Paula Stokes - The Art of Lainey

Bee chews on her naturally plump lower lip. “I’m not sure if—”

I wave her quiet with the back of my hand. Thirty seconds. Forty-five seconds. A minute. There is no way Jason is not going to answer me. He always answers me.

Another minute passes. Bianca sees me teetering on the edge of pathetic and tries to pull me back. “We need a plan,” she announces, grabbing my laptop from my desk. I’ve got about eight windows open—most of them to soccer or gossip websites, one of them to CalebWaters.com. “Oooh, Caleb,” she says, immediately distracted. She enlarges a picture of him at a red-carpet premier and turns the laptop toward me. “This will cheer you up.”

I give her a halfhearted smile. Caleb Waters is a former pro soccer player and the star of Victory Dance and Only One Shot . He’s currently shooting a movie called Flyboys in cities all across the Midwest. I’ve been checking his page a lot for updates in case they shoot some scenes in nearby St. Louis. Meeting Caleb Waters is one of my major life goals.

“Do you think Flyboys will be as good as the other movies?” Bee asks. “You know, since he doesn’t get to play soccer in it?”

“I’m sure it’ll be awesome.” I blot my eyes with the tissue again. “Maybe he’s reinventing himself as a serious actor.”

“Hopefully not.” She peers at the screen. “What good is a Caleb Waters movie if he doesn’t get sweaty and take his shirt off?”

As wrecked as I am right now, I have to giggle a little at that. Bianca may act all prim and proper most of the time, but when it comes to Caleb Waters she’s every bit as obsessed as me. I force my face back into a serious expression. “Enough celebrity stalking. We have a different soccer star to focus on, remember? I thought you were coming up with a plan to fix my life.”

“Right. Sorry. A life-fixing plan.” Bee opens another window to a search engine. “I don’t think I’ve fixed your life since that time in seventh grade when you tried to give yourself highlights and ended up looking like a crooked skunk.”

I shudder. “Thank God that color fixer stuff worked.” I lean over Bianca’s shoulder while she types in various permutations of “how to win back your ex-boyfriend.” Hundreds of thousands of hits come up. “Wow. A lot of people get dumped.” I feel a tiny twinge of relief. Somehow, it’s better knowing I’m not the only one.

“Yeah, but I’m not sure if we’ll find anything useful.” Bee scrolls through a bunch of websites that are trying to sell thirty-dollar e-books with “secret psychological techniques.” Some are written by people whose grasp of the English language is debatable.

Undaunted, Bee keeps clicking. A pink-and-gray page pops up. “This one looks good.” She nibbles at a pinkie nail. “Tips from Maverick the Master Dater, MD in Loveology.”

“Clever. Probably some thirty-year-old virgin living in his mommy’s basement, but what do I have to lose?” I read over her shoulder. Maverick has a basic list of Dos and Don’ts.

• Do keep on living. Even though you’re sad, you need to keep going to school or work.

• Don’t wallow. It’s pathetic, and you don’t want him to realize how much the breakup has affected you.

“I can do those,” I say. “I’m pretty sure my parents wouldn’t even give me the option of bailing on my shifts at Denali, and I definitely don’t want to seem pathetic.”

Next:

• Don’t contact him. At all. No emails, text messages, phone calls, letters, unannounced drive-bys, etc. for at least three weeks. Men inherently crave what isn’t readily available. If you stay away, he’ll wonder why. And he’ll come sniffing around to find out.

A strangled sound works its way out of my throat. “Three weeks without any contact from Jason would seem like several lifetimes. No way,” I tell Bianca. “Find something else.”

A rattling sound from the floor makes me flinch. Bee’s backpack is vibrating. While she digs around for her phone, I click desperately through links from so-called relationship experts, but they all seem to say the same thing: the best way to win back a guy is to avoid him . . . for weeks!

“There has to be a better way,” I say.

Bianca peeks quickly at the text message and puts her phone away without replying. She holds up a tattered red-and-black paperback.

“Maybe there is.”

“ T he Art of War ?” I raise an eyebrow. It sounds vaguely familiar, like I heard it referenced in a movie or something. It also sounds as old as dirt. “Why do you have that?”

“Seriously? It’s on our summer reading list. Don’t you ever do your schoolwork?” Bee slaps me on the leg with the book. “It’s by a Chinese military strategist named Sun Tzu. It’s mostly about war, but people have applied it to all kinds of scenarios—business, law, college, sports, relationships.”

I squint at the cover. It figures brilliant Bianca would turn to some dusty schoolbook for advice. “You think a dead Chinese guy can help me get Jason back?”

“A dead Chinese warlord, ” Bianca corrects.

My eyebrow creeps up even farther. “My world is ending and you’re channeling your inner warlord?”

Bee smiles. “Hear me out.” She flips the book over and starts reading the back cover. “‘Master Sun Tzu’s military treatise is required reading on battlefields and in boardrooms. Countless people of all ages have benefited from his wisdom.’” She tosses the book to me.

I snatch it out of the air. “This is never going to help.” The cover is decorated with a bunch of symbols that look like tic-tac-toe boards on crack. I flip past the introduction and start skimming from the top of a page. “‘The art of war, then, is governed by five constant factors, to be taken into account in one’s deliberations, when seeking to determine the conditions obtaining in the field.’” I roll my eyes. “Whatever that means.”

“Read them,” Bianca says. “The five factors.”

“‘Moral law, heaven, earth, the commander, method and discipline . ’” I clear my throat. “Which is six things, not five. I’m supposed to take advice from some dead guy who can’t count?”

Bee ignores me. “So you can think of those as loyalty, timing, natural resources, leadership, and organization. These are the things you need going your way to be successful.”

“Super. All I have to do to win Jason back is become my mother.”

“No, really, Lainey. Give it a chance. Millions of readers can’t be wrong.”

“That’s like saying millions of boy-band fans can’t be wrong,” I mutter, but I flip through a few more pages. They’re full of words I’ve never heard of, like ramparts and bulwark . Even the words I do understand don’t make much sense. My eyes start to glaze over. “Is there a translation?”

“This is a translation.”

“Is there maybe a translation to the translation? The Art of War for Dummies?”

“You can do this.” Bee reads over my shoulder. “‘All warfare is based on deception.’” She points at the next page. “‘Hold out baits to entice the enemy. . . . Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected . ’”

I stare down at the text. “So how do I use that to win back Jason? Sneak up on him when he’s at the gym and offer him a protein smoothie?”

“You have to read the book first,” she says. “Then we’ll make a plan.”