“Hi, honey. How was your day?”
“Good,” I said, sliding past her to look in the fridge. Pudding cups. Awesome. “You’re home early.” My mom was a nurse at Madison Falls General Hospital and tended to work long, and odd, hours.
“Yeah, well, I thought I’d make spaghetti. So get out of there.” She snatched the butterscotch deliciousness out of my hand and shut the refrigerator door. “We’ll eat in an hour.”
I put on a pathetic face. “I could starve to death by then.”
“Doubtful.”
“It could happen.” I opted for sneaking a couple of chunks of cheese off the cutting board. “I’m a growing boy. I need my calcium,” I said through a mouthful of provolone.
She laughed but slapped my hand when I went in for more cheese. I hopped up on the counter as she opened a jar of sauce and poured it into the pot.
“I like it when you make it from scratch,” I said without thinking.
My mom’s eyes narrowed. “Well, the next time I have a day off I’ll take your request under consideration,” she said. “Today, I’ve worked ten hours, so you get Ragu. And you’ll like it.” She pointed at me with the wooden spoon, and I held up my hands in surrender.
“I love Ragu. Ragu is perfect. I don’t know what I was saying. I think I was delusional from hunger.”
My mom reached out to ruffle my hair, and I ducked to avoid it unsuccessfully. For a middle-aged woman, she was fast. She turned back to stir the spaghetti, and I decided a little research was in order.
“Mom, can I ask you something?”
“You just did,” she said with a wink.
I rolled my eyes. “How did Dad get you to fall in love with him?”
Now, here’s the thing I love about my mom. Well, one of the many things, because, despite any teenage posturing I might do, I had to admit that my mom—both my parents actually—was pretty cool. She could have picked that moment to squeal and ask me, Oh, is this about a giiiiiirl? and be incredibly embarrassing. But instead, she put the spoon down and thought for a moment before she actually answered the question.
“He didn’t really have to try,” she said finally. “It’s something that happened over time.”
I frowned, a little deflated. “But he had to have done something to, I don’t know, court you?”
“Court me?” She snorted slightly. “This isn’t the Old West, Oliver.”
“You know what I mean,” I said with an exasperated groan. I was about to take back all my kind thoughts about my mom being cool.
“I do,” she said, laughing. She took a deep breath and tapped her lips, thinking about it. “I suppose he did, back in the beginning. I guess it was the usual things—bringing me flowers, opening doors for me, pulling my chair out at restaurants.” Her eyes took on a dreamy quality. “But I think what I liked the most was that he seemed to pay attention to me. He listened when I talked and really seemed like he wanted to know what I was going to say. He acted like I was . . . important, I guess.” She blinked and shook her head slightly, turning her attention back to the sauce.
This was useful information. I’d need to expand my list a bit. “So when did you know you loved him?” I asked.
My mom smiled softly and stirred the noodles. “I’m not sure of the exact moment. Like I said, it came over time. One day I looked at him and realized that the thing I wanted most in the world was to make him happy.” She set the spoon down and turned to me, head tilted. “Now, can I ask you a question?”
I smirked. “You just did.”
“Touché,” she said, reaching out to brush the hair out of my face. “So what is this all about?”
“Oh, you know.” I shrugged. “There’s this . . . girl.”
“There usually is.” Her eyes were dancing, but she didn’t mock me. My mom never mocked me. “And this girl is special?”
I nodded. “I just . . . I don’t know if she . . . she and I, we’re not . . .”
My mom reached out and took my shoulders gently. “I get it,” she said. She always did. “Let me tell you this, though, Oliver. And it’s important, okay?” She looked into my eyes until I nodded again.
She smiled, squeezing my shoulders a little. “It’s not about what you do or what you say or any of that stuff. You can’t make someone fall in love with you. And you can’t try to be someone else to win them over.”
“I know that, Mom.” We’d had that discussion dozens, maybe hundreds of times in my life. Be yourself. Be proud of who you are. Be who you want to be.
