We Are Inevitable Gayle Forman (simple ebook reader TXT) 📖

maybe Hannah can too. Or maybe it dawns on Hannah the dissonance of a professed music hater having such a collection. Or maybe she reads the look on my face. Because she gets it.

“These aren’t yours?”

Sandy built the cabinets over a single weekend in a burst of manic energy, not stopping to eat or sleep until he’d finished installing them, lining them with special plastic to keep out warping moisture, putting each album in its right place.

“No,” I say. “They’re my brother’s.”

She is holding a Violent Femmes album, tight to her chest. She sets it down and in a quiet voice asks, “He died?”

There are so many reasons why Sandy could’ve given me his collection: Maybe he’s in prison. Maybe he became a Hare Krishna. Maybe he grew out of his collecting obsession and got married, had kids, got old and boring. But Hannah is right.

“He died.”

“That explains it,” she says.

“Explains what?”

“I don’t know. This vibe I got off you. Sadness. I felt it coming off you when you were watching me read.”

“You knew I was there?”

“Yeah, stalker. I was gonna tell you to piss off but something stopped me.”

“I didn’t mean to creep. It’s just you were reading The Magician’s Nephew.”

“So?”

“That book means a lot to me.”

“You said you’d never heard of it.”

“I lied.”

“Why’d you lie?”

“I don’t know. I panicked. I’ve never seen anyone reading that before. And that book, the entire series, it’s like really special to me. They were the first books I ever got into. When I was a kid, I read them obsessively. My mom used to say Narnia was my first love.”

This makes her laugh but in a nice way. “Who’s your second love? Harry Potter?”

YOU, I think. You, you, you.

“Let’s make a deal,” she says. “You don’t lie to me and I won’t lie to you.”

She holds out her hand to shake and it’s like she has one of those prank buzzers because as we do a jolt goes up my spine. A delicious jolt. “Deal,” I say.

She turns back to the bins. “What was he like?” she asks, pulling out a Prince double album. “This brother of yours.”

I see Sandy again, handing me the key. I blink him away. I don’t want to see Sandy, here, now. “I don’t really remember. It was a long time ago.”

Technically, Sandy died fifteen months ago, but he’d been dying in pieces for years, so this feels true enough that I didn’t just violate our pact.

I gesture to the Prince album. “You wanna listen to that or just fondle it?”

She scopes out the basement. “Is there a turntable?”

“Upstairs. I can bring it down. Give me a sec.”

“Okay. I’ll keep searching for a perfect song for you.”

“You’re gonna be looking for a long time.”

“I love a challenge.”

In the store, Garry and Richie are playing catch with the books. I intercept a copy of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter that Garry is tossing to Richie as if it were a Frisbee. “Show some respect!” I scold.

“It’s a book, not the Bible,” Richie replies.

I don’t even bother to respond to that. “Where’s Ira?” I say, looking around. No way would he stand for this kind of treatment of the books.

“On a walk,” Ike replies.

“Be careful,” I bark at the guys as I climb the narrow staircase up to the apartment.

The one turntable we still possess lives in Sandy’s room, tangled in a Gordian knot of wires and cables, the remnants of his workshop. Sandy was fourteen when he started revamping old stereos out of component parts he nosed out from hidden corners of junk shops and the dump, with the same spidey sense that pinged when he was in the vicinity of rare vinyl. For a while, he did a pretty brisk business, shipping his stereos all over the country. He used the proceeds to buy records. “Funds his addiction,” Mom joked, back when our family could joke about addiction.

I pause in front of Sandy’s doorway, his Milo Goes to College poster barely hanging on to the door. I’d stopped going in here when Sandy became a dick, but even now that he’s gone, I still avoid it. Every so often I catch a whiff of him and then that trickster olfactory bulb sends me time traveling, and I never know where it’s gonna take me: Will it hurl me back ten years, me and Sandy “camping” in a pillow fort? Or will it fling me back to that morning, Mom’s animalistic screams echoing through the house? Sometimes I don’t know which memory is worse.

I hold my breath and burst into his room. The only turntable left is a shitty one with built-in speakers, too crappy to sell. I yank it out of the pile and carry it down the stairs, past the nosy Lumberjacks.

Hannah sits cross-legged on the cement floor, five albums fanned out in front of her. “My opening salvo.” She points to the covers one by one: Prince, Versus, the Rural Alberta Advantage, Scrawl, Lorde. “Five of my perfect songs. Let’s see if any of them stick.”

We plug in the turntable and she puts on the Prince first. “‘Starfish and Coffee,’ for all the weirdos in the house.” It’s a fine song. I appreciate it. I don’t hate it. But I don’t love it. And it doesn’t do to me what it does to Hannah.

Because each time the needle scratches onto the vinyl, Hannah closes her eyes, fingers playing invisible chords, mouthing the words. I can see she goes somewhere and I wish I could join her, but I can’t.

“So?” she asks after playing “Team” by Lorde, the fifth perfect-to-her song.

I shrug. “It was nice.”

“Nice?”

“I mean, maybe perfect. I can’t tell.”

“Trust me, if it was a perfect song, you’d know.”

“Can we keep trying?”

“I’d love to, but . . .” She checks the time on her phone. “I have to get to a meeting.” She stands up, holding the pile of records to her chest, and steps toward me. I stand up to face her. We are so close,