“Yes!” I shout for a second time. Tanya looks up again. I give her an apologetic smile. “All good, promise. Want some chips?”
“No thanks, sweetie,” she replies with a smile, turning back to her book yet again.
And I am all good. I text my moms and ask them to be home in time for dinner tonight. I tell them I’m cooking us pasta. But I’m not cooking us pasta. I’m going to get them Thai from their favorite restaurant, and they’ll actually sit down and talk and listen and remember why they love each other so freaking much in the first place. Ooh! What if I could get prosecco as well, so it could be just like one of their anniversary dinners? Hmm, the Thai food alone will push my budget for Barbra to the limit… though maybe…
“Hey, Tanya,” I say, interrupting her again. She puts her book down on the table this time and looks at me with the patience of a saint. I twirl a piece of my hair and smile wide. “Can you do me a favor? Pretty please?”
* * *
Tanya agrees to buy two bottles of prosecco in exchange for three free babysitting sessions for her boys next year and a promise I’ll snap a photo of my moms with the alcohol—otherwise she’ll storm my house to tell them I’ve been underage drinking. It’s kind of funny how easy it is to get alcohol when no one suspects you’d actually drink it. I also call the Thai restaurant and place my moms’ staple order for delivery: shrimp pad thai, vegetable basil rice, and tom kha gai soup. The price isn’t too bad—$37.24. With the wine-for-babysitting exchange and the bonus money, I’ll still have enough for Barbra. Just enough. Like I might be couch diving for gas change the rest of the year.
Now if only my moms would actually text me back. I bite my nail as I leave the break room and check my phone one last time. No messages yet.
I wander down the young adult fiction aisle and am soon swept back up in the tide of bookselling. After helping half a dozen shoppers and sending them off to the registers with my QR code, I spot Jake and a customer in the nonfiction section. The woman smiles down at a tablet in her hands as Jake chats with her, nodding at something in agreement. What did he mean earlier about me not winning the bonus? What’s the magic trick up his flannel sleeve?
I walk up to him and the customer, and in a breezy voice say, “Hello, I’m Shoshanna! Can I also assist you today?”
“Sure!” The woman smiles at me before glancing back at the tablet in her hands. “I’m just finishing up your quiz. This is awesome!”
“Our quiz?” I ask, leaning over to glance at the screen. It’s some kind of Buzzfeed-style quiz, like the ones that sort you into your Harry Potter house and are always wrong, and how dare anyone say I’m anything other than a Ravenclaw?
The questions are straightforward yes-or-no.
Did you read this book? Yes.
Did you read this book? No.
Each answer generates a new, more niche title.
The woman is totally engrossed. I glance at Jake, who seems pleased as heck with himself, thumbs tucked into the pockets of his jeans. We both step back as the woman continues with the quiz. Jake leans toward me, his voice low enough to make my skin buzz. “Pretty cool, huh?” he asks.
“Um, I guess.” I shrug. Seriously? This was his genius idea. No way some Buzzfeed quiz is going to outsell me. “Where’d you find it?”
“Oh, I didn’t find it anywhere.” Jake yawns, stretching one arm behind his back and tugging it with the other, exposing a sliver of his abdomen, like when I first met him only a couple days ago. He must do it on purpose. Sliver-of-skin-exposing, flannel-wearing mastermind. “Sorry.” He grins at me. “Tired. It was a late night. I was up building that quiz.”
“You…” I pause, feeling a tiny seed of panic. “You what?”
“I built the quiz,” he repeats in a casual tone. “It’s based off of Once Upon stock and weighted toward store bestsellers and staff recommendations.”
“Oh!” the woman exclaims, looking up from the screen in delight. “Perfect! I had this on my list last year and forgot about it!”
“Perfect!” Jake smiles at her, then at me. I hate his white teeth. Like, big deal you have good oral hygiene. Mazel tov, you floss. Show-off. “I’ll take you right to it.”
Before they head off down the aisle, Jake passes the tablet to me. “Here, take a look if you want. Let me just…” He signs me into his password-protected quiz. His ridiculous popcorn-stringing, light-untangling dexterous fingers move too fast for me to even see the username, much less the password. He then leads the woman off as I look down at the screen. The design is attractive and clean. The quiz title asks: “What Is Your Next Great Read?”
I roll my eyes and push back the seed of panic. Please. Like anything Jake builds could predict something I’d want to read. I sigh and start tapping answers. I’m led down the Time Stands Still category, but I mean, that’s a major book. Like half the planet owns a copy, so of course it’s on here. There’s no way Jake can predict what I want to read next. Even I have trouble.…
“Damn it,” I mutter.
The quiz leads me right to a fantasy series the author of Time Stands Still often recommends. I’ve been meaning to read it and keep forgetting. But still. That’s pretty obvious. We print out recommendations like that on our receipts: “Do you read X? Then you might also like Y.”
I’m sure if I picked more difficult options it wouldn’t work… though, the book it selected for that woman has been out for years. And it’s the author’s only novel, so it’s not a basic “other titles by this author” recommendation.
My shoulders tense as Jake rounds a corner. He walks back to me with so much confidence, with a grin so cocky, I want to kick out my foot and trip him. He takes the tablet back with one hand and runs fingers through his hair with the other. “Pretty cool, huh?” he asks. “Oh, wait. One second.” Suddenly he pulls out a walkie-talkie. My eyes widen in shock as he presses the button, and the system buzzes overhead. “Jake to stockroom, we’re low on Christmas Cat calendars again; Jake to stockroom, low on Christmas Cat calendars.”
My voice is loud enough without a radio. “Myra gave you PA privileges? Already? You only started working here forty-eight hours ago!”
“Actually, forty-six.” Jake winks. “To be exact.”
My eyes narrow as I look back down at the tablet. “You don’t read books. How did you make this quiz?”
“I read books,” Jake responds, his tone short. A sick feeling courses through me. I didn’t mean to say that again. It just slipped out and sounded all judgmental. “I read books for school. And Daniel’s been giving me some stuff to read, and I—you know what? I don’t need to explain myself to you.”
“You’re right,” I say stiffly. “You don’t. I’m sorry.”
Silence stretches, the air crackling between us for a long moment, before Jake continues, “This doesn’t have to do with reading, anyway. It’s mostly coding and algorithms.”
“But if you’re so great with computers, why work here?” I ask genuinely. “Why not work at the Genius Bar?”