All Our Worst Ideas

by Vicky Skinner

  I don’t even have to look at the lyrics scrolling across the screen. I know this song forward and backward. Instead, I scan over the faces of strangers, some of whom watch me sing, some who are actually shopping, and some who are just dancing to the music. It’s the kind that’s hard not to dance to. I’m stiff, mostly out of total discomfort, unable to move my limbs, but nobody seems to mind. During the interlude, I do a little back-and-forth step on the podium, and I hear Amy laugh over the music.

  Throughout the whole thing, Morgan cheers, and halfway through, Brooke produces her phone, which she points at me, but Amy just watches with this look on her face, like she’s looking at a complete stranger, and maybe she is because this is definitely not the kind of thing I do.

  When the song finally ends, I make sure to take a bow because I’ve already embarrassed myself so much, what’s a little more, and then I walk back to Amy.

  “Well, well,” she says, biting her lip and in the process biting back her grin. “You have a nice voice, too. I’m learning a lot about you tonight, Oliver York.”

  I shrug, trying to be casual but I’m still a little mortified. “I was feeling inspired.”

  “I know that song,” she says.

  I cross my arms and stand beside her, pretending that absolutely nothing has changed in the last three and a half minutes. “I know you do. Everyone does.”

  Her narrowed eyes are back, and it takes everything to keep myself from smiling.

  “Oh, Oliver,” she says. “You’re going down.”

  AMY

  “I MUST SAY,” my calculus teacher says, standing at the front of our class with our graded exams in her hand. “This test didn’t go over as well as I hoped it would. It seemed that a lot of you didn’t really understand the concept of this chapter.”

  I’m feeling antsy, my knee bobbing up and down as she speaks. Why doesn’t she just give us the damn tests? I can feel my heart sinking. She’s talking to me. I know she’s talking to me. I wasn’t particularly confident during the test, even though I heard Oliver’s voice in my head, the way he explained the problems to me at Spirits. But I took this test right between my last good night with Jackson and his suggestion that we “take a break.” How was I supposed to focus?

  Our teacher begins passing out the tests, obviously going in alphabetical order. Great. That means I’m going to get mine pretty much dead last. I peek over at Petra but am particularly disheartened when I do. She looks so confident. She’s going to get an A, and I’m going to fail, and she’s going to get the valedictorian spot I worked so hard for.

  Petra gets her test, and I’m suddenly very frustrated that she has such a crappy poker face. She bites back her smile, but I see it nonetheless. I don’t know if it’s instinct or her innate desire to always brag, but she glances over at me. She can’t stop her megawatt smile then.

  She doesn’t show me her grade. We aren’t really friends and therefore don’t talk about grades or even really discuss the fact that we’re competitors.

  A sheet of paper falls on my desk, and I stare at it, letting it sit there, like maybe if I don’t touch it, it isn’t real. I got a C. It’s much worse than I imagined, and even though it isn’t a midterm or a final, it’s still an exam, and it’s still a C, and it’s still going to bring my final grade down.

  I’m not going to cry. There’s no way I’m going to cry in the middle of class over a test grade and give people more ammunition against me. I swallow hard and flip my paper over. If I can see the grade on it, so can everyone else, including Petra, one row away from me. I stay there with my hand flat on the desk until I have the courage to look up.

  My teacher’s eyes are on me, and I can see pity there as clear as I can see the sun shining through the window. She pushes her glasses up her nose and looks away.

  Petra, unlike our teacher, doesn’t try to hide. She looks at me, her face a mixture of confusion and something else that I can’t quite read.

  I spend the rest of class trying hard to focus on the lesson so that I won’t end up in this trap again. I obviously didn’t grasp the lesson we learned the first week back from break, or I wouldn’t be having these problems so far down the line. I just need to focus more, pay more attention, give my homework and my reviews the time they need and not only my break time at Spirits.

  When the bell rings, I shove my almost-failing test down into my bag and take off, ignoring the looks I get when I push past everyone to get to the door. I want to get to the bathroom before I start crying. I can still feel that C burning in my bag like a ten-pound weight.

