The next day I wore a red knit sweater and flat-front chinos to school, cognizant of my parents’ request to never wear jeans at the store. And then, ten minutes after the last bell rang, I saw Sam leaning against the hood of his car in the school parking lot, waiting for me.

“Hey,” I said as I got closer.

“Hey.” He went around to my side of the car and opened the car door. No one had ever opened a car door for me before except my father, and even then, it was usually a joke.

“Oh,” I said, taking my backpack off and putting it in the front seat. “Thank you.”

Sam looked surprised for a moment, as if he wasn’t sure what I was thanking him for. “For the door? You’re welcome.”

I sat down and sunk into the passenger’s seat as Sam made his way to his side of the car. He smiled at me nervously when he got in and turned on the ignition. And then, suddenly, jazz music blasted through the speakers.

“Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes I really have to psych myself up in the morning.”

I laughed. “Totally cool.”

He turned the music down but not off and I listened as it softly filled the air in the car. Sam put the car in reverse and twisted his body toward me, resting his arm on the back of my seat and then backing out of the spot.

His car was a mess. Papers at my feet, gum wrappers and guitar picks strewn across the dashboard. I glanced into the backseat and saw a guitar, a harmonica, and two black instrument cases.

I turned back to face the front. “Who is this?” I said, pointing to the stereo.

Sam was watching the steady stream of cars to his left, waiting for his chance to turn onto the road.

“Mingus,” he said, not looking at me.

There was a small opening, a chance to enter the flow of traffic. Sam inched up and then swiftly turned, gracefully joining the steady stream of cars. He relinquished his attention, and turned back to me.

“Charles Mingus,” he said, explaining. “Do you like jazz?”

“I don’t really listen to it,” I said. “So I don’t know.”

“All right, then,” Sam said, turning up the volume. “We’ll listen and then you’ll know.”

I nodded and smiled to show that I was game. The only problem was that I knew within three seconds that Charles Mingus was not for me and I didn’t know how to politely ask him to turn it off. So I didn’t.

My father was at the register when we came in through the doors. His face lit up when he saw me.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he said, focused on me. And then he turned for a brief second. “Hey, Sam!”

“Hi, Dad,” I said back. I didn’t love the idea of my father calling me “sweetheart” in front of people from school. But groaning about it would only make it worse, so I let it go.

Sam headed straight for the back of the store. “I’m going to run to the bathroom and then, Mr. Blair, I’ll be back to relieve you.”

My dad gave him a thumbs-up and then turned to me. “Tell me all about your day,” he said as I put my book bag down underneath the register. “Start at the beginning.”

I looked around to see that the only customer in the store was an older man reading a military biography. He was pretending to peruse it but appeared to be downright engrossed. I half expected him to lick his fingertip to turn the page or dog-ear his favorite chapter.

“Aren’t you supposed to be taking Mom on a date?” I asked.

“How old do you think I am?” he asked, looking at his watch. “It’s not even four p.m. You think I’m taking your mother to an early bird special?”

“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging. “You two are the ones who made me work today so you could go see a movie together.”

“We made you work today because you were being rude to your sister,” he said. His tone was matter-of-fact, all blame removed from his voice. My parents didn’t really hold grudges. Their punishments and disappointments were perfunctory. It was as if they were abiding by rules set out before them by someone else. You did this and so we must do that. Let’s all just do our part and get through this.

This changed a few years later, when I called them in the middle of the night and asked them to pick me up from the police station. Suddenly, it wasn’t a fun little test anymore. Suddenly, I had actually disappointed them. But back then, the stakes were low, and discipline was almost a game.

“I know that you and Marie are not the best of friends,” my dad said, tidying up a stack of bookmarks that rested by the register. When the store opened, sometime in the sixties, my great-uncle who started it had commissioned these super cheesy bookmarks with a globe on them and an airplane circling it. They said “Travel the World by Reading a Book.” My father loved them so much that he had refused to update them. He had the same exact ones printed time and time again.

Whenever I picked one of them up, I would be struck by how perfectly they symbolized exactly what I resented about that bookstore.

I was going to travel the world by actually traveling it.

“But one day, sooner than you think, the two of you are going to realize how much you need each other,” my dad continued.

Adults love to tell teenagers that “one day” and “sooner or later” plenty of things are going to happen. They love to say that things happen “before you know it,” and they really love to impart how fast time “flies by.”

