Page 28 of The Music of Us
Jake shrugged. “I don’t hate what they give me, and I’ve never really wanted to go shopping myself.” He scrunched up his nose. “But I guess now that I actually have to, I realize I’m always hearing the team go,Is this what Jake from the Usual Suspects would wear?And I sort of started thinking in those terms too, instead of asking myself whatIwould wear. Even though, Iam, you know...”
“Jake from the Usual Suspects?”
“Yeah. But now you’re not asking me to be Jake from the Usual Suspects, you’re asking me to just be... Jake.”
“Or Sylvester,” I said, because he needed some levity.
“Right. Good old Sylvester,” he quipped, but he had that look on his face—the one I remembered Jake got when he started retreating too far inside his head.
We wouldn’t get anywhere if he got caught up in overthinking.
“Here,” I said, pulling a wide-brimmed, weathered fedora off the hat rack and reaching up to set it on his head. “Try this on.”
Jake looked up, eyeing the oversized brim. “This thing is supposed to make me blend in?”
“No. It’s supposed to make me laugh,” I told him, reaching up to gently flick the brim.
But instead of making me laugh, it was Jake who laughed, sweet and low in the back of his throat, and all at once it dawned on me:
I hadn’t heard that laugh in over a thousand days.
I swept the thought away before it could really sink in, not trusting myself to sit too long with it. We needed to get back to why we were here.
“Stop thinking so much,” I told Jake, as if that wasn’t the advice I needed to take myself. “It’s just clothes. Try stuff on. Have fun.” My eyes flickered up toward the dramatic, downward dip of the hat on his head. “I’m going to go ahead and veto this look, though. It might not be the best for subtlety.”
“Oh? Onlymightnot?”
“Well, if you were searching for the lost ark or the temple of doom, you’d fit right in.”
“Unfortunately, I’m not doing that tillnextweek.”
“Right. My bad.” I put the archaeologist-esque hat back and pointed out a baseball cap. “You could get another one of these, though.” I eyed the rest of the rack. “It’s that or the yellow one that saysRay of Sunshine, but I’d stick with the plain one, if I were you.”
He put his hand over his heart. “You don’t think I’m a ray of sunshine?”
I gave his all-black outfit a pointed look. “More like a dark and stormy night.”
“Harsh.”
I laughed, then led him over to the shirt section. “Come on, just pick something out.”
Instinctively, he reached for an all-black shirt that looked like a cheaper version of the exact thing he had on.
I suppressed a sigh. He couldn’t just buy more of the exact same style to walk around town in; that’d defeat the purpose of him not looking like his poster. I fished around in my pocket for a piece of watermelon gum.
Be cool, I told myself.He’s not used to this. You can work with him for the greater good.
“You could try wearing something that’s not black from head to toe, you know?” I reminded him lightly. “I mean, you don’t have to dress like you’re in the middle of a heist all the time. Try some color.”
“Does gray count as col— Wait, heist?”
“Yeah. Your wardrobe looks like you shop at Burglar-ington Coat Factory.”
Jake gave me a look so unamused that I had to keep going, just to see if I could get another genuine reaction out of him. “You always do that,” he’d told me once, amid a peal of laughter, after I’d made a joke when he’d been sad after a failed audition. “Do what?” I asked. “Get a reaction out of me,” he’d replied.
“Thieves-R-Us,” I added. He was starting to crack. “J.C. Robbery.”
There—his eyes glinted for a moment, and his lips twitched upward, unable to resist.
