Someone Else's Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson

him. He knew it on the cellular level.
    Weeks of this, sick with crazy, silent longing, and then Paula said it was starting to be “Unabomber creepy.” She made him skip class and took him up on the roof. She’d had a key, lifted off a janitor, since her freshman year, and often snuck up there to smoke.
    William lay flat on his back, squinting up at the sun, still warm though the air had a decided chill. Paula stripped down to bra and panties, shivering, to bask in it. She might as well have been wearing one of her mother’s voluminous caftans. His own body was attuned only to where Bridget sat, two floors below. She was a red laser dot on his mental map of the school. The sun was nothing. The real heat licked up at him from Bridget. His whole body warmed and flushed, burning at the idea of her under him, even with a building in between them.
    Meanwhile, on the roof, where his brain was, Paula said, “You have to make a move before you end up torturing puppies in a basement full of Bridget-themed blow-up dolls.”
    “I don’t have a move,” William said. “Tell me a move.”
    But instead Paula spent ten minutes cataloging all the ways in which William was not allowed to wreck it. “. . .  and you’re forbidden to talk about how to make really stable explosives. Or poisons. That will scare the shit out of her. Don’t talk about any of the six boring-ass books you are reading, or the fact that you’re reading six books concurrently, and God, don’t use the word concurrently , at all. Ever. I can’t believe I used it. I can’t believe I even know it. I probably caught it from you, and it’s the least sexy word on the planet.”
    William listened with his brain, while his body, an entirely separate animal, tried to melt shingles and brick and wood and plaster so it could plummet into Bridget.
    “So far, you’ve told me nineteen things not to do.”
    “Really? You counted?” Paula said, sitting up. She was making an expression at him.
    When William was little, he had a book called How Are You Peeling? It was full of pictures of vegetables with faces. The radish is happy. The eggplant is sad. His therapist wanted him to learn to recognize the same looks on the faces of his classmates or his parents. He’d outgrown the book, but he was still supposed to do the exercise. Right now, he should ask himself, What is she feeling, if Paula raises one eyebrow up and not the other? But Paula generally said exactly what she meant with him. It was one of his favorite things about her. He was free to take the question at face value.
    “Yes. Exactly nineteen. Do you want me to say them back to you?”
    “God, no.” In his peripheral vision, he saw Paula lean forward so that all her shaggy black hair dropped around her face. She said, “I have made myself a hair tent for thinking in.”
    They could hear the bell ring even through the roof. Bridget would be rising from her desk, moving toward her locker. He tracked her on his mental map, wishing he was on her level. He would like to look and look at Bridget’s face, try to guess what she meant when she lifted just one eyebrow.
    “Tell me three things to actually do,” William said to the hair tent.
    “You could go the secret admirer route?” Paula used both hands to part her hair and her up-tilted eyes peered out. “Perfume and anonymous love notes. Girls eat that shit up.”
    Not a bad start, but too circular. “That ends with us back here, because I have to eventually talk to her.”
    “Yeah, there’s always a downside,” Paula said, then put her finger up in the air, making a hook.
    William grinned. Last year, after they’d had sex, he’d felt comfortable enough to ask if he could practice his assigned peer conversations with her. He’d been bad at picking up on jokes, sarcasm especially, which relied so wholly on inflection. He was much better at it now. At one point, early on, she’d suggested making the finger hook every time she was kidding. He had