He found her sitting on a swing in the park on a lovely spring evening and also, her seventeenth birthday.
He knew her name, her family and where she lived, but she was quiet and a little freaky and they didn't exactly hang with the same crowds. He was in Glee; she was in the Writers Club. He played football; she worked part time at the local library. He knew this because he watched her sometimes, from the corner of the library where he tutored the middle school students on Friday afternoons.
There in the library was where he discovered that she in fact wore glasses, that she loved the smell of old books and that when she tied her hair up in a ponytail, like she would often do two hours into her shift, she looked normal. She didn't look afraid and apprehensive, but she looked completely and utterly confident in whom she was.
He wanted to talk to her most of the time when he watched her in the library, but his minor obsession with her was enjoyable from a distance. They had spoken in middle school more than once, but she was nervous and he hated to admit it, but he found her a little bit boring. That was, until now.
He had been dating Terri for the last six months, and they had almost given themselves to each other three weeks before he had discovered that Emma Pillsbury spent her free time in the Young Adult Fiction and American History aisles. So naturally, wanting and needing to know how sex worked and how good it felt, sometimes he thought about Emma in ways that he shouldn't have, ways that left his pants tight and his lips dry.
She was pretty when she was a girl, but the more he watched her and the more confident she grew as an individual, he realised how beautiful she was. Her doll-like features made her stand out from all of the other girls and her hair radiated a kind of innocence that sometimes kept him awake at night, long after his mother had turned off the porch light.
It wasn't a stalker-like obsession that he had with her; that would have been sad. Still, Will couldn't resist the fact that he liked to see her walk by him in the hallways, or watch her return books to their rightful shelves. Maybe it was boredom in tutoring that brought it on, or maybe it was the testosterone that was running through his adolescent veins, but his fantasies that involved Emma Pillsbury were lovely and erotic. She wasn't the type he would usually go for, but now she was older and prettier and different to every other girl he knew and the mysterious qualities that she possessed made him desperately want her beneath him as he watched her, the rim of her glasses balancing delicately on her perfect nose.
And so, when he found her in the park on her seventeenth birthday, alone and hopeful, elegant and restless, he grasped the opportunity with his whole heart.
She was in love with him, or so she thought she was. She knew he watched her sometimes, and that made it all the more exciting, but when he spoke to her that evening as she rocked on the swing softly in her pale blue dress, startling her, she gave him a part of herself that she never knew existed.
"Hi, Emma." He was a confident boy, his head raised and his glance meeting hers beautifully.
"Hey, Will. How are you?" Her legs closed tightly and her back straightened in an attempt to return to a ladylike posture.
"Good. And yourself?" He took the swing next to her and returned the stunning smile that radiated from her sculpted features.
"I'm well, thank you." She bit her pink, lower lip and his mind travelled to a dark paradise.
"I don't see you so often anymore at school, Emma."
"No, but you see me in the library."
The way she said it, her knowing tone, it wasn't patronising and disgusted. She understood and she cared. Then he wondered if perhaps he wasn't the only one who was plagued by the need to be close to someone, another body that is desired so deeply.
He wouldn't find out it was her birthday on this very day for another year.
Sometimes, a year can change everything.
