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.”