IT SEEMS WEIRD TO SAY that I never cared for romance, even though I was married to my first crush. Well, the first one who existed, anyway.
Don't get me wrong. I was never a sucker for the lovey-dovey. Fancy dinners and roses and the word "babe" never held appeal for me. Yet I can hardly remember a time in my life when I didn't have a crush. To show you, we will now be traveling through the Men's Wing of my Personal History Museum. Pay special attention to the statues of the guys---they all have their own fascinating history.
HARRY POTTER
I've never not been in love with someone since fourth grade. That was when I read the Harry Potter series.
My mom, sister, and I would gather together every evening in third grade after our teacher gave us a goal to read for fifteen minutes a day, which was how it all got going. Eventually I had a mad crush on the guy, starting when I was ten.
(By "the guy," I'm not sure if I mean the character or the actor. I do remember that I once spent an afternoon sitting on the lawn, literally praying for Harry's flying car to come down our street so we could meet each other. Eek.)
As I was traveling in the car to school on one cloudy, gray morning, I felt strangely happy. Like life had more meaning and excitement now, even though I was on my way to an afternoon of standardized testing.
And as I got to school and they started passing out the tests, I couldn't help but be happy at my revelation. Harry Potter was the greatest character to ever exist! The books were great! He was such an amazingly cute person! It really added excitement to life. Any time I hit the doldrums, I could just tap into my Potter fantasies and get a hit of happy. So for the next few months, I would bookmark every fan site I could find on the family computer, watch the movies whenever I got the chance, read fanfictions, the works.
And the movies! I waited so eagerly for new movies to come out. I was furious that my parents always made me wait a few weeks to avoid the crowds, and was jealous of classmates who got to see them before I did.
But when I finally got to the theater, the experience was magical. Even when I watched the movies at home, it was fantastic--I always had a dream about him that night.
I felt this way until sixth grade but regretted it quickly. For a health class project, we had to create posters about ourselves and present them to the class. As one girl put her poster up, I noticed something suspicious under the "Future Hopes and Dreams" column: a Photoshopped image of her and Harry Potter dancing together! An outrage! She looked straight at us and told us seriously, "I want to marry Harry Potter."
This statement was met with feeble half-laughs from the other girls and a grimace from me. My face burned redder than her hair. I tried to look as pissed off as I could muster. I had competition!
I had to step up my game, for one never knew when Harry would show up at school one day! I mean, the girls' room happened to have a very long mirror which I was convinced could be the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets. We could have Voldemort living in the basement! Until the happy day when a serpent would be set on the students and Harry would have to come to rescue us, I simply took solace inâ¯knowingâ¯that if he were to show up at school, he would pick me. After all, I was the one with HP calendar pages taped all over my room and who had dreamed about him every night after I watched the movies! We would be perfect together.
Of course, this was not the first time I was worried about competition. I brought Potter-themed valentines for my fifth-grade class party the year before, and the same girl went around collecting them from other people. That was the first clue that I was not his only fan. Another instance came after another girl, a fourth-grader named Faith (who would later allegedly also start dating a real crush of mine) talked about the books so much that I thought she was after him too. I still found it unbelievable that there were â¯threeâ¯of us in one school who wanted to date him.
Still, hope sprung eternal. One day, as we were both at a summer program put on by the school, hanging out at recess, Faith turned around and said, "Harry Potter is here! He's under his invisibility cloak!" I was actually relieved. Someone else believed, truly believed, that he existed! And he was here, at school, because he wanted one of us!
Unfortunately, he never did come out of his invisibility cloak that day. Perhaps he was shy. Or most likely, he just didn't exist. Thankfully, I would get my first real crush later that year. Thus a humiliating showdown over which one of us got Harry Potter never happened. And as real people came into play, the Potter crush waned. At one point, I was even repulsed by it.
ROGER, MY DEAR HUSBAND
In the summer before sixth grade, my sister and I did a theatre program. I had a lot of performing experience through dance lessons I'd had since I was 4. The feeling of being on stage in gorgeous, sequined costumes, with attention focused on me, was always a thrill.
