All Our Worst Ideas

by Vicky Skinner

  I sigh, looking out at Dad from the open doorway. “What do you want?” I ask him, surprised that he even knows the world exists before noon. I’m not sure he’s ever seen it.

  Well, except for when I had to pick him up from the police station.

  Dad grips the doorjamb, and I don’t miss the way he slips his foot into the corner of the doorway, just in case I’m tempted to slam the door in his face. “I just want to talk to you, Oli. Can I take you out for breakfast?”

  And that’s how I end up sitting across from my father at Charlie’s, watching him devour pancakes, dripping with syrup.

  “What do you want to talk about?” I demand. I have an omelet sitting on the plate in front of me, but I’m not feeling much like eating. In fact, the smell of the eggs is making me queasy.

  My dad’s fork drops to his plate. “Oli, I’m—” He breaks off and looks away, at the cast wrapped around my arm. “I’m sorry about what happened. It was my fault, and I know that. I know that you shouldn’t have been there, picking my ass up off the concrete.” He grits his teeth, and when he speaks again, he chokes over his words. “I didn’t mean this for you, Oli. It kills me that you got hurt. That I put you in harm’s way.” He digs his fingertips into his chest, his shirt wrinkling around them. And when he looks up at me, there are tears in his eyes.

  I steel myself against it. What else can I do? Dad has been hurting me my whole life. When he got so drunk he stumbled home from the bars every night, when he got so drunk he started fights, when he got so drunk Mom couldn’t bear to look at him. He was always hurting me. How is this, this stupid cast and the dented bumper on my truck, any different than it was before?

  My father’s bloodshot eyes find me, and he moves fast, reaching across the table and gripping my hands over the top of it, so hard it hurts. “I can’t lose you, Oli. I can’t. You’re the only good thing in my life. Tell me what to do. Just tell me what to do to fix this.”

  I look down at where he has a hold on me. One of his big hands spans across half the words Amy wrote on my cast. I think about her looking up at me in that courtyard, the same courtyard I carried Dad out of, snowflakes landing in her long eyelashes. I want to be back there with her, in that place that was just the two of us, where we could whisper secrets to each other that no one else could understand.

  I pull my hands out from under his, sliding them back toward me on the tabletop. “You need help,” I tell him. “You want to fix this? You want to see me again? You go to A.A. You see a counselor. I don’t care which. But you need help. Or this is over for good.”

  His eyes go wide, and his surprise mirrors my own, even if I refuse to show it. I wasn’t planning to serve him up an ultimatum, but here we are. And I mean it. I’ve done a lot for him. I’ve spent the past ten years being his crutch, his very reason for living, as he tells me again and again. But I’m tired of being responsible for him. I’m tired of being the only adult in this relationship. So it’s time for him to buck up or find someone else to pick him up from Hassey’s.

  Dad’s hands fall to his lap, and I see the conflict on his face. What was he expecting me to tell him? That what he’s doing is enough? That he doesn’t have to change? That life can go on as it always has, even after I got my damn arm broken trying to get him home in the middle of the night?

  Yeah. That’s exactly what he was expecting.

  But for the past few days, my mind has been flashing back to the look on Amy’s face when I told her I don’t want college. I was expecting revulsion, I was expecting disappointment, disgust, even confusion. But instead, she looked at me with respect, and it felt so damn good, and it’s enough. For now, it’s enough that someone like Amy respects me and my choices. I don’t need Dad’s approval, too.

  Maybe I don’t need Mom’s, either.

  AMY

  I’M CLOSING WITH Oliver tonight. It’s my first time closing with just him, instead of him and Brooke, and I’m a little jittery. He’s focused, his eyes flitting in between the computer in front of him and back down to the sales slips in his hands as he goes over the transactions for the day to make sure everything adds up.

  We’ve barely spoken, and I can’t help but feel like I’ve done something wrong, even though I don’t even think I’ve had the chance to. Maybe I should have just left it alone the other night. Maybe I should have just let him have his secrets if he wanted them. But all I can think about is the relief in his shoulders when he told me about not wanting to go to college. Those same shoulders are bunched up an inch higher than usual tonight, and I want to know why.