She shoved my hair back again. I really needed a haircut. “I know you do,” she said. “It can be easy to forget, though, when you—” The phone rang and she tapped my cheek once before turning to answer it.
“Hello?”
I swung my legs, banging the cabinets lightly with my heels. She glanced at my feet with a pointed look, and I stopped, chewing on my thumbnail as I watched her smile fall before she turned away.
“Again?” she said, her voice terse, sharp. “That’s the third time this week. I made dinner.”
My stomach started to churn, and I knew it was my dad on the phone. I hopped down from the counter, grabbed my backpack, and headed up to my room as angry, hissed words echoed behind me. I hummed a little under my breath to drown them out and took the steps two at a time up to my room. I felt rather than heard my little brother following behind me, so I left the door open as I grabbed my iPod and flopped on the bed. He trailed in a few minutes later and chewed on his lip as he eyed me, waiting for my silent welcome before he closed the door behind him. Although I hated Sherlock being in my room, I couldn’t turn him away when our parents were fighting. There were certain responsibilities that came along with being a big brother, after all.
Yes, you read that right. Sherlock. Sherlock Holmes. My parents always said they wanted us to have big names so we’d have big dreams, big goals. I really got the better end of the deal, to be honest. Very few teenagers knew who Oliver Wendell Holmes was, let alone that there were two (my mom insisted I was named after Senior—the poet, my dad, Junior—the Supreme Court justice) and most teachers didn’t know my middle name, so it rarely came up even with them. My little brother, however, was burdened with the name Sherlock. I shuddered to think what would have happened if he’d been born a girl, although I would have hoped my parents would have opted for Victoria (the English novelist) or even Elizabeth (Miss New York, 1960) rather than Tom Cruise’s ex-wife. Not that Katie Holmes wasn’t cool, and I’ve been known to enjoy a rerun of Dawson’s Creek as much as the next guy . . .
Anyway.
You would have thought that going through life with the name Sherlock Holmes would have been a nightmare, but evidently when you’re ten, and Robert Downey Jr. plays your namesake in the movies, it’s not that bad. My brother embraced it even before that, though. When he was five, he started wearing a deerstalker hat everywhere he went and used words like elementary and indubitably in everyday conversation. He carried around a magnifying glass and reporter’s notebook to gather clues to solve the Mystery of the Missing Cookie or the Case of the Broken Kitchen Mug. He named his first goldfish Watson, and when he succumbed to overfeeding (Sherlock had investigated the case thoroughly), there was Watson the Second.
I glanced over to where he sat curled up in the beanbag in the corner, scribbling in his notebook. The notebooks were something we had in common, but his was skinny and spiral-bound with Evidence scrawled across the front in black marker and bulging with bits of paper and Post-its, where my three-ring binder was a little more subtle. Innocuous. Like me.
“What’s the case today?” I asked.
He shrugged and carefully closed the notebook, securing the whole thing with a rubber band. He looked out the window and swallowed. “Nothing important.”
I watched him for a moment, a miniature me—skinnier and shorter, but with the same shaggy hair and deep-set dark eyes, his a little larger in his face. “It’s going to be okay,” I said, not at all sure about t
hat.
“It’s been quieter, hasn’t it?” he replied, a little hope lighting his face as he turned to me. “Not so much yelling.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” I said, forcing a smile. “It’s just a rough patch. They’ll figure it out.”
He nodded and turned back to the window, and the set of his bony shoulders eased a bit. I felt bad because he believed me, selfish. It was a weakness on my part. No matter how much Sherlock annoyed me, I couldn’t stand for him to be afraid or unsure, and I had to make him feel better if I could. Even if it might have been a lie. Because Sherlock was right—it had gotten quieter. But I knew that sometimes the loudest fights were those fought in silence, when doors weren’t slammed but quietly locked, and when angry shouts dissolved into shrugs and indifference.
