As Published in Unacceptable Behavior
It’s very important when making contact with a crush to first have a crush on someone. It does not have to be a big crush; in fact it would be better if it were a little one. In my experience a little crush is roughly analogous with a little thermo-nuclear explosion, I would be terrified to see a big crush in action, a large crush probably has the ability to destroy all life on earth several times over. A little crush is easily established. The little crush I had on Hercules, a cute boy in my dorm, was established in the span of five minutes.
It was early enough in September that wearing anything more than jeans and a t-shirt made sweat roll down the side of my face when climbing the two, unnecessarily long, flights of stairs to my dorm room but late enough that pine needles flew in attack formation from the sky like little spears of doom exacting the tree’s revenge for all the printing my major required of me. I was five minutes and a sprint through the loop away from being late for British Literature before 1800. I was frazzled, my long brown hair needed to be brushed, and half of my bangs had decided to point any direction but down when I sprinted down the hall, still shoving books in my back pack. I reached the stairwell and the only thing I still had out was a large pink Nalgene filled to the brim with apple juice. I unzipped one of the smaller pockets of my backpack and thought I slid the Nalgene all the way in. I hadn’t. I also had not fully zipped the pocket closed. I swung the bag back over my shoulder and my Nalgene went flying out of it, over the rail, and onto the second floor landing. The bottle landed with crash that could, and possibly did, wake the dead.
“What the hell!” A deep and unrecognized voice shouted below my feet.
Oh no. I panicked. I had hit someone, maybe even given them a concussion. Then an even more frightening thought came to mind. I was going to be late for class! I might have to drive the person to the hospital and miss the class all together and then the professor would give me an F! The world was ending.
I peeked over the rail. “I’m sorry,” my voice sounded so small and mousish, “it fell out of my backpack. Did it hit you?” I did not wait for an answer but flew down the first flight of stairs and found myself face to chest with Hercules, a 6’2” junior with dark blond hair shoved under a Mariners baseball cap. My Nalgene rocked back and forth by his foot. “I am so so so SORRY it just kind of flew out of my bag,” the words tumbled out of my mouth, I felt stupid for saying the same thing a second time but I couldn’t stop. “I have never been more embarrassed in my life.” That was not true opening night of the school play my senior year of high school was far more embarrassing. My costume came unzipped during the first song and when I finally got off stage the only people around who could help me was the members of the football team who were being forced to participate.
Hercules bent over and lifted the water bottle off the floor. He pushed it toward me and smiled a smile that was so broad, so genuine, and so friendly that heavens light seemed to flow from his slightly opened mouth. “Don’t worry about it,” he replied as I took the pink, plastic, cylinder of embarrassment from him. “I’m sure your water bottle just knew that you were in a hurry and wanted to help out.” He smoothly added that he would see me later and wandered down the stairs. I stood there in shock for a moment or two. I was hooked, the combination of his smile and that tiny bit of charm and I had found my little crush.
Of course I had seen him around before. After school started a few weeks earlier I learned that if I studied in the third floor lounge one of my neighbors would stop and want to chat for half an hour or so until it became clear that I was not going to get anything done so I had taken to hiding on second floor. He would walk through occasionally but I hadn’t noticed him until it was too late and I had to deal with a small thermo-nuclear explosion.
My next move was to completely ruin any chance I had with Hercules by emphasizing the fact that he was miles out of my league. I was incredibly successful at choosing someone who I perceived as “out of my league.” Hercules was a basketball player, had the muscles of a Greek god, and he was incredibly charming and funny. As far as I was concerned he was so far out of my league that we were not even swimming in the same ocean. I was cute with my just past shoulder length hair, habitual movie quoting, and my “awkward charm.” Had the phrase “adorkable” been a thing at the time someone would have probably used it to describe me and I would have punched them in the face. Being a little dorky and telling guys in bars all about the King Arthur legends you are studying is fine when you are playing for a prize in the minor decathlons but this was part of the big leagues. I was determined to prove myself right and I did not have to wait long for my chance.
It was almost mid-terms; the squadrons of pine needles had become soggy piles of slippery goop. By 3:30 in the afternoon I was in sweatpants, my mood had reached the highest possible number in the bad end of the spectrum, and all I wanted in the whole world was to hide from my across the hall neighbor, who had developed a bad habit of barging in whenever she wanted. I slunk down to second floor in my paint stained sweats with my Norton for British Literature, threw a batch of brownies in the oven, and curled up on an overstuffed chair.