  “Hey,” I say, stepping up to him.

  He doesn’t take his eyes off the screen, but he says, “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Are you okay?”

  At this, his eyes finally flit over to me, his hands faltering on the sales slips. “Yeah, I’m fine, why?”

  He blinks down at the slips in his hand for a second and then he puts them down and looks at me, and I can see in the skin around his eyes just how tired he is. He opens his mouth, shuts it again, opens it again, takes a deep breath, closes it. “Just thinking,” he says.

  “About what?”

  He bites his lip and lets it go. He shrugs, and I know he’s not going to tell me. I don’t know what happened between us out in the snow, but I don’t think it’s going to happen again, right here. He’s closed back up. We stand there for a long moment, until the music changes and the heavy sounds of an electric bass breaks between us.

  “You better get to work before I write you up,” he jokes, and I laugh, turning away from the register. I start walking the aisles, straightening displays and reorganizing stray vinyl, but I can feel him watching me.

  Moments later, when the music changes, I laugh.

  “What’s so funny over there?” he asks.

  I shrug. “Isn’t this, like, the sex song?” I ask, listening to the chords of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” over the sound system.

  Oliver stops working and narrows his eyes at me. “The sex song?”

  “Yeah, you know, in the movies, any time a character is looking to get lucky, they play this song. It’s like a thing. Although, I don’t think that’s particularly realistic. If I was going to choose a song to have sex to, this probably wouldn’t be it.”

  Behind the counter, the register opens with a ding. “I wouldn’t know,” Oliver says quietly.

  He’s still not looking at me, and it’s starting to make my stomach turn. I want him to talk to me. I know he’s stressed out from dealing with his dad and the car accident and all that, but I just want him to look at me the way he did the other night. I want him to see me.

  So, I walk up to the counter and lean my elbows on it. “Okay, Mr. Know-It-All. What’s your sex song?”

  Oliver’s entire body freezes. “I don’t have one.”

  I sigh and turn my back to him, leaning against the counter, facing the other direction. “Oh, please, Oliver. You have a song for every occasion, and you don’t have a song for when you’re going to hook up with a girl?”

  He’s quiet and still, making no noise whatsoever, so I look over my shoulder at him. Finally, his eyes are on me, and I regret trying to be casual because something about seeing Oliver like this, intense and serious, after weeks of finally seeing another side of him makes me nervous. I don’t want to say the wrong thing, and now I feel like I have.

  But then he says, “You want a sex song? I’ll give you a sex song.”

  I smile at the way he says it, so determined. I like this Oliver much better. He disappears into Brooke’s office and comes back out with a set of headphones and his phone in his hand. He’s scrolling around on the screen by the time he’s standing right in front of me, his hand outstretched, offering me the headphones.

  “Oh,” I say, taking them and looking down at their sleek lines. “These look expensive.”

  He stops scrolling. “It’s cool,” he says, pushing them toward me with a nudge. “Put them on.”

 
I hesitate, and before I get the chance, he’s reached out, taken the headphones, and clamped them over my ears. I arrange them so that they’re not caught around my hair and then jump up on the counter, letting my feet dangle between us. When I’m up here, we’re the same height.

  The music starts.

  I hold on to the edge of the counter and listen to the singer’s voice, sliding over the notes so cleanly it gives me goose bumps. I don’t recognize the song, but I know the singer’s voice to be Ed Sheeran’s, and I can’t help but smile at that because it’s so unexpected. Ed sings Oliver’s sex song.

