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 person 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.