I turned and looked at him, embarrassed to admit the truth. “Sorry,” I said. “I did. I hated it.”
Sam shook his head. “Totally fine. Now you know.”
“Yeah, if someone asks me if I like jazz, I can say no.”
“Well, you might still like jazz,” Sam offered. “Just because you don’t like Mingus doesn’t mean . . .” He trailed off as he saw the look on my face. “You’re already ready to write off all of jazz?”
“Maybe?” I said, embarrassed. “I don’t think jazz is my thing.”
He grabbed his chest as if I’d stabbed him in the heart.
“Oh, c’mon,” I said. “I’m sure there are plenty of things I love that you’d hate.”
“Try me,” he said.
“Romeo + Juliet,” I said confidently. It had proven to be a definitive dividing line between boys and girls at school.
Sam was looking back at the journals in front of him. “The play?” he asked.
“The movie!” I corrected him.
He shook his head as if he didn’t know what I was talking about.
“You’ve never seen Romeo + Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio?” I was aware of the fact that there were other versions of Romeo and Juliet, but back then, there was no Romeo but Leo. No Juliet but Claire Danes.
“I don’t really watch that many new movies,” Sam said.
A mother and son came in and headed straight for the children’s section in the back. “Do you have The Velveteen Rabbit?” the mom asked.
Sam nodded and walked with her, toward the stacks at the far end of the store.
I moved toward the cash register. When they came back, I was ready to ring them up, complete with a green plastic bag and a “Travel the World by Reading a Book” bookmark. When she was out the door, I turned to Sam. He was standing to the side, leaning on a table, with nothing to do.
“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