I would learn later that almost everything my parents told me in this regard turned out to be true. College really did “fly by.” I did change my mind about Keanu Reeves “sooner or later.” I was on the other side of thirty “before I knew it.” And, just as my father said that afternoon, “one day” I was going to need my sister very, very much.

But back then, I shrugged it off the same way teens all over the country were shrugging off every other thing their parents said at that very moment.

“Marie and I are not going to be friends. Ever. And I wish you guys would let up about it.”

My father listened, nodding his head slowly, and then looked away, focusing instead on tidying up another stack of bookmarks. Then he turned back to me. “I read you loud and clear,” he said, which is what he always said when he decided that he didn’t want to talk about something anymore.

Sam came out of the back and joined us up by the registers. The customer reading the book came over to the counter with the book in his hand and asked us to keep it on hold for him. No doubt so he could come back and read the same copy tomorrow, as if he owned the thing. My father acted as if he was delighted to do it. My father was very charming to strangers.

Right after the man left, my mom came out of her office in the back of the store. Unfortunately, Dad didn’t see her.

“I should tell your mother it’s time to go,” he said. I tried to stop him but he turned his head slightly and started yelling. “Ashley, Emma and Sam are here!”

“Jesus Christ, Colin,” my mom said, putting a hand to her ear. “I’m right here.”

“Oh, sorry.” He made a scrunched face to show that he’d made a mistake and then he gently touched her ear. It was gestures like that, small acts of intimacy between them, that made me think my parents probably still had sex. I was both repulsed and somewhat assuaged by the thought.

Olive’s parents always seemed on the edge of divorce. Marie’s friend Debbie practically lived at our house for two months a few years earlier when her parents were ironing out their own separation. So I was smart enough to know I was lucky to have parents who still loved each other.

“All right, well, since you’re both here, we will take off,” my mom said, heading toward the back to grab her things.

“I thought you weren’t leaving for your date until later,” I said to my father.

“Yeah, but why would we hang around when our daughter is here to do the work?” he said. “If we hurry, we can get home in time to take a disco nap.”

“What is a disco nap?” Sam asked.

“Don’t, Sam; it’s a trap,” I said.

Sam laughed. I never really made people laugh. I wasn’t funny the way Olive was funny. But, suddenly, around Sam I felt like maybe I could be.

“A disco nap, dear Samuel, is a nap that you take before you go out and party. You see, back in the seventies . . .”

I walked away, preemptively bored, and started reorganizing the table of best sellers by the window. Marie liked to sneak her favorite books on there, giving her best-loved authors a boost. My only interest was in keeping the piles straight. I did not like wayward corners.

I perked up only when I heard Sam respond to my father’s story about winning a disco contest in Boston by laughing and saying, “I’m so sorry to say this, but that’s not a very good story.”

My head shot up and I looked right at Sam, impressed.

My dad laughed and shook his head. “When I was your age and an adult told a bad story, do you know what I did?”

“Memorized it so you could bore us with it?” I piped in.

Sam laughed again. My father, despite wanting to pretend to be hurt, gave a hearty chuckle. “Forget it. You two can stay here and work while I’m out having fun.”

Sam and I shared a glance.

“Aha. Who’s laughing now?” my dad said.

My mom came out with their belongings and within minutes, my parents were gone, out the door to their car, on their way to take disco naps. I was stunned, for a moment, that they had left the store to Sam and me. Two people under the age of seventeen in charge for the evening? I felt mature, suddenly. As if I could be trusted with truly adult responsibilities.

And then Margaret, the assistant manager, pulled in and I realized my parents had called her to supervise.

“I’ll be in the back making the schedule for next week,” Margaret said just as soon as she came in. “If you need anything, holler.”

I looked over at Sam, who was standing by the register, leaning over the counter on his elbows.

I went into the biography section and started straightening that out, too. The store was dead quiet. It seemed almost silly to have two people out in front and one in the back. But I knew that I was here as a punishment and Sam was here because my parents wanted to give him hours.

I resolved to sit on the floor and flip through Fodor’s travel books if nobody else came in.

“So what did you think of Charles Mingus?” Sam asked. I was surprised to see that he had left the area by the cash register and was just a few aisles down, restocking journals.

“Oh,” I said. “Uh . . . Very cool.”

Sam laughed. “You liar,” he said. “You hated it.”

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 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.