I met a tall guy named Roger who was about my age. I'm not sure how I knew I liked him, but the feelings I had were similar to those I had for Harry Potter. He had the dark, just semi-messy hair and round glasses thing going for him, so maybe that was just my type. But this time, I had a chance. Especially because as luck would have it, we played the roles of husband and wife.
We played the parents of a teenage girl who won the chance to be kissed by a young star about to head off to war. As typical 1950s parents, we worried and fussed and set boundaries. His role was great---a slightly overbearing, strict father with a fierce sense of sarcasm. I can still picture him, with a deep voice and slight lisp, yelling about this young celebrity carelessly invading his home, the home that he was the Emperor of, saying that he'd just go out and burn Rome if clearly he wasn't welcome there anymore, and storming off the stage. It was truly a great role.
We even got to sing together, in a song that complained about "kids these days." Meanwhile, I got to hear him yell at other characters to shut up constantly, and listen to his onstage orders for me to break out his gun, because he was going to kill that celebrity who was out to kiss his daughter--who also happened to be taking over his house-- or so help him God.
Great times.
Rehearsing, though, was a bit awkward. I was forced to talk to someone and act out scenes with someone I liked, which was intimidating then as a twelve-year-old. I had to keep eye contact as he yelled at me to fetch his gun, and I had to be his obedient 50s wife. If I tried that now, I might burst out in gales of giggles.
We also had to learn dance moves together. These were old-timey moves that had never been taught in dance class, and I had to learn them in front of a seriously attractive male. Eventually they gave up teaching me a difficult move and let me perform a simpler one.
Sometimes he did cute things when he rehearsed, too. If he forgot a line, he would slap his hand to his forehead and make a raspberry. This relieved me. Even hot guys weren't perfect.
Saturday night was performance time. Our number went down without a hitch, or a raspberry, even though I had caught a cold just in time. My family loved that I had a husband. (Cue the running jokes for about a year.) That didn't mean I even knew much about him. I knew that Roger was in seventh grade, like me, and probably went to public school. He also must live nearby. So maybe I had a chance here. I still had lots to learn about him, but I was on a roll. I already knew these things:
1. He was freakishly tall.
2. He liked drinking Sprite---at least that's what he had with lunch.
3. He may or may not have been a Boy Scout (as evidenced by the vintage T-shirt he wore one day).
4. He liked theater. (Um, DUH.)
On the way out of the building, I looked back at him one last time to see him talking to family and friends. Well, maybe he'd be back next year. Finding the time to actually see my love interests would be a problem that always plagued me. After our show, he was off to seventh grade, the same grade as me, and I would be off to seventh grade too...at a private school 30 minutes away. It was all over....
...or so I thought.
My sister, who attended the local public school, started her school year a few days before I did. On that first day, she came home all excited about something.
"I sawâ¯himâ¯in the hallway!" she told me.
I squinted. I didn't know anyone at her school. "Him?"
Unless...
It couldn't be. He's in seventh grade and her school only goes until sixth.
She furiously motioned for me to get in the corner so we could have some privacy. In a mixture of confusion and giggles, she told me that Roger was in the hallway of her school that day. Come to think of it, where did I hear that he was going into seventh grade? I didn't remember. I must have assumed he was my age, when he was actually a year younger. Still, he was in...gulp...elementary school. But it was only a year's age difference, right? This was amazing. I had a chance.
Now all I had to do was get to her school for some reason. Surely she'd have a concert or family night or something. Not too hard, right?
Wrong. Timing has never been on my side when it comes to love--in fact, perfect timing and I are often ships passing in the night, missing each other by inches--- and it started back then.
In April, I had my first real shot. Their school was about to have Bingo night, an event that we had gone to several times in the past. It was expected that we'd go again and I couldn't be happier.
However, Bingo night ended up coinciding with a trip my parents were taking. My grandparents came over for those few days to watch us. When I got home from school, we would do a craft. Sometimes we'd watch a movie, or just walk down to the duck pond on our street and enjoy the flocks of ducks come for our bread. We had fun, as we always did. But naturally, Bingo night was forgotten, and they wouldn't have thought to take us anyway.