I was rereading the Canterbury Tales and muttering to myself moving between the Middle English I was learning to read and my own grumpy sentiments about the situations. “Damn you Chaucer! Experience though noon autocritee / were in this world, is right enough for me.” A door down the hall opened and closed. “To speke of wo… to speak? To spake?” I tore a florescent pink sticky note off the stack and slammed it over the entire paragraph. Then skipped down to try and pronounce “but the axe why the fifthe man / was noon…”
“Are you trying to summon a dragon?” The air in my body stopped moving. I stopped and looked up at him. I had been so focused that I had not heard him or his roommate walk down the hall, apparently they had been chatting until I had so rudely interrupted them with my dragon summoning powers. Hercules lifted the purple Norton out my hands. “The middle ages. History?”
“English, I’m learning a new version… well actually an old version of it. This is Middle English, which I assume they did use to summon dragons.” Oh my gosh. SHUT UP! Any second he would tell me to shut up. I had to stop myself from talking.
“So like Shakespeare and stuff?”
“Shakespeare’s actually modern English.” I responded, making sure I did not ramble on this time. It still was not good enough for the little voice in my head. I sound so pretentious! Why couldn’t I just say yeah? Yeah is short. Yeah is not a rambling answer!
“Oh… cool… well we have to go,” he gestured to his roommate, “but those brownies you’re making smell fantastic.” The two of them started for the stairs again.
“Those aren’t brownies; I just emit that smell naturally.” I replied then froze again letting my breath escape with the words; “what the hell am I saying?” There was no response. I dared to hope that I had only imagined saying such an odd thing instead of thank you but I knew the truth. I knew I had said it but maybe Hercules had not heard me. I was still glued to the overstuffed chair when he came back a little over an hour later, this time with a boy who was not his roommate.
“That’s the girl who said she naturally smells like brownies,” I heard him whisper as they walked down the hall.
I nurtured my crush on Hercules all winter. The nuclear fall out of my crush had been extensive. One day in April, after the snow had melted and the pine cones started to cover the lawns something terrible happened.
I had a good feeling about my afternoon. The kind of feeling where you just know something great is about to happen. I have learned to take that feeling as a warning that things are actually about to go horribly wrong.
Everything was going the right way. My iPod was doing great things, it was Friday, and Modern World Lit, my only class of the day had been canceled. I was so happy and content with my life that by the time I reached my dorm I wanted nothing more than to dance to the off-beat lyrics of Hot Summer Nights which had just come onto my iPod. I left my sunglasses on, only the coolest and most put together of people can both wear their sunglasses inside and dance to the music on their headphones. I felt like one of those people. My pony tail bounced. I raised my arms and moved my shoulders. My hips swiveled with each stair. At the corner I closed my eyes and twirled around it, feeling the force of the music down in my core.
Then my outstretched arms collided with something solid.
It was not solid like the railings or the walls that I had run into on many a klutzy occasion. Whatever it was felt softer and more human. Whatever it was felt like a disaster. My eyes opened. My fingers clenched around the rubbery cord that attached one headphone to the other and I pulled them out. I once again stood face to chest with the boy who I had actively been crushing on for months.
“What are you doing?” He stared down and asked. I could hear the undertone of “every time I see you, you’re doing something weird.”
“I… uh…” My voice was gone. I wanted an asteroid to fall out of the sky and hit me right then. Or maybe the floor could open up like it did in It’s a Wonderful Life and I would fall into a swimming pool. There did not even need to be a pool it could just open to a bottomless pit and I would fall until I died of starvation or got caught at the center of earth’s gravitational pull, because that is what happens when you fall in a bottomless pit. “I… uh…”” Say something! Anything! All I needed to do was explain that I was not watching where I was going. All I needed to do was apologize for bumping into him. Why were no words coming out of my mouth?
“YOU CAN’T SEE ME!” I finally blurted out. “I’M WEARING SUNGLASSES!” I did not wait around to find out if he thought I was being witty or charming. I took off up the second flight of stairs. If I had sprinted any faster my feet would have lifted off the ground and I would have taken flight. I sprinted all the way to my room and slammed the door shut. “You can’t see me, I’m wearing sunglasses?”
I know that wearing sunglasses does not make me invisible any more than waving a stick around makes a kid a wizard but at that moment I wanted the world to work that way. I wanted to go back and explain myself, this time using my big girl words, but I knew he would be gone by the time I made it back to the stairwell. Instead I decided it was time to clean up some of the nuclear waste and start rebuilding civilization. It would take time but there was no way in my mind anything other than embarrassment was coming out of that particular little thermo-nuclear explosion.
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