One True Loves Page 4

  “What do you like to do, then?” I asked. “If you’re not into movies, I mean.”

  Sam thought about it. “Well, I have to study a lot,” he said. “And other than that, between my job here and being in the marching band, orchestra, and jazz band . . . I don’t have a lot of time.”

  I looked at him. I was thinking less and less about whether Marie thought he was cute, and more and more about the fact that I did.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said as I turned away from the stacks in front of me and walked toward him.

  “I think that’s typically how conversations go, so sure,” he said, smiling.

  I laughed. “Why do you work here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if you’re so busy, why do you spend so much time working at a bookstore?”

  “Oh,” Sam said, thinking about it. “Well, I have to buy my own car insurance and I want to get a cell phone, which my parents said was fine as long as I pay for it myself.”

  I understood that part. Almost everyone had an after-school job, except the kids who scored lifeguard jobs during the summer and somehow ended up making enough to last them the whole year.

  “But why here? You could be working at the CD store down the road. Or, I mean, the music store on Main Street.”

  Sam thought about it. “I don’t know. I thought about applying to those places, too. But I . . . I think I just wanted to work at a place that had nothing to do with music,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I play six instruments. I have to be relentless about practicing. I play piano for at least an hour every day. So it’s nice to just have, like, one thing that isn’t about minor chords and tempos and . . .” He seemed lost in his own world for a moment but then he resurfaced. “I just sometimes need to do something totally different.”

  I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be him, to have something you were so passionate about that you actually needed to make yourself take a break from it. I didn’t have any particular passion. I just knew that it wasn’t my family’s passion. It wasn’t books.

  “What instruments?” I asked him.

  “Hm?”

  “What are the six that you play?”

  “Oh,” he said.

  A trio of girls from school came in the door. I didn’t know who they were by name, but I’d seen them in the halls. They were seniors, I was pretty sure. They laughed and joked with one another, paying no attention to Sam or me. The tallest one gravitated toward the new fiction while the other two hovered around the bargain section, picking up books and laughing about them.

  “Piano,” Sam said. “That was my first one. I started in second grade. And then, let’s see . . .” He put out his thumb, to start counting, and then with each instrument another finger went up. “Guitar—electric and acoustic but I count that as one still—plus bass, too—electric and acoustic, which I also think counts as one even though they really are totally different.”

  “So five so far but you’re saying that’s really only three.”

  Sam laughed. “Right. And then drums, a bit. That’s my weakest. I just sort of dabble but I’m getting better. And then trumpet and trombone. I just recently bought a harmonica, too, just to see how fast I can pick it up. It’s going well so far.”

  “So seven,” I said.

  “Yeah, but I mean, the harmonica doesn’t count either, not yet at least.”

  In that moment, I wished my parents had made me pick up an instrument when I was in second grade. It seemed like it was almost too late now. That’s how easy it is to tell yourself it’s too late for something. I started doing it at the age of fourteen.

  “Is it like languages?” I asked him. “Olive grew up speaking English and Korean and she says it’s easy for her to pick up other languages now.”

  Sam thought about it. “Yeah, totally. I grew up speaking Portuguese a bit as a kid. And in Spanish class I can intuit some of the words. Same thing with knowing how to play the guitar and then learning the bass. There’s some overlap, definitely.”

  “Why did you speak Portuguese?” I asked him. “I mean, are your parents from Portugal?”

  “My mom is second-generation Brazilian,” he said. “But I was never fluent or anything. Just some words here and there.”

  The tall girl headed toward the register, so I put down the book in my hand and I met her up at the counter.

  She was buying a Danielle Steel novel. When I rang it up, she said, “It’s for my mom. For her birthday,” as if I was judging her. But I wasn’t. I never did. I was far too worried that everyone else was judging me.

  “I bet she’ll like it,” I said. I gave her the total and she took out a credit card and handed it over.

  Lindsay Bean.

  Immediately, the resemblance was crystal clear. She looked like an older, lankier version of Carolyn. I bagged her book and handed it back to her. Sam, overlooking, pointed to the bookmarks, reminding me. “Oh, wait,” I said. “You need a bookmark.” I picked one up and slipped it into her bag.

  “Thanks,” Lindsay said. I wondered if she got along with Carolyn, what the Bean sisters were like. Maybe they loved each other, loved to be together, loved to hang out. Maybe, when Lindsay took Carolyn to the mall to get jeans, she didn’t abandon her in the store.

  I knew it was silly to assume that Carolyn’s life was better than mine just because she had been holding Jesse Lerner’s hand yesterday in line for a pack of cookies. But, also, I knew that simply because she had been holding Jesse’s hand in line for a pack of cookies, her life was better than mine.

  The sun was starting to set by then. Cars had turned on their headlights. Often, during the evening hours, the low beams of SUVs were just high enough to shine right into the storefront.

  This very thing happened just as Lindsay and her friends were making their way outside. A champagne-colored oversized SUV pulled up and parked right in front of the store, its lights focused straight on me. When the driver turned the car off, I could see who it was.