(Although really, isn't that what old people are SUPPOSED to do? Play Bingo? But my grandparents were different and cutting-edge. They preferred Bunco, a dice game that sounds like Bingo, but alas, is a dice game that is nothing like Bingo. If their school had Bunco night instead, who knows what would have happened. Maybe we'd have met up, reconciled, and have formed a relationship. And maybe we'd still be in it because he actually lives close to me. I could be engaged by now instead of still single. You never can tell with fate. And all this because a school chose Bingo over Bunco. Only two letters' difference!)
So what happened? Kelly reported a few days later, courtesy of her school paper, that Roger was indeed there, calling out the ball numbers. And we had missed it because of my parents' ill-timed trip. It was enough to make a girl want to go and burn Rome!
Another chance came several weeks later. My youngest sister, Emily, who attended the same school, was going to be tested to see if she had a speech delay. For reasons unbeknownst to me, it would take place at Kelly's elementary school. Being that it took place during the week, that I was on spring break, and that my dad was at work, I would have to tag along for the two and a half hours and sit in the school hallway. He could pop up at any time, especially since the building was small. So for stupid reasons, I spent much of the following week secretly looking forward to this day.
Then my dad announced that he could take the day off of work so that I could stay home. What could I do? I pondered asking my mom if I could come along anyway. But I ultimately had enough sense not to say that I wanted to go sit in a school hallway for two hours. So basically, I was screwed, and upgraded to wanting to burn the whole of Italy.
I did finally attend their school's family night in the spring. (Again, my parents were all, "You don't have to go if you don't want to!" D'oh! This time, though, I decided to come along.)
When I peeked around a corner at one point, my heart stopped. A tall, dark-haired guy, who looked a lot like Roger from behind, was on the swings with some buddies. But I never confirmed it, nor did I get the chance to go over there. I figured that leaving to play on the swings by myself would look weird.
But I didn't give up hope yet.
Thanks to Kelly's school directory, I knew where Roger lived. He lived a mere three streets down from me and I probably could walk there if I wanted. Cool, right? Not that I ever went that way.
In eighth grade, my family and another school family made an arrangement. We would take their daughter to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and they would take me home on the same days. This was to avoid those dreaded long bus rides.
So anyway, we're driving home one day and take an alternate route for some reason. We drove past his house, and low and behold there he was, walking up the driveway with his mother. I was shocked to see that he looked relatively the same. I bet he didn't know that his former wife was driving behind him at that very second.
But the memories stayed put, and I missed them. There was a certain stain on one of the steps leading to the stage that our director asked us to stand on either side of during our big number. When my sister graduated preschool in that same auditorium a few years later, we all gathered for a picture. Below me was THE spot. My stomach twisted in a nostalgic pain.
But I was fairly over him by the time school started---thankfully, as I only knew him for six days. That was because a new guy was readily available at school.
BEN
Although Ben lived 30 minutes away from me, I got to see him every day at school. He was a new student who visited my 6th grade homeroom the previous year and was somewhat of a nerd. He liked karate, Monty Python and video games, especially Halo.
I didn't really notice him until leaving a community service assignment. In middle school, we all went to do community service projects every other week. In seventh grade, we went to a school in Trenton to help with the younger kids. I dreaded this one. It wasn't in a great place and the orange and brown hallways smelled of a uniquely sickening combination of cafeteria food, paint, burned rubber, and cheese.
But the kids were mostly nice. Christine and I loved hanging out with Amanda and Irene, two adorable little girls. We set up their snacks----iced fruit cups or applesauce usually---and read to them and played games with them in the gym and on the playground. What could go wrong?
The teachers. They were TYRANTS. There were a couple that seemed okay, but many of them were angry people, perhaps wanting to scare any wannabe future crime-doers off since they lived in a bad neighborhood. I don't know. All I know is that I distinctly remember on the last day of our work there, all the kids gathered in one room and the teacher screamed bloody murder at them for breaking the rules. Which was interesting, because I don't remember them breaking any rules, or at least no major ones. There was lots of shouting going on all the time and I wasn't sure why. It seemed like a miserable place to grow up.
