One True Loves(10)

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 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.”