  Jesse Lerner was sitting in the front passenger’s side of the car. A man, most likely his father, was driving.

  The back door opened and out popped Carolyn Bean.

  Jesse got out of his side and hugged Carolyn good-bye and then Carolyn got in her sister’s car with her sister’s two friends.

  Then Jesse hopped back into his father’s car, glancing into the store for a moment as he did it. I couldn’t tell if he saw me. I doubted he was really looking, the way I had been.

  But I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. My gaze followed his silhouette even as Carolyn and Lindsay’s car took off, even as Jesse’s father turned the headlights back on and three-point-turned out of the parking lot.

  When I spun back to what I was doing, I ached somehow. As if Jesse Lerner was meant to be mine and I was being forced to stare right into the heart of the injustice of it all.

  My hand hit the stack of bookmarks, sending them into disarray. I gathered them and fixed them myself.

  “So I was wondering,” Sam said.

  “Yeah?”

  “If maybe you’d want to, like, go see a movie together sometime.”

  I turned and looked at him, surprised.

  There was too much overwhelming me in that moment. Jesse with Carolyn, the headlights in my eyes, and the fact that someone was actually, possibly, asking me out on a date.

  I should have said, “Sure.” Or “Totally.” But instead I said, “Oh. Uh . . .”

  And then nothing else.

  “No worries,” Sam said, clearly desperate for this awkwardness to end. “I get it.”

  And just like that, I sent Sam Kemper straight into the friend zone.

  Two and a half years later, Sam was graduating.

  I had spent a good portion of my sophomore year trying to get Sam to ask me out again. I had made jokes about not having anything to do on a Saturday night and I had vaguely implied that we should hang out outside of
the store, but he wasn’t getting it and I was too much of a chicken to ask him outright. So I let it go.

  And since then, Sam and I had become close friends.

  So I went with my mom and dad to support him as he sat outside in the sweltering heat in a cap and gown.

  Marie was not yet home for the summer from the University of New Hampshire. She was majoring in English, spending her extracurricular time submitting short stories to literary magazines. She had yet to place one but everyone was sure she’d get published somewhere soon. Graham had gone to UNH with her but she broke up with him two months in. Now she was dating someone named Mike whose parents owned a string of sporting goods stores. Marie would often joke that if they got married, they would merge the businesses. “Get it? And sell books and sports equipment at the same store,” she’d explain.

  As I told Olive, there was no end to the things Marie could say to make me purge my lunch. But no one else seemed to want to vomit around her, and thus, my parents were promoting her to assistant manager for the summer.

  Margaret had just recently quit and Marie had lobbied for the job. I was surprised when my mom was reticent to let her do it. “She should be off enjoying herself in college,” she said. “Before she comes back here and takes on all of this responsibility.”

  But my father was so excited about it that even I had softened to the idea. He made her an assistant manager name badge even though none of us wore name badges. And he told my mom that he couldn’t be happier than to spend his summer with both of his daughters at the store.

  The smile on his face and the gleam in his eye led me to promise myself to be nicer to Marie. But she hadn’t even come home yet and I was already unsure it would take.

  I was not looking forward to summer at the store. Sam had given his notice the month before and had worked his last day. Instead of staying in town, he was leaving in a few weeks to take an internship at a music therapy office in Boston. And then he was starting at Berklee College of Music in the fall.

  It was his first choice and when he got in, I’d congratulated him with a hug. Then I quickly moved on to teasing him for staying so close to home. But I wasn’t entirely joking. I truly couldn’t understand why his first choice was to live in a part of the country he’d lived in all his life. I had set my sights on the University of Los Angeles. I got a pamphlet in the mail and I liked the idea of going to school in permanent sunshine.

  As Sam’s name was called out on the converted football field that afternoon, my parents were disagreeing about whether to restain our back patio. I had to nudge my father in the ribs with my elbow to get his attention.

  “Guys,” I said. “Sam’s up.”

  “Samuel Marcos Kemper,” the principal announced.

  The three of us stood and cheered for him, joining his own parents, who were seated on the other side of the crowd.

  When Sam sat down, I connected eyes with him for a moment and watched a smile creep across his face.

  Four hours later, Olive and I were standing in the kitchen of Billy Yen’s house, filling up our red Solo cups with generic-looking beer from an ice-cold steel keg.

  Almost seventeen, I had made out with two guys and dated Robby Timmer for four weeks, during which time I let him get to a tame third base. It was safe to say I was looking to ditch my v-card as soon as the moment was right and I was hoping that moment was sooner rather than later.

  Olive, for her part, had come out to her parents as bisexual and then confused them when she started dating Matt Jennings. Olive patiently explained to her parents that bisexual did not mean gay, it meant bisexual. And while they seemed to understand, they once again became confused when Olive and Matt broke up and Olive started dating a girl from her after-school job at CVS. They understood gay and they understood straight but they did not understand Olive.

  “Did you see who’s here?” Olive asked. She took a sip of the beer and made a grimace. “This tastes like water, basically,” she said.

  “Who?” I asked. I sipped from my cup and found that Olive was right—it did taste watery. But I liked watery beer. It tasted less like beer.

