? It’ll be slow, so we can train you.”

  I nod, but I’m thinking about Monday already. It’s my first day back at school after winter break, and I’ll probably have a load of homework. But I can stay up late. Or do it before my shift. I’ll find the time. I have to.

  Brooke smiles kindly. “Band shirts or solid colored shirts only. Oh!” She snaps and then points at Oliver. “Except Monday is silly hat day.”

  Oliver, without even lifting his head, groans.

  My eyes shift between them. “What’s silly hat day?”

  “During the week,” Brooke explains, “I come up with stupid stuff for customers to do for a discount. Keeps the business up, and the regulars like it.” She grins at me. “We’ll see you on Monday.” She’s already moved on to the next task, her eyes traveling along the stacks of records in front of her and then out to the shop, where one or two people are milling around. It’s kind of slow for a Saturday morning, but it’s still early.

  I glance up at the boy, up and up and up at him because he’s at least a foot taller than me, and his eyes feel a mile away. He’s watching me hesitantly, a record gripped in his hand. His gaze makes me anxious, maybe because he’s so tall, but I smile at him anyway.

  He doesn’t smile back.

  “Okay, bye.” I wave at both of them and turn to leave, but I freeze when I’m facing the front window. Because Petra Johnson is standing outside the tutoring center talking to my boyfriend.

  My relationship with Petra is hard to define. Maybe if we weren’t at the top of the class, always competing for grades and the top spot, Petra and I could be friends. But as it is, we’re both just a little too competitive, I’m a little too impatient, and Petra is just a little too mean. But if I’m being honest, Petra is the only person at school who understands why I need to make valedictorian, get into Stanford, get the Keller Scholarship, and get out of this place.

  But I’ve never seen her talk to Jackson before, and she’s smiling at him like they’ve been friends all their lives.

  “Everything good?”

  I turn back to the counter when I realize Oliver is speaking directly to me for the first time. Brooke has vanished. Oliver and I are completely alone at the front desk.

  “Yeah,” I say, trying to clear my head. “I forgot to give you back your pen.” I put it on the counter in front of him, and his brow creases.

  “This is yours,” Oliver says, and he reaches out the pen toward me. I stare at it for a second. It’s a pen that Mama let me borrow, with the name of the hotel where she works across the side.

  “Oh yeah.” I take the pen, but I turn back to Oliver again. “You guys aren’t, like, pranking me with the whole silly hat day thing, are you?”

  He almost looks like he wants to smile. His eyes look significantly cheerier. “I wish. Mandatory for employees.”

  I just nod, hesitant. I keep thinking that Mama was kidding about the job, that maybe I’ll go home and she’ll say, “What do you mean you got a job? I wasn’t being serious. Of course Carlos didn’t get laid off!” But I know Mama better than that. And my application is already on the other side of the desk, beside Oliver’s moving hands. So I turn and leave.

  I’m not sure why seeing Petra and Jackson together has me so flustered, but it still takes me a second to step out of Spirits and cross the street to join them. Jackson puts his arm around me without even making eye contact. After almost a year together, this movement comes naturally to him, like muscle memory.

  Petra, however, smiles, her perfectly white teeth glistening against her dark skin, and it’s not a kind smile. Petra stopped giving me kind smiles junior year, when it became clear that one of us was going to be valedictorian of our senior class and the other would come in close second. Petra perches her hand on her hip, her purse swinging from the crook of her arm and her curly hair blowing in the cold breeze. I look up at her. I have to look up at most people as I’m five foot one. Petra, tall and slender, is closer to six feet, even without her heels.

  “Finding more distractions?” Petra asks, her eyes shooting to Jackson suggestively, and I have to clench my jaw not to say something awful.

  “You get your Yale app in yet, Petra?”

  Her eyes shoot back to me, narrowing. She tries to hide it, but I can see the panic behind them. “I’m not interested in winning against someone who isn’t even trying, you know.”

  I narrow my eyes right back. “Believe me, I’ve got this in the bag.” I sound much more confident than I feel, and Petra isn’t buying it. She wants valedictorian so she can walk into Yale at the top of her graduating class. I want valedictorian so I can get the scholarship that’s going to get me to Stanford on a full ride.

  She makes a little sound in the back of her throat, and then, without another word, walks around me and right into the tutoring center.

