4. She’s an only child
5. She writes and acts in plays
I stared at the rather pathetic list, thinking hard before adding
6. She has a nice smile.
I frowned, then squeezed in a few more cramped letters.
6. She has a really nice smile.
Pathetic. How was I supposed to think of the perfect birthday gift based on Ainsley’s smile? What was I supposed to get her—a new toothbrush? Whitening strips? Not that she needed whitening strips. Her teeth were perfectly white. Although maybe they were white because she used whitening strips.
I collapsed onto the desk, my head hitting with a soft thud. I was actually thinking about giving her whitening strips. As a birthday present. I was hopeless.
I didn’t know why it was so difficult. Actually, that was a lie. I was starting to realize exactly why it was so difficult. I thought I knew Ainsley better than pretty much anyone, but the fact was, I really didn’t know that much about her. Not the little things that nobody else knew—the things to help me discover the perfect gift that would make her realize we were meant to be. I allowed myself about five seconds to wallow in my failure before taking a deep breath and steeling myself for the challenge ahead.
I simply needed to add to my list. I needed to watch Ainsley—not in a weird, creepy way, but I needed to be more observant. I needed to get to know her, the real her who I’d seen peeks of now and then but was still a mystery to me.
We needed to become friends.
Whoa. I’d never actually set out to make a friend before. Viney and I had kind of fallen into it, and other than that, I had a few acquaintances and more than a few people-I-knew-and-said-hello-to-in-the-halls-but-little-else, and that was it. Still, I knew the basics. It couldn’t be that hard, could it? Plus, there was the added bonus that Ainsley and I were already friend-ish. We talked. She was nice to me. It was a good start.
“Oliver, is there a problem?” I sat up to find my trig teacher, Mrs. Gonzales standing next to my desk, hands on her hips.
“Umm . . . no?”
She pursed her lips, an eyebrow lifting ever higher as her gaze drifted over my notebook. Mrs. Gonzales was known to hold entire conversations with her eyebrows. I drew my arm down casually to cover the list, all but laying over it. Super casual.
“Then I suggest you get back to the assignment,” she said, taking mercy on me as she tapped a pink fingernail on my slightly rumpled worksheet. I nodded in gratitude and closed my notebook to get back to work.
Unfortunately, my obsessed daydreaming meant I didn’t finish the trig assignment, which meant I had to spend my free period after lunch in the library instead of hanging out in the computer lab for my independent study programming credit. I made my way to the second floor, grumbling a little under my breath about stupid homework that you shouldn’t need to do if you already understand how to do it and came to stop when I spotted Ainsley sitting at a table on the far side of the stacks, doing her own homework.
I took a step, hesitated, took another step. I was vaguely aware I kind of resembled a zombie as I all but stumbled through the bookshelves. Ainsley stretched, and I panicked, ducking behind the shelves and pressing back against the Architecture section. Or maybe it was Sculpture. I never learned the 700s in the Dewey Decimal System all that well. I held my breath, wondering what in the world I was doing on the second floor of the library, hiding from the girl I’d recently decided I needed to get to know better. It really didn’t seem to further my cause.
Get a grip, Oliver.
I took a deep breath and let it out, shaking my arms and cracking my neck in an attempt to calm the butterflies in my stomach. I could do this. I’d walk up to her, calm and suave as could be, lean against the chair across from her, and ask, “Is this seat taken?”
Like James Bond. Or someone equally as cool, but minus the shaken-not-stirred martini and plus the braces, shaggy hair, and a 4.0 GPA. Although I was having a hard time thinking of who exactly that might be.
I squared my shoulders and rounded the corner of the bookshelf, not allowing myself to pause before I walked right up to Ainsley. She looked up at me half-surprised, half-expectant.
“Hi, Oliver.”
“Ummm . . .” What was I going to say? Something about James Bond. Or a seat. A seat! Yeah, that was it. “How’s your seat?”
Nope. Pretty sure that wasn’t it.
“Excuse me?”
I mentally head-slapped myself. “I mean, uh, hi.”
“Hi.” She smiled, and my stomach did a little rollercoaster dip. “What’s up?”
“Up?” I leaned against the chair, cool and suave as anything, but it tipped under my weight, and I stumbled and knocked the chair to the floor with a crash. Every eye on the second floor turned my way as I fumbled to put the chair back up on all four feet.
“Are you okay?” Ainsley asked.
“Yeah . . . yeah, sure.” I sat down across from her, wondering if crawling under the table might have been a better option—Is this seat taken? That’s what I was supposed to say!—and searched for a topic of conversation. “What are you doing?”
Ainsley frowned and shoved a little at the textbook in front of her. “Algebra. Math from the devil.”
I laughed. “That bad?”
“Worse.” She extended her arm across the table and slumped down onto it. “I don’t get it. At all. It’s supposed to be math—what’s up with all the letters?”
“They’re variables.”
She glared up at me. “Variables are from the devil.”
“I’m sensing a theme.”
She sighed and sat up. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“Here, let me see what you’re doing.” I reached for her book and flipped it around so I could see the assignment. “Ah, okay, so you’re supposed to simplify the expression—”
“Nothing simple about it,” she muttered.