“Hey,” I said, putting my iPod aside as I slid off the end of the bed. When Sherlock looked back at me, I invited him over with a jerk of my head. “Xbox?”
Sherlock’s eyes lit up as he set his notebook on the bookshelf. He crawled over to sit next to me on the floor and picked up a controller. “Black Ops?” he asked.
I gave him an exaggerated grimace. “Don’t tell Mom.”
Sherlock laughed, and I felt a rush of relief. It wasn’t right for a ten-year-old to be worried about things like whether his parents were fighting, whether they might be thinking about a divorce, or whether his whole life was about to change. It was much better for him to think about tracking his brother through the jungle, staying hidden from enemy soldiers, and blowing his brains out.
Okay, maybe I wasn’t the best influence, but I had good intentions.
We’d been playing for about twenty minutes when a knock at the door had us both scrambling for the power button. Sherlock beat me to it—he was young, but he was quick—and managed to turn off the game right as my mom opened the door. She eyed us both suspiciously as she stood in the doorway, but we just looked back at her with innocent eyes. Or at least I hoped they looked innocent. I glanced in the mirror on my desk and widened them a little more.
“Hi, Mom,” Sherlock said, sliding the Black Ops disk under the dresser. “What’s up?”
“Dinner’s ready,” she replied slowly. “I called for you, but I guess you didn’t hear me.”
“Nope,” I said as we got to our feet. It was important in these situations not to offer up information, not to speak unless it was absolutely necessary.
“And I know you weren’t letting your little brother play any inappropriate games, right?” She looked pointedly at my television screen where insert disc was flashing before turning that sharp gaze on me. I reached out and flipped off the TV.
“Would I do that?” Not an outright lie but not an admission of guilt either.
Sherlock shoved his way through the door. “I’m starving,” he exclaimed, well-versed in diversionary tactics. He’d learned from the best, after all. “Do we have the good garlic bread?”
“Don’t eat all the middles out!” I shouted after him, no slouch at diversions myself. Of course, I also hated it when he left all the crusts, so it wasn’t entirely a façade.
My mom pressed her lips together like she wanted to say something more, but instead she only dropped an arm over my shoulders as we followed my brother down the hall.
It was later that night when the pounding of footsteps announced Viney’s arrival. He burst through my bedroom door and tossed his backpack onto my desk chair before starting in on a tirade.
“Dude,” he said, shrugging out of his army jacket and letting it fall to the floor. He kicked it once for good measure, then stalked across the room to dig in the dresser drawer where he knew I kept my stash of candy. “I can’t take it anymore, I swear. A guy can’t even have a moment of”—he raised his eyebrows in a significant look—“privacy without one of my stupid siblings pounding on the bathroom door!”
I winced. “Ouch.”
“No kidding!” He settled on a bag of M&M’s and collapsed into the beanbag. “You don’t know how good you’ve got it, man. One brother? Your own room? Freaking paradise.” He popped a handful of candy into his mouth and munched dejectedly. “I’m spending the night, by the way.”
“I figured.” After a moment, I added, “But don’t be trying to get any privacy here, okay?” Viney blinked at me, and we both shuddered.
“Right.”
Eventually, Viney finished the M&M’s and plugged away at his history homework while I finished typing up an English paper. It was a familiar scene, actually. Viney slept over at my house as much as he did at his own. It wasn’t that things were bad at his house. Far from it, really. His parents were awesome, probably the nicest people I’d ever met. But Viney had a ton of brothers and sisters. The number varied due to the foster kids who came through—some for a few days, some for months at a time. Viney himself had been a foster child before his parents adopted him when he was five, and he had an adopted sister and twin brothers who came along through the system in the following years. Well, they weren’t actually twins, per se. They weren’t blood related and looked nothing like each other—one was Asian, the other a pale, freckled redhead. But they were the same age and were adopted at the same time, so everybody called them the Palmari twins.