One day on the bus ride home, Ben turned to me and said, "I hate their school." I chimed in with a, "Me, too." I couldn't believe someone felt the same way I did. We complained about how the kids were treated for a few minutes, then Ben turned away. As he closed his eyes for a brief nap, I noticed he looked sort of cute. But I decided I was trying to force a crush to happen, and I forgot about it.
In May, Ben had his bar mitzvah. Seventh grade was bar/bat mitzvah season for sure. There was a social event to go to all the time back then. Most of these parties took place in nice venues like country clubs. We'd get dressed up, attend a ceremony at a synagogue, and then take buses to the venue where we'd dance to a DJ, eat nice foods and Shirley Temples, and party. Because our classes were small, everyone was invited. Ben's occurred in May, soon before summer vacation. This would be the turning point for me.
And I almost didn't go.
You see, Webkinz were really becoming a thing, not just for little kids but for me as well. Christine also had one, and we'd sometimes make plans to meet up online after school---her with her lion, my with my pink poodle Butterscotch---and play in the virtual arcade together. We especially loved bowling. Now, they had rolled out a Clubhouse where you could actually talk to other users with little restriction. I had a blast.
And it was really hard to pull myself away from that computer on the day of the party. I wanted to continue the real conversation I was having about boys with some other kids my age. When I got to the party, I questioned my choice. It started out as a lot of casino games. I didn't gamble, even for fun. But after the ceremony, the real party started.
It was there I noticed how handsome he looked in a suit, and how great he was. I mean, weâ¯wereâ¯celebrating him, weren't we? We should be proud of him! We enjoyed ourselves playing casino-themed games and dancing on the floor and playing a trivia game to see who knew him best. One of those facts was that he once met George W. Bush and shook his hand. I always thought it was an honor that he met such an important, great guy. That George Bush met him, I mean.
There were also speeches. His parents took the floor and talked about what a huge heart he had and how amazing he was. Then we all gave him our gifts and congratulated him. Really, it's hardâ¯notâ¯to fall in love with someone under those conditions. Still, this time around I found myself oddly looking forward to school the next day.
We had several weeks left before school let out for the year. This time consisted of mainly me wishing I could gather the courage to talk to him. At the end-of-year pool party, I was devastated when his mom came to pick him up, so we wouldn't even spend the bus ride back to school together. It would be THREE WHOLE MONTHS before I'd see him again. To the young mind, that is a very long time. I had to take drastic action.
Right before the end of the year, though, something interesting happened. This one kid named Rick developed an interest in duct tape. He was already one of the quirkier guys. In third grade, he conducted a schoolwide experiment to see which teacher had the biggest head and posted the results on our classroom door. He, along with fellow friend Jeremy, often spent recess time pretending to hibernate. So all those times I walked past them on the playground and thought he was upset, I guess he was just pretending to be a squirrel in winter. Now he was creating everything from toilet seats to wallets to roses. Soon, he began to sell these creations on his own website.
But it didn't stop there: he created a shoutbox in which people could talk to one another. Naturally, this shoutbox was a source of fun for classmates, and we were 95% of the people who actually used it. People would say things like, "I'm supposed to be in study hall right now but I'm on here instead, hahaha!" and create names like JohnnyDeppLover. (AIM was the craze at the time and almost everyone had a screen name. Now, you could talk strictly with classmates, courtesy of duckydesign.com!) It was all fun and games until one idiot decided to proclaim their love for their crush there.
I don't need to tell you who that was, but what I will tell you is that people noticed. I stared at my keyboard for ten minutes, trying to decide if what I was going to do was smart. I decided that it probably wasn't, and therefore went ahead with it. I wrote, and I quote, "I love Ben! I'm going to miss him over summer vacation!"
"Ben is a nerd," one kid wrote back.
I defended this, but it was true. He liked video games, Pokemon, reading, and math homework. One day our class had a substitute. We had originally been told to work on a packet of problems, but the sub decided we could save it for homework. As the rest of us enjoyed playing on the playground, Ben sat by himself up on the hill, back toward the playground, hunched over math problems.
Were we really that compatible?
I don't remember what the other responses on the shoutbox were, but I was too embarrassed to check back. What onâ¯Earthâ¯inspired me to do such a thing? Anyway, now the whole class knew and supposedly some nasty comments followed. Christine, always the loyal friend, would report back to me, but I made like a celebrity and chose to ignore what people said about me on the internet. Ignorance was bliss.