  “Amy!” Petra is chasing me down the hallway. I stop and wait for her to catch up to me, her curly hair bobbing up and down. I don’t want to talk to her, I don’t want to talk to anyone, but I know Petra. She’s persistent. If I run, she’ll follow.

  “You should have aced that test,” she says. Petra seems to have missed the memo about how we never discuss our grades.

  I roll my eyes and turn away from her, away from the bathrooms and toward my third period class. “Did you seriously just run down the hallway to tell me that I suck?”

  Petra scowls and follows after me. “No, I just…” She gets in front of me, making me stop. “I’m just worried, I guess.”

  I clutch the straps of my backpack hard and step around her quick. “Well, don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”

  AMY

  THE NEXT DAY, I stand in the doorway of the science lab. I don’t have bio today, but I’m too anxious to wait. “Ms. Murphy?”

  My AP bio teacher looks up when I approach her desk, and I can already tell she’s not happy to see me. “What can I do for you, Amaría?”

  She’s the only teacher who refuses to call me Amy, and I hate her for it. “I’d like to request a new lab partner.”

  She sighs and puts the pen she’s using to grade papers down. I ignore the sound of my classmates filing into the room behind me. “I’ll admit,” she says when her eyes meet mine, “that I’ve been waiting for one of you to come and ask.”

  I can’t quite meet her eye. I hate it when teachers bring up the fact that they know about our personal lives, that they’re just as much a part of the gossip circuit as the rest of us. “Jackson has a lot of friends in the class. I don’t think he’d mind switching.” I’m trying to sound considerate, but she sees right through me.

  “That’s just the problem,” she says. “If I pair Jackson with anyone else in this class, they’ll use the opportunity to turn it into a funhouse. He works with you. He gets better grades as your partner. And you’re not one to play around in class. I’m sorry, but the two of you will just have to finish out the semester as lab partners.”

  My mouth drops open. “But that’s not fair.”

  She smiles up at me, and I get the distinct impression that, despite her current employment, Ms. Murphy doesn’t like teenagers, or maybe even people in general. “You’ll find that most of life isn’t fair, Miss Richardson. And you have to face the consequences of your bad choices.”

  By bad choices, I’m not sure if she means breaking up with Jackson or dating him in the first place.

  OLIVER

  I’VE BEEN STANDING in the office doorway for almost five full minutes, and Amy still hasn’t noticed that I’m here, she’s so focused on her homework. It looks like science this time, not calculus. Her eyes scan the page, whipping back and forth, her pencil tapping against the table as she reads over something again and again. I try not to be proud of the fact that she’s listening to a soft Parachute song instead of the loud rock music she usually listens to.

  “Amy?”

  She jerks so violently her pencil goes skittering across the floor. “Dammit,” she says, her hand over her chest. “You scared me.”

  I bend down to pick up her pencil and set it in the crease of her open textbook. “Sorry. I’ve been standing here for a while.”

  She blinks at me, almost like she doesn’t recognize me, and then she frowns, but I don’t know why. She st
ares down at the page in front of her. “I’m a little out of it.”

  “Still having trouble?” I ask, pulling the chair that usually sits against the wall up to the desk.

  She shrugs, not looking at me. “Yes and no.” A crease forms between her eyebrows, her mouth going hard. She looks over at me. “It’s stupid.”

  I frown at her. “If it’s got you this worried then it’s not stupid.” But I think I get what she means. Amy and I aren’t quite friends but aren’t quite just coworkers, so there’s no reason for her to feel like she can talk to me about anything other than music and our new competition. What happened at her ex’s party wasn’t enough to make her trust me like that. One weird Friday night experience does not a friendship make.

  She hesitates for a long time and then sighs and says, “I got a C on my calculus exam.”

  “That’s bad, right?” It might seem like a stupid question, but I got my fair share of Cs in high school, especially senior year, when it felt like nothing really mattered anyway. But Amy doesn’t seem like the C type, and she seems pretty upset about it.