  The song is only mildly sexy, a sad song, about a girl crying and a boy wiping away the tears, but Oliver was right to choose it. Something about it makes warmth run up my arms, and perhaps it’s not just the song itself, but just knowing what the song is supposed to make me feel. Knowing Oliver wants me to feel sexy, wants me to feel the drumbeat in my blood and the slide of Ed’s voice on my nerves, and that alone makes my skin hot. I let my eyes slide closed, focusing on Ed’s crisp harmonies

  But then I feel a tingling on the surface of my skin, an awareness in my pores. I open my eyes, and Oliver is right there, so close I can feel his breath on my lips. His eyebrows furrow, like being this close to me is painful. His hands slide along the tops of my thighs, and I gasp just before he leans forward and swallows the sound with his mouth.

  If I thought my skin was hot before, it’s nothing compared to the way it burns as Oliver’s hands move to my hips, as he pulls me against him and then wets my lips with his tongue. Every touch is unexpected and yet somehow not surprising at all, gentle and soft and aching.

  I think maybe I should pull away, maybe we shouldn’t be making out on the counter where anyone could see through the windows, but I have Ed Sheeran in my ears, and Oliver smells like lemon hand soap, so I open my mouth and keep kissing him.

  The song fades into the next one, and Oliver pushes his hands into my hair, halfway knocking one of the earphones off with his long fingers. We kiss through two more songs, and when the album ends, and I can hear the muffled sounds of our lips, I finally inch away from him.

  He sighs and smiles, his eyes still closed. It’s amazing and terrifying. “Did I win the contest?”

  I can’t help but laugh at that and then give him a playful shove. “Absolutely not.”

  He helps me off the counter and we don’t speak again as we finish closing up the shop. We don’t speak as he walks me to my car or as I climb into my driver’s seat, and I don’t look back when I drive out of the parking lot.

  OLIVER

  THAT NIGHT, I lie in bed and listen to the Lumineers. I listen to them because I know they’re Amy’s favorite and right now, everything is Amy.

  Her skin under my fingers, the pressure of her mouth, the smell of her shampoo.

  I’ve always been disappointed by the thought that, in the event of a near-death experience, my brain is supposed to supply some spiritual kind of montage of powerful life moments. I never really thought I had any of those.

  Now I know, if I’m seconds from death, I’ll think of Amy and her mouth, and I’ll die happy.

  AMY

  THAT NIGHT, I lie in bed and listen to the Lumineers. I listen to them because they’re my comfort band, and I think what I need right now is comfort.

  But I can hear Ed Sheeran in my head. I can feel Oliver’s fingers in my hair. I can see the green of his eyes when he pulled away from me.

  The two Valentine-grams Jackson gave me are sitting beside me on my bed, and I ruffle my fingertips over them and glance at the wilted carnation in the vase beside my bed.

  What the hell do I do now?

  OLIVER

  EVEN THOUGH I tell myself it’s time to chill out, I check my phone again. I’ve probably checked it at least four hundred times since last night, and just like the last three hundred ninety-nine times, there’s no message from Amy.

  I’m not sure what I’m expecting exactly. Maybe I should be the one messaging her. Maybe I should just grow a pair and tell Amy that I’ve never been in love before, but I’m fairly certain this is what it feels like. Because what else could this be?

  “Would you put your phone away?” Mom hisses when she sees me checking it again. That makes four hundred one. I roll my eyes and put my phone in my pocket. The Sunday sermon is almost over, based on how much shouting our pastor is doing, so I figure I can probably do without checking again until we get back outside.

  “What are you so jittery about?” Mom asks when she sees me checking my phone again at lunch. I’m not sure if Amy is at work today. I could go by there. I could text Brooke and ask if Amy’s there, if she’s acting any differently.

  “Are you checking your application status?” Mom asks, and I’m so startled by the question that I just stare up at her with wide eyes.

  Shit, shit, shit. It’s already March. College acceptance letters are probably being delivered in peoples’ mailboxes already. And now that email acceptances are a popular thing, of course Mom thinks I’m checking for mine … because my mother still thinks I actually applied.

  Shit.

  “Uh, yeah,” I lie because I can’t decide if it’s worse to lie to my mother or have to tell her that I’m checking my phone every fifteen seconds because I made out with the girl of my dreams last night, and I’m waiting for her to say something about it.

