How to Get Ainsley Bishop to Fall in Love With You (5 page)

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, c
reepy
?”

“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

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.