  She sighs. “Yes. It’s bad. It’s going to bring my average down, which is going to bring my GPA down, and I could—” She cuts off, letting the end of that sentence float between us. I don’t push her to finish it.

  Something occurs to me. “Shit. Is it my fault? Did I explain it wrong the other day?”

  She’s shaking her head before I finish. “No. What you showed me was fine. I’m just”— There it is again, that hanging sentence. But this time, she finishes it—“distracted.”

  I feel something crawl under my skin. “By your ex?”

  She doesn’t answer right away, her forehead wrinkling in thought. “Not really. It’s not Jackson. It’s actually—” She’s killing me. I feel oddly impatient to know what’s going on in her head, to find a way to solve her problems. “I think it’s Spirits,” she says, finally looking at me. “I thought I could handle working and going to school, but maybe I can’t. I’m spending so much time here, and I feel like I’m falling behind.” She stops, but I can already tell what she’s going to say next.

  “I kind of think I need to quit,” she whispers, and even though I heard the sirens, I’m still surprised by the tornado in my gut. “But my family needs the money. My stepdad got laid off and still hasn’t found a new job. It’s not much, but it helps.”

  “You can’t quit,” I say without thinking.

  Her head comes up, and she looks at me curiously, and I think that for such a smart girl, she’s pretty oblivious if she can’t see how much I like her. I feel like the whole world can see it. “We need you,” I finally say, in an attempt to save myself. “Brooke will be upset if you quit. Can’t you just, you know, get a tutor?”

  She smiles. “It’s not that easy. I’m more the type to be the tutor, not need a tutor.”

  “So, you’re going to skate through with Cs instead of asking for help?”

  She bites her lip. “No, I guess not,” she says, and I lean forward, putting my hand over her textbook so that she looks at me again, instead of down at it.

  “I’ll help any way I can.”

  She blinks at me, her dark eyes a little wide, and I just stare at her.

  “I think I’m just going through a rough patch,” she says. “It’ll pass.” She smiles at me, her lips pressed tight together. “I can’t quit. The school year is almost over anyway. So, you just come through with that music,” she says, turning back to her homework.

  “I’ll have it tomorrow.”

  She doesn’t look at me, but I keep looking at her.

  OLIVER

  I’M NOT EVEN sure what I’m nervous about, but here I am, with actual butterflies in my stomach as I stuff the CDs in a backpack.

  “Are you humming?”

  I turn to see my mother standing in the doorway of my bedroom, her arms crossed and a confused expression on her face. When she frowns like that, it brings out every single wrinkle and worry line on her face, and it ages her ten years.

  “No,” I snap immediately, and her eyebrows raise. “I don’t hum. I just, um, have a song stuck in my head.” A terrible excuse.

  My mother scowls again. “You’ve been awfully agreeable lately. Something I should know about? Did you get a promotion? Or an acceptance letter?”

  It’s my turn to scowl. “I’m always agreeable.”

  My mother snorts. “Oh, sweetie. You growl at people that get too close.”

  I scowl harder.

  “I’m not criticizing your character. Your grouchiness is what people love about you. I’m just commenting on the fact that you’re pretty cheery these days.”

  I think about Amy’s eyes and her lips and that flawless skin that I can’t stop thinking about touching. I shrug, playing it off. “Not particularly cheery. Things are just going, um, smoothly.” Smoothly. My life is anything but smooth. I spent the last week doing research on how the hell to keep Dad from getting in serious trouble with the courts, time is running out on the lie that is my pending admission to Missouri Baptist University, and of course, I’m way into a girl who’s still way into her ex.

  My mother taps her fingers on the doorjamb. “If you say so. Have somewhere to be today?”

  I stuff some more books in my bag: books on Missouri state law, books on criminal offenses, books about how to get yourself out of the shittiest bind of your life.

  “Yeah, I’m just meeting Dad at Charlie’s before work.” And the knowledge that Amy is going to be at Spirits by the time I get there is really the only thing keeping me going. I feel like I’m one misfortune away from smashing something.