I shook my head with a smile. “So you start out by writing the problem.”
She waved a hand at her paper. “And that’s where it all falls apart.”
“Okay.” I slid around to sit at the head of the table, across the corner from her, so I could look at the lines where she’d erased and rewritten multiple times. “You’re thinking too hard,” I said, examining her work. “You can’t skip steps or you’ll get lost. Once you’ve got the process down, you can do more complex problems.” I erased what she’d written and methodically filled in the lines. “See? First, you use the distributive property . . . then add and subtract . . . then combine the like variables. Don’t try to do it in your head. Write it all down for now.”
She leaned in, and her perfume wafted toward me, making me dizzy. She smelled really good. Like flowers. Or cookies. Flowery cookies, if that was a thing.
“. . . x and xy?” Ainsley looked up at me expectantly.
I swallowed. “What?”
“Why can’t I add the x to the xy?”
Her eyes were really pretty, too. Really . . . blue. And pretty.
“Oliver?”
“Oh.” I cleared my throat, feeling my face heat as I focused back on the paper. “They aren’t actually like variables, you see . . .” I went on to explain the process to her, and after a few more problems, she seemed to get the hang of it. She took the pencil and started to do the problems herself, asking a question now and then when she got stuck. She frowned at a particularly difficult one.
I leaned in. “You need to—”
“Don’t tell me,” she said, holding up a finger as she punched numbers on her calculator. She let out a frustrated groan and started over.
“You need a new calculator,” I said, glancing distastefully at the antiquated machine she was working on.
“Trust me, it’s not the calculator,” Ainsley said, still focused on the problem.
“You’re only as good as your tools.”
“Yeah, well, my tools are going to have to do the job for now.” She chewed on her lip as she wrote and finally held th
e paper up with a victorious smile. “I did it!” Her smile fell, and she shoved the paper toward me. “Didn’t I?”
I scanned the problem and grinned. “Yeah. You did. Good job.”
“Couldn’t have done it without your help. Thanks so much, Oliver.” Her eyes widened. “Oh no. I’ve taken up your whole free period. You probably had homework of your own.”
I shrugged. “Nothing major.”
“I’m so sorry. You’ve got all those AP classes, too.”
“It’s really no big deal.”
“What am I saying?” she said. “You’re so smart, you probably never have homework.”
Okay, I’m not above admitting I preened a little bit at that. “Well, I wouldn’t say never—” I caught myself. This was about getting to know Ainsley. I needed to keep my head in the game. “Besides, you’re pretty smart yourself.”
“Well, you wouldn’t know it from my algebra skills.”
“Not everybody gets algebra right away. You just need to keep at it, and it’ll click at some point.”
“Sooner rather than later, I hope.” She rolled her eyes. “I don’t know why we need it anyway. It’s not like I’ll ever use algebra.”
I sat up at that. “Oh, it’s actually very useful.”
“Well yeah, for you,” she said, gathering up her papers. “You need it for college and whatever.”
I faltered for a moment, surprised. “Wait. Are you saying you’re not going to college?”
She shrugged. “Probably not. If I do, maybe Benson Community or something. Just until Ian gets established at the dealership.”
I was at a loss for words, something rare and altogether unpleasant for me, make no mistake. “Is that what you want?”
Her eyes narrowed. “There’s nothing wrong with community college.”
“No . . . no, I’m not saying there is,” I said hastily. “But you . . . you’re so smart. And you get such good grades. You could do whatever you want.”
Ainsley flushed and looked away. “No point really, though. I mean, my dad needs me around and then there’s Ian. I can’t really go anywhere far away.”
“Seattle’s not that far.”
Ainsley opened her mouth to respond, but the bell rang before she could. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “Thanks again for your help, Oliver. Really.” She was halfway down the aisle before I could answer.
“No problem,” I murmured.
Late that night, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, still thinking about Ainsley. I couldn’t get over my surprise at her saying she was probably going to BCC, if she went to college at all.
If.
I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. College had always been a given for me. It had never even occurred to me that I might not go. And although I knew some people—a lot of people—didn’t go to college, and I didn’t really have a problem with that, I just couldn’t imagine Ainsley not going.
I figured she’d be a doctor or a lawyer . . . or the governor or something. Something big. Something amazing.
But it wasn’t even really about college, to be honest. It was the way she said there was no reason for it. The way she said she couldn’t go far away.
Like it wasn’t her idea. Like it wasn’t her choice.
It didn’t sit well with me, and I couldn’t figure out what to do about it.
After tossing and turning for another few minutes, I got out of bed and made my way to the kitchen to rummage around for a snack. Settling on some kind of stale oatmeal cookies and the last of the milk, I sat at the kitchen table, jumping a little when the door rattled then opened. My dad came through, shaking rainwater out of his hair, and stopped in surprise when he spotted me.
“What are you doing up at this hour?” he asked, slipping out of his coat and hanging it on one of the hooks by the door.
I shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep.”
My dad nodded and grabbed a cookie out of the bag. “Want to talk about it?” He sat down across from me and winced as he chewed on the cookie but took another bite.