And so was the end of an era. R.I.P. Rick's Shoutbox. Here lies an innocent chatroom, murdered by the stupidity of a seventh-grader who just wanted her crush to get the message. And then the end of the year came, finally. Besides, I got to go to theatre camp again. Maybe I'd see Roger there.
Alas, he was not. It was a long, relatively love-less summer.
In eighth grade, I got lucky when I saw Ben again. I wasn't sure if he was coming back to school when I didn't see him at a pool party over the summer. His locker was even right next to mine (which was exactly what my Girls' Life magazine horoscope said would happen. Take that, doubters!). Now I really had a chance! Especially in History classes and especially now that the shoutbox thing had blown over. Some people still knew, though.
I soon discovered that Ben and I shared history class (after the first day, after he realized he had been sitting in the wrong class for half an hour). It was there that I would appreciate how good-looking he was. I spent more time watching him than the board. Soon, the same thing happened with other classes.
Of course, I figured he'd get annoyed eventually, so I would try practicing not watching him at some points. My biggest challenge was daring myself to not look at him once during a double English period. That meant not looking at him forâ¯an hour and a half. It was difficult. I don't remember if I succeeded or not, but I bet class was a lot less fun that day.
Meanwhile, in my art class, I currently sat next to a boy named Jake. We had played together on the playground in first grade. Jake was kind of a goofball and rumor had it that he liked me, though I never believed that. While we were assigned to the same table, he would spend the time kicking my stool. Whenever I asked him to cut it out, he said he was having seizures in his leg and that he couldn't. It was far funnier than I'd like to admit. It was especially difficult when the teacher was lecturing to us about important paintings, and I'd have to work very hard to not burst out laughing in front of the entire class.
When he wasn't jiggling my stool, Jake would constantly ask me about Ben. He was so busy talking to me that he barely got any work done on his art projects. A guy named Andrew would join in too. Like Jake, he would constantly ask me if I asked Ben out yet. When I said no, he would ask, "Are you chicken?" Then he'd proceed to "Buc-buc-buc-bucKAW!" Sometimes he'd flap his arms and make a great fool of himself. I may have been more bothered with it if it wasn't so ridiculous.
(It wasn't just in art class, either. Once when we were at our lockers at the end of the day---you will recall that Ben and I were right next to each other---Andrew saw me and started in on his chicken impression. To my horror, Ben went, "What are you doing?" I froze, but for whatever reason, Andrew didn't blow my cover. "Oh, you'll find out," he replied simply, clucking his way down the hall.)
It was at this table in class that Jake would tell me something important. "He says you look at him too much in History class," he said.
So it was true. Heâ¯didâ¯notice me. But the worst was when Jake went to Ben at lunch one day and actually told him I liked him. I watched him do it. And so began a series of good and bad crushworthy events.
One of these events was when our eighth-grade community service assignment was working with disabled kids at a local school. One day, members of our basketball team played theirs, and the rest of us watched. It wasn't especially riveting, except for that Ben sat next to me...and fell asleep right on me. The next fifteen minutes consisted of him sleeping on me and bunches of girls coming over to admire the scene. It was embarrassing, but nothing happened until after the game, when one girl went over to him and recounted what happened. She also made sure to mention how much I had been smiling.
Great, thanks.
An even better one was earlier in the year when our all-knowing head of middle school also set us up to work on a project together. As Quaker students, we were encouraged to think about a meaningful question posed to us at assemblies every week with an anecdote, known as queries. Usually our art teacher presented these at Monday morning assemblies, but that year the staff tried something new and had pairs of eighth-graders each write a weekly query. (Previously, the tradition would be for each eighth-grader to read a poem at assembly over the course of the year.)
We wrote the background anecdote together, which recounted the Challenger explosion, and then the query itself, which was, "Who is there that comforts you and helps you through the hard times?" Actually, I should say that he wrote it, as I was too shy to say much. He just sort of accepted it, or at least didn't say anything to me about it.