  God, I should have just said something last night. I should have told her how I feel about her. But no, after that kiss, I acted like a chickenshit and made that stupid joke about the contest. There’s something wrong with my brain.

  Mom nudges me with her elbow as we walk out of the restaurant. It’s a sunny day, all the snow from Friday night completely melted and nothing but dark spots left on the concrete.

  “Don’t worry so much,” she says. “There’s no reason why you wouldn’t be a shoo-in for a place like MBU.”

  I can think of one reason.

  AMY

  I HAVEN’T REALLY had any deep or meaningful conversations with Mama since I freaked out at family dinner. Mostly, we’ve spoken in passing about what’s for dinner or who’s taking the car in the morning, and not much else. But she chooses tonight to finally knock on my door. I only stopped by the house for a second to change because it’s eighties night at the shop, and I didn’t want to wear my crazy makeup and neon paraphernalia to school, and since there’s nobody else in the house, I guess Mama decided it’s a safe time to approach.

  “Off to work?” she asks from my open doorway.

  “Yep,” I say, being mildly rude and turning up the volume on my computer, where music is already streaming so loud I can barely hear myself think.

  Mama leans against my doorjamb and sighs. “Are you going to ignore me forever?”

  I roll my eyes and go back to applying my hot pink eye shadow. “I’m not ignoring you. I’ve been busy.”

  “Too busy to talk to me?”

  I shrug. Sort of. I’ve been too busy for everything and everyone lately, and I haven’t really been interested in getting into it with Mama. There’s a reason I never said anything to her about how I’ve been feeling. I’m absolutely awful at confrontation, especially when it comes to her.

  Mama comes up behind me and pulls the scrunchie out of my side ponytail, attempting to smooth out the bumps I left there since I’m already running late.

  “Baby, I didn’t want to upset you. I’m just concerned.”

  I do my best not to make eye contact with her in my mirror. I start in on my eyeliner. “It’s not your concerns that are upsetting me, it’s your doubts.”

  She pulls her hands away from me, letting my hair curtain down around my shoulders. “Baby, it’s not that I doubt you. I just know how this goes. Stanford is a hard school to get into. And even if you do get in, the chances you’ll get this scholarship—”

  I jerk away from her, and she looks like I just slapped her. “I know all the obstacles. I don’t need you to remind me. I have a hard enough t
ime having faith in myself without your contribution.”

  Her eyes look pained at that, but I don’t know what else to say, how to make her see that I need someone to believe in me.

  “I have to go to work,” I say when she continues saying nothing. I’m halfway to my car when I realize I never finished my eyeliner.

  OLIVER

  IT FINALLY HAPPENS after work. Amy and I are walking through the parking lot when she says, “Oli,” and my stomach twists up in knots. Of course. I knew the second she walked in and didn’t look at me that this day wasn’t going to end well, but I wasn’t prepared for the way she says my name, like she’s going to try to let me down gently. God, I hate that. “I think last night was a bad idea.” She keeps her head down when she says it.

  “Because of Jackson?” I knew this, of course. Knew it almost a month ago, when we were sitting in Brooke’s room, and she was crying. I knew she still had feelings for him. But I guess I wasn’t ready for it to be a reason for us not to be more than friends.

  “I’m not trying to get back together with him,” she says, and I should feel something like relief, but instead there’s just tension in my stomach, just the clench of waiting for the other shoe to drop. “But I don’t think it would be fair for me to pursue something else when I still feel…” She trails off and then sighs, her arms falling to her sides. “While I still feel something.”

  She isn’t really making sense, but I understand in the curve of her mouth and the wrinkle in her brow what she’s saying. She’s confused. She doesn’t know how she feels about her ex and maybe she doesn’t know how she feels about me, either.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  She blinks up at me with those dark eyes. “It is?”

  I shrug. “Sometimes friends do stupid stuff like make out at work. That’s what happens when you’re exposed to Ed Sheeran.”