Someone Else's Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson Page A

said it was a good idea, and she had rolled her eyes and made the finger hook, because she had been kidding.
    “I got it!” Paula said. “Make her talk. I’ll write you a list of questions. Then you listen and say all nineteen parts of her answers back to her. That way she knows you listened, and plus it makes her think that you guys have stuff in common. I read it in Cosmo .”
    “She’ll ask me questions back,” William said.
    “So, answer them. Maybe she’ll like you.” William made the finger hook, and Paula grabbed it and shoved it down. “I’m serious. She could like you. I like you, Bubba.”
    “Yeah, but you don’t want to be my girlfriend,” William said.
    “Please. I’m a senior.” Paula flopped down onto her back, her shoulder pressed companionably against his. He barely felt her, his whole physical self yearning itself ragingly down. William sat inside his overheated skin, trying to think and failing with a torrent of hormones clotting up what was generally an excellent brain. He could feel his body starting to rock itself.
    Paula curled toward him on her side and bit his shoulder. Hard, but friendly. It was Paula’s version of one of his therapist’s old tricks, like origami or football; give the body-animal something to do so his mind could go about its business.
    When he looked at her, fully present on the roof at last, she let go with her teeth and said, “Sex ambush. You need to drop her down, but hard. Get her hooked on the bod and the crazy-hot moves before she clocks how ever-fuckin’ weird you are.”
    This might well work on Paula. She could be caught up and swept along, laughing, into any plan that pleased her in the moment. But it depended on Bridget being like Paula in this way. The Bridget he’d observed was wholly self-contained and thinky. She made plans, and people fell into them with her. She did not lie on rooftops in her underwear biting male friends. She changed parks with subversive tulips. She sat at the smart girls’ lunch table, observing more than participating, reserved. She seemed . . . not untouchable, not at all. But not something he could lay his hands on without express permission.
    “That plan will end with me in prison,” he said, but everything Paula had told him to do and not do was folding itself into a shape in his good brain.
    “Well, a kiss ambush then.” Paula was still talking. “It’s not like you can win the girl by doing chemistry.”
    “Yes, I can,” William said, a variation on her plan growing clearer and more detailed by the second. “You just said I could.”
    “Uh, no?” Paula said. “I didn’t say that.”
    “Yeah, you did,” William told her. She simply hadn’t realized it, because like most people, Paula didn’t understand that the entire world was mostly chemistry, doing itself.
    He hears ringing again, so Bridget is in English class. But it is not the bell. It is a phone. William blinks and feels the room reload around him. Oh, right. He is having a robbery. He is having a robbery while all the carefully compartmentalized sections of his life jumble and collide and refuse to be contained.
    “Fuck!” screams Stevie, so shrill he sounds like a child. William’s paper-bird spell has been broken.
    The girl in the poppy-covered dress stares up at him. She is making the face that William recognizes as the far end of anxious, and her little boy’s body is trembling, pressed against William’s side. Yet here is William, wanting to re-court his teenage pre-wife, still so angry with her that the only Bridget he can stand to desire is two stories and sixteen years distant from him.
    He shakes his head to clear it. Bridget’s priest has failed, spectacularly . Anniversaries can open up old wounds, he’d said. What an asshole. William is not a fan of metaphors; they are so often inaccurate. William, the priest should have said, anniversaries are just like being vivisected.
    The phone rings again. William was better a week