  “J-E-S-S-E,” Olive said.

  “He’s here?” I asked.

  Olive nodded. “I saw him earlier, by the pool.”

  Olive and I were not aware, when we heard about the party, that there was a pool and people there would be running around in bikinis and swim shorts, throwing one another in and playing chicken. But even if we had been, we still would have come and we still wouldn’t have worn our bathing suits.

  I sipped my own drink and then decided to just throw it back in a series of chugs. Then I filled up my cup again.

  “All right, well,” I said. “Let’s just walk around and see if we spot him.”

  Jesse and Carolyn broke up sometime over spring break earlier that year. It wasn’t such a crazy thing to think that Jesse might notice me.

  Except that it was. It was totally absurd.

  He was now the captain of the swim team, leading our high school to three undefeated seasons. There was an article about him in the local newspaper, titled “Swim Prodigy Jesse Lerner Breaks 500 Meter Freestyle State Record.” He was out of my league.

  Olive and I took our cups with us out back, joining the chaos surrounding the yard and pool. There were girls on the redwood patio smoking clove cigarettes and laughing together, every single one of them wearing a spaghetti-strap tank and low-cut jeans. I was embarrassed to be wearing the very same thing.

  I had on a black tank with flared jeans that came up two inches lower than my belly button. There was a gap between the tank and the jeans, my midriff showing. Olive was wearing flat-front camo-print chinos and a V-neck purple T-shirt, also exposing her lower abs. Now I look at pictures of us back then and I wonder what on earth possessed us to leave the house with our belly buttons hanging out.

  “You look great, by the way,” Olive said. “This might be your hottest phase yet.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I figured she was referring to the way I’d been wearing my long, blond-brown hair low down my back, parted in the middle. But I also suspected it had something to do with the way that I was growing into my body. I felt more confident about my butt, less shy about my boobs. I stood taller and straighter. I had started wearing dark brown mascara and blush. I had become a slave to lip gloss like every other girl in school. I felt far from a beautiful swan but I no longer felt like an ugly duckling, either. I was somewhere in between, and I think my growing confidence had started showing.

  Olive waved a hand in front of her face as the smoke from the cloves drifted over to us. “Why do girls think that just because the cigarette smells vaguely of nutmeg that I would want to smell it any more than a normal one?” She walked away, down toward the pool to put some distance between us and the smoke.

  It was only once my feet hit the concrete surrounding the pool that I realized who was about to dive in.

  There, in a wet red-and-white bathing suit clinging to his legs, toes lined up perfectly with the edge of the diving board, was . . . Sam.

  His hair was wet and mashed down onto his head. His torso was entirely bare. There, underneath the faint chest hair and the sinewy pecks, was a six-pack.

  Sam had a six-pack.

  What?

  Olive and I watched as he bounced slowly, preparing to take flight. And then he was in the air.

  He landed with the familiar thwack of a belly flop.

  Someone yelled, “Ohhhhh, duuude. That had to hurt.” And then Sam’s head popped up from the water, laughing. He shook the water from his ears and saw me.

  He smiled and then started to swim to the edge as a second guy jumped in right after him.

  I was suddenly nervous. If Sam came up to me, wet and half-naked, what did I want to happen?

  “Another beer?” Olive asked me, holding her cup out to show me it was empty.

  I nodded, assuming she would go get them.

  But instead she said, “Be a doll,” a
nd handed me her cup.

  I laughed at her. “You are so annoying.”

  She smiled. “I know.”

  I walked up to the keg outside and pumped out enough for one cup before it sputtered out.

  “Oh, man!” I heard from behind me.

  I turned around.

  Jesse Lerner was standing six inches from me in a T-shirt, jeans, and leather sandals. He was smiling in a way that seemed confident but vaguely shy, like he knew how handsome he was and it embarrassed him. “You drained the last of the keg,” he said.

  It was the first time Jesse had ever said a complete sentence to me, the first time I’d heard a subject followed by a predicate come out of his mouth aimed for my ears.

  The only thing that was weird about it was how not weird it was. In an instant, Jesse went from someone I saw from afar to someone I felt like I’d been talking to my entire life. I wasn’t intimidated, as I always imagined I’d be. I wasn’t even nervous. It was like spending years training for a race and finally getting to race it.

  “You snooze, you lose,” I said, teasing.

  “Rules say if you take the last beer you have to chug it,” he said.

  And then, from the crowd, came the word that no teenager holding a Solo cup ever wants to hear.

  “Cops!”

  Jesse’s head whipped around, looking to confirm that the threat was real, that it wasn’t just a bad joke.

  In the far corner of the yard, where the driveway ended, you could just make out the blue and red lights across the grass.

  And then there was a whoop.

  I looked around, trying to find Olive, but she’d already taken off into the back woods, catching my eye and pointing for me to do the same.

  I dropped the cups on the ground, spilling my beer on my feet. And then I felt a hand on my wrist. Jesse was pulling me with him, off in the opposite direction of everyone else. We weren’t going toward the woods in the back; we were headed for the bushes that separated the house from the one next to it.