  Jackson, his arm still around me, stares into the tutoring center, where we can see through the huge front windows that Petra has walked up to the front desk and is now speaking cheerfully to the woman behind it.

  Jackson whistles low. “I think she’s getting worse.”

  I lace my fingers through his and we turn to the lot where we parked his car. “Of course she is. It’s barely five months until graduation.”

  “You haven’t turned into a terror.”

  I laugh, but something unsettling sits in my chest. Because even though Jackson hasn’t said it out loud, I know he’s having a hard time dealing with my obsession with getting into Stanford and getting the Keller Scholarship. And now, a job.

  Inside his car, I reach over and take his hand again. A job can’t be enough to cause everything to crumble. I just need to hold on.

  OLIVER

  AS SOON AS the girl leaves, I stop sorting vinyl and walk into Brooke’s office. “You sure about that?” I ask her, but she doesn’t even look up from the paperwork in front of her.

  “Did you see her? She’s going to train easy, work hard, and probably someday take my place as manager.” She grins up at me and I roll my eyes.

  “Too skittish. And too … smiley.”

  Brooke levels me with a look. “Just because she’s not a walking grimace like you doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with her.”

  Just then, my phone buzzes and I look down at the text that just came in from my mom.

  Just booked you a tour at Missouri Baptist on Monday! I wasn’t sure what your work schedule is but I’m sure Brooke can work with you.

  I hate it when she does that. Not just scheduling things that she expects me to show up to, but also making the assumption that everyone else’s priorities are the same as hers and that they’ll just go along with it. Brooke is my employer, and this tour is two days away. She has every right to tell me I can’t take the day off.

  “Hey, Mom set me up a tour at a school on Monday. Think I can come in late?”

  Brooke grunts and says, “Yeah. Sure. But you have to train the new girl.”

  I also hate it when Brooke proves my mother right. “No way. You’re the manager. You do it.”

  Brooke scowls at me. “Um. Exactly. I’m the manager, which means you do as I tell you. Go finish with that vinyl because I need you to set up that new display that came in.”

  I groan. “Can’t someone else do it? Morgan is coming in, in, like, an hour.”

  Brooke smacks a hand on her desk and smiles up at me, wide-eyed. “I’m understaffed, Oliver. Tell the college kids to stop quitting, and maybe you won’t have to make the displays.”

  AMY

  I’M STANDING ON my front porch, breathing in the cold, soaking in my last few moments of quiet before going inside. Just one … more … minute.

  Inside, it’s a circus.

  “This one is mine, and you know it!” one of my sisters screams at the other one. They’re fighting over a pink hairbrush in the middle of the living room
, and when I close the door behind me, they both turn to me immediately.

  “Amy!” Gabriella screams. “Tell Marisa this is my hairbrush! She bought the purple one, remember? The pink one is mine!”

  “No!” Marisa screams back. “I didn’t even want a purple one! I want the pink one! You take the purple one!”

  I walk around them and into the hallway. “Where’s Mama?” I ask, because she’s usually wrangling my little siblings into their pj’s about now.

  “Javi’s crying because he swallowed a tooth,” Gabriella says. “They’re in Mama’s room.”

  I turn in the direction of my parents’ room, but before I can knock, the door is thrown open, and Hector runs out of the room and directly into me.

  “Ow!” I say, but he’s already taking off past me. “You stepped on my toe.”

  “Sorry,” Hector calls over his shoulder as he runs down the hallway.

  “Mama?” I call, tapping a knuckle against her doorframe. I hear someone hiccupping from inside.

  “Amy?”

  I push the door open.

  “Hi, sweetie.” Mama still has her arms around a crying Javier when I come in, but I ignore my little brother. Gabriella swallowed a tooth last month, so this isn’t the first time we’re going through this little calamity. “How was job hunting?”

  I halt a few steps inside her room. I know I don’t have any right to be upset that she asked me to get a job, but now that I’ve had time to let it sink in, to think about how this is going to derail me, I think I’m upset anyway. Upset that this happened, and that I have to help deal with it.

  Not to mention, I’m afraid I’m going to hear a chorus of see I told you so’s from her and my stepfather, Carlos, when I tell them I got a job at Spirits. They know how much I like it there, and I know they’ll be smug about it. They’re always trying to get me to do “teenager things,” but they don’t get that I don’t have time for “teenager things” if I’m going to get the hell out of Missouri when I graduate. This job is not about “teenager things.” It’s about money, plain and simple.