I considered that question and all the things running through my head. “There’s this girl . . .”
His eyebrows shot up. “Oh yeah?”
I could see the Way to go, son coming and nipped it in the bud. “It’s not like that,” I mumbled, crumbling a cookie onto my napkin.
My dad eyed me carefully. “But you’d like it to be?”
I shrugged again and swept the crumbs into a pile, not meeting his eyes. “How’d you get Mom to fall in love with you?”
He frowned a little. “Well, it’s not like I set out to do it.”
“She said you make her feel important.”
“She did?” He really seemed surprised for a moment. Then his eyes fell to the table, and he pressed his finger into a wayward crumb and brushed it onto my napkin. “Well, she was. She is.”
“But how did you let her know that?”
My dad took another cookie and rolled it along the table as he thought. He seemed tired, dark circles under his eyes, lines curving around his mouth. He’d been working so much lately, and I hadn’t noticed how it had taken its toll.
“You have to think about what’s special about her,” he said, a quiet smile on his face. “And let her know you find it special, too. Compliment her. Listen when she talks.”
This was good. I could do that.
“I was thinking I might give her a birthday present,” I said hesitantly.
He looked up, surprised. “Really?”
“Nothing big.” I could tell he was already worried I was thinking about digging into my college fund. “But I want it to be perfect, you know?”
“You have something in mind?”
I sighed. “Not yet.”
My dad stood up and patted me on the shoulder. “I’m sure you’ll come up with something. But remember what they say—it’s the thought that counts.”
“Not really all that helpful, Dad.”
He laughed. “I know it sounds trite, but it’s true. If she realizes that you really put time and effort into picking it out, she’ll appreciate it all the more.” He leaned against the doorway to the living room. “I remember when your mom and I were first dating. She saw this little teacup in the window at this antique store. She mentioned that it was the same pattern her grandma had when she was little. She and her sisters would have tea parties when they’d visit her, with those little thumbprint cookies your mom makes?” He glanced at me, and I nodded. I loved those cookies.
“Anyway, she told me the cups were all broken when her grandma moved into a nursing home. She said it offhand. No big deal, just a story—we shared a lot of stories back then.” He looked off in the distance, a smile on his face. “But I went back to that store and got her that chipped teacup. Then I came home and made her a pot of tea and some of those thumbprint cookies. We didn’t have any raspberry jam. Closest thing was some maple syrup.” He winced. I had to agree. Gross.
“She didn’t even care, though. When she saw that chipped teacup and those horrible syrup-filled cookies . . .” He shook his head. “Well, I’ve never seen her so happy.”
He blinked and focused back on me. “All those sayings—it’s the thought that counts, and it’s the little things that matter—they become sayings because they’re true,” he said. “So if you want to give her something meaningful, you’ll have to find out what’s meaningful to her.”
I nodded, a little overwhelmed. “Okay. Thanks, Dad.”
He smiled and turned to head up to bed. “Don’t stay up too late.”
“Okay. Night, Dad.”
“Night, son.”
He left the room, and I stared into my milk for a few minutes. I was beginning to realize that this whole Ainsley proposition was a little more difficult than I’d anticipated.
But as I sat there in the dark, I knew that I was up for the challenge. After all, Ainsley was worth it.
4.Make Her Feel Secure and Important
Let her know you’re there
for her. She can talk to you about anything, and you’ll listen to what she has to say.
The Madison Falls Senior Center was conveniently located around the corner and two blocks down from my house. Convenient, because it was where I worked Saturday mornings, updating the website and blog as well as dealing with any computer-related problems that popped up during the week. The manager, Elaine, also had my home number, in case of emergency, although she rarely used it.
I knew I was lucky to have the job. Elaine used to work with my mom at the hospital before she left for the manager’s job. She knew I had a flair for computers and begged my mom to let me take a look at the system when I was fourteen. She kept me on and paid me under the table until I was old enough to be an official employee. It wasn’t bad, as part-time jobs went—better than slaving over a hot fryer or a push lawn mower.
Yeah, I wasn’t one for physical labor, to be honest. It wasn’t something I thought people should hold against me. It wasn’t that I was lazy or anything. I just generally preferred to use my brain rather than brawn. Nothing wrong with that, right?
Not that I had much brawn in the first place, but whatever.
I pulled into the parking lot a little before ten in the morning and nodded at Janice where she sat in her customary spot by the front door.
“Morning,” I said with a smile, sliding the oxygen tank next to her wheelchair a little farther away with a nervous look at her lit cigarette. “You really should quit, you know?”
Janice grinned, smoke pouring out through the spot where a tooth was missing. “You need to learn to respect your elders, boy.”
“I respect them plenty,” I replied, taking the cigarette and stubbing it out in the half-full ashtray balanced on the arm of her wheelchair. “Enough that I like them to stick around for a bit.”
Janice laughed and reached down to pull another cigarette from her bag. “Best get to work. Don’t want to be late.”
It was a familiar exchange. I just shook my head at her as I yanked open the heavy wooden door. “One of these days, I’m going to take those and hide them.”
How to Get Ainsley Bishop to Fall in Love With You Page 4