  Mom taps her foot, she bites her lip, she crosses her arms.

  “Mom, what is it?”

  She meets my eye and shrugs. “This shouldn’t be on you, Oli. It’s not your job to take care of your father.”

  “Yeah? Well, no one else is going to do it,” I say, pushing past her and heading down the hall, my backpack slung over my arm. I know it isn’t my job to take care of Dad. I know that it’s his own damn fault that he got in trouble, and that he should have to face the damn consequences of acting like a total idiot. But when I think about it, when I imagine my father in jail for being stupid enough to have an addiction that makes him lose all sense of himself, it makes my stomach turn. “I’ll be late,” I call to my mom, ready to shut the door behind me. “I’m closing tonight.”

  OLIVER

  DAD IS WAITING for me at Charlie’s, the coffeehouse that we sometimes meet at when he has it in him to sober up. This isn’t very often. Today, we’re going to discuss his plan of action, as his court date is in less than a week, and he can’t afford his own lawyer, so he has to accept the one the state is offering him.

  I slide into a booth at ten on the dot and wait for him to show up. I scan the books I got at the library yesterday, looking at the places I bookmarked. There’s a chance Dad could get off with a fine, but I don’t know how to guarantee that. I’m not a lawyer.

  Dad falls into the booth across from me with a huff, a smile on his face.

  “Oli, boy,” he says, immediately picking up the cup of coffee I had the waiter bring for me. He gulps it, his eyes wandering around the café over the top, until he finally drops it back onto its saucer with a clatter. He wipes a thumb under his bottom lip and then his eyes go to the table between us. “Wow. Lots of books you got there. We startin’ a book club?”

  I stare at him for a long time, unease starting to tingle up the back of my neck. “What’s going on?”

  He tries to look casual as he slumps down in his seat and looks at me, but I can see the way his fingers tremble, the way he can’t quite get his eyes to focus. “Whadda you mean?”

  “Are you drunk?” I demand.

  His eyes focus then, going wide. He doesn’t have to answer. Of course, he’s drunk. He probably started drinking as soon as he got off work, before the sun even came up.

  “Oli,” he says when I start piling the books
back into my bag.

  “Why can’t you take anything seriously?” I ask loudly. People are starting to look in our direction, including our waiter, who’s subtly glancing our way while wrapping silverware. “You’re going to court in less than a week. You might be in big fucking trouble. And it’s like it doesn’t even faze you.” I rip the zipper on my backpack closed and slide out of the booth, almost stumbling in my anger.

  “Oli, just calm down.”

  I can’t help but laugh. I’m hysterical at my own idiocy, thinking I could count on him, even once, even when it’s his own shit at stake. “Calm down?” I’m looking out the front window when I say it, seeing people walk by in the early morning sunlight. What it must be like to be on the other side of that window, to not have this to deal with all the time.

  “Oli, come on. Sit back down. I’ll sober up. I promise.” Out of the corner of my eye, I see him reach for the cup of coffee before remembering that he already drained it.

  I turn back to the table and smack my hand on the tabletop. My father jumps. In that moment, he doesn’t look like a father to me. He looks like a child being reprimanded, and maybe that’s exactly what he is. “If you don’t give a shit, that’s fine. You can rot in jail for all I care.”

  Hurt flashes in his eyes.

  Good.

  I turn again to leave, and this time his hand comes up, clutching at my jacket, and I yank my arm away from him before swinging my bag over my shoulder and walking out of the café.

  Spirits isn’t far, only a few doors down, and as soon as I open the door, there she is: Amy, standing in the gospel section, restocking a shelf. She turns and smiles at me, the low morning sunlight slanting across her face, and I can tell by the unfocused look in her eye, by her practiced smile, that she thinks I’m a customer. And then her eyes focus and her smile gets bigger, and for a second, I can almost forget that I left my dad behind at Charlie’s, my dad who’ll be standing in front of a judge in less than a week, to deal with his own shit.