Other times, I would watch him interact with his friends at lunch, green with envy. One of his friends was Faith. From the way they hung out together, it was obvious that they liked each other. Or as much as you can like someone at that age, anyway. They seemed to enjoy tossing around an empty water bottle and trying to get it to land right-side up. I didn't get the appeal, but by golly if I got to sit with them, I'd participate any day.
One day, he decided to sit next to me---on a separate bench, but still next to me. I was feeling brave and decided to slowly scootch his way. And scootch. And scootch some more. A teeny bit more...When I was barely touching his back, he noticed enough to yell, "Can youâ¯pleaseâ¯move over?" I moved over to find Christine laughing at me. Mercifully, he and his friends never mentioned it again.
And when our class performed Seussical, that was another chance for me to admire him. We worked on it from November through May. He was the main character and I was one of the Whos, due to an unfortunate cold that struck me on audition day. My role had its perks: I got to spend more time watching Ben sing, and I, at the time, thought it was wonderful. I often heard him sing to himself at his locker, but it turned out he was a pretty darn good singer in real life!
Being a small character during our many rehearsals had its perks: I often got to sit back and watch him perform. Sometimes it was tempting not to jump up and hug him, especially because one musical number had me standing right next to him. Thankfully, I held back. I had lots of memories from that show, but as I was missing him throughout high school, listening to the soundtrack often made me sad.
Eventually it all came to a head in homeroom one day, as one of the boys asked him if he hated me. It was somehow a well-known fact that I liked him by now. And right in front of me, he practically shouted, "Yeah!" Later on, that same guy would tell me that Ben had said before that he hated me, but "looked disappointed" afterwards. I didn't know what to make of those things.
These events were interspersed with Andrew's chicken dance and Jake kicking my chair in class. And lots of being ignored.
I never really got the feeling that Ben hated me. Annoyed by me, sure. But "hate" was much too strong a word. So despite really wanting to get to know him, I never quite did. Every time I drove past his street, I had an urge to go down and see what was there. I typically only went that way when I was going to the bowling alley, but it was plenty enough for me. But that meant we had to drive back the same way, which in turn meant I got even sadder driving away and thought about how much I wanted to be with him for the rest of the afternoon. That problem only intensified after we graduated and I couldn't see him every day.
And soon, my time at the Quaker school would be over. After a year of chasing after him with my eyes, we would graduate and move on to different schools.
This pattern of chasing him continued throughout high school, I am sorry to say. For I was about to go on to an all-girls boarding school, and a lack of new interests would make it hard to move on. So I had to resort to focusing on them.
One night over spring break, I was on Facebook and Jake messaged me. Not a "Hello" or anything normal, but with a serious question: "have u talked to Ben yet? or emailed him?"
I replied in similar tech speak. "uh, no, not yet."
Jake then continued telling me things that were very interesting. "he talks about u sometimes," he'd write.
I responded, "What does he say??"
"just that u were a pretty cool girl. and it's 2 bad that he can't see u anymore."
I froze. Was this true? It seemed way too good to be believed.
Jake replied again: "it's 5PM he's probably doin nothin. just call."
I had been grappling with the issue of whether or not to call him in recent weeks. I only had his home number thanks to the school directory, but by doing that I'd have to get past his parents. That alone was a thought that terrified me, and then I'd actually have to talk to him and think of things to say. After half an hour, Jake got frustrated with trying to convince me to call him and left. I was silently chastising myself, too. Why was it so hard to talk to another person?
I never did end up calling him. Instead, I sent him emails constantly, all of which he ignored. This option was much safer, and he'd be sure to get it. I'd email him and email him after one of the boys in our class gave me his address. (They also went to the Quaker school next door and thus knew the email format.)
But I increasingly became frustrated as no reply came. Once, I even instilled "Operation Harry Potter," in which I sent him ten emails in a row with a continuing sentence in the subject lines, as if they were a flurry of owls sitting outside his window with letters. Heâ¯hadâ¯to notice them then.
He didn't notice for four years.
New interests wouldn't come until later. And so that left me to close the book on romance, for now. It's true what they say: middle schoolers don't know much about romance, even when they say they do.
And boy, was I unaware how little I knew.