Viney loved them all. Despite his sometimes gruff exterior, he had a big heart, and he helped with the younger siblings and was pretty much a perfect big brother. But there were times a guy just needed an escape. And for Viney, that escape was my house. I stayed over at his sometimes, too, of course. And it was always wild and loud and a little overwhelming—such a change from the quiet I was used to. I kind of loved it.
I finished my paper and checked it off my To Do list, smiling because it was the last item I needed to complete for the day. I flipped idly through my List Notebook, adding a line here and there as I waited for Viney to finish so we could play some Xbox before bed.
“I was thinking,” he said, startling me slightly. I hadn’t realized he was watching me, but his eyes were focused on my notebook, a thoughtful look on his face.
“That’s scary.”
“Har har,” he said with a snort. “Fine. Maybe I don’t want to tell you my brilliant idea for your Ainsley Bishop mission.”
I perked up a little because Viney was pretty much a genius when it came to these kinds of things and his idea probably was brilliant. Still, a guy had to have some dignity. “It’s not a mission. You make it sound like she’s a mountain to be scaled.”
Of course, Viney barked out a laugh at that. “Yeah, you wanna scale her mountains.” He waggled his eyebrows because—face it—we were teenage boys. “You want to climb her summit. You want to plant your flag—”
“Okay!” I shouted, throwing a pillow at him. “Enough. What’s your stupid idea?”
“It’s not stupid.”
“My mistake,” I said, rolling my eyes. “What is your brilliant idea?”
He stared at me for a minute, one eyebrow raised in challenge, assessing. Then he grinned and leaned in. “Okay. Here it is . . . Ainsley’s birthday.”
I blinked. This wasn’t sounding so brilliant just yet. “Okaaaaay?”
“It’s November twenty-first.”
“How’d you find that out?” I mean, I already knew when Ainsley’s birthday was, but that made sense because I was pretty much obsessed with her. Viney, however, wasn’t.
“I have my ways,” he said, waving his hands like a magician. “So I’m thinking you need to give her a birthday present.”
“That’s it? That’s the brilliant idea?” I said, imitating his hand-waving. “Give her a present? Come on, Vine.”
“Not just any present.” He held up a finger. “Something meaningful. Something that shows her you’re the perfect guy for her.”
It was a good idea, but still. “And what is this perfect gift that will solve all my problems?”
Viney shrugged. “Dunno. That’s what you have to figure out.”
“Great.”
“Hey, you can’t expect
me to come up with all the answers.”
I let out a heavy sigh and flopped back on my bed. “You don’t think it’d be, I don’t know, creepy?”
“I’m not suggesting you give her a diamond ring or a lock of your hair, Ol,” he replied, and I could picture the exasperated look on his face, even though I wasn’t looking at him. “You know what they say,” he said. “It’s the thought that counts. So give her something thoughtful.”
Thoughtful. I could do that. I did a lot of thinking, after all. And a lot of that thinking was about Ainsley.
“Okay,” I said slowly as I sat up and reached for my notebook. “Okay.” I flipped to Ainsley’s page and added Find the Perfect Birthday Gift to the bottom of the list. I stared at the words for a while, chewing on my lip as I thought.
“So how do I do that?” I finally asked Viney with a helpless shrug.
“Dunno,” he said, cramming his homework into his backpack before he reached for the Xbox controllers and tossed me one. “But you have a little over a month and a half. I’m sure you’ll come up with something.”
I took a deep breath and nodded. Sure I would. I simply needed to think about what was important to Ainsley, find out what she needed, and the gift ideas would come pouring in.
I’d make a list.
No problem.
3.Provide Something She Needs
She’s bound to appreciate it if you can anticipate her needs, so put forth the effort and figure out what she’s looking for.
Things I Know About Ainsley
1. She’s beautiful
2. She’s smart
3. She’s funny
How to Get Ainsley Bishop to Fall in Love With You Page 3