But each week, the Boy Next Door had come back. He quickly became a regular at the Sunday night College Bible study, and also within my circle of friends. We’d quickly begun acknowledging each other at school and we chatted between classes and sat together to eat lunch amongst other friends.

The more I got to know him, the more I liked him.

The conversations between us came naturally and were always fun and easy. I began to think about him constantly when we were apart. I began snooping and inquiring whether he was going to be at certain gatherings before making my decision of whether or not to attend. I loved being around him and he seemed to enjoy being around me… but I wasn’t sure.

There were always a lot of other girls around, also vying for his attention. It seemed like he was treating me different than the others, special… but maybe that was all in my head. Maybe that was just what I wanted to believe.

Things moved very slowly over the next few months and that was fine by me!

Well…

Most of the time it was fine.

I’ll admit, there were moments when I just wished he would make a move… grab my hand, ask me out… something!

But I was also scared.

Scared to get involved again.

Scared of getting hurt.

Scared…. Scared…. Scared!

And besides that, I had a strict personal policy for myself of not dating any guy who I didn’t already know really well as a friend first. The couple of times I went out on dates with guys who weren’t friends first, the experiences turned out to be uncomfortable disasters!

Nope! Not for me.

Friends first, and then we’ll see what happens from there. So going slow with the Boy Next Door, and taking time just to get to know each other was a good thing.

And for five happy months we were nothing more than friends.

But then… on one December evening… I let the cat out of the bag.

To be continued…

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It all started when one morning before heading off to High School, The Boy Next Door noticed a promotional brochure from my private school sitting on his kitchen table. It had come in the mail, and strangely enough there had been a picture of me in it, sitting under a tree, reading a book. He was captivated.

“Now there’s one cute girl,” he thought while munching on his Cocoa Puffs.

“She looks young, but she is gonna be one good lookin’ girl when she gets older.”

No one else in the family paid much attention to the brochure, not even enough attention to throw it away. For that reason it managed to somehow hang around the house for years like the Forest Gump feather blowing from one pile of useless papers to another. The Boy Next Door took the opportunity to glance inside it at my picture again and again.

When I was twelve or thirteen, my younger brother became very good friends with The Boy Next Door’s younger brother (The Professor). Apparently they walked to and from school together almost every day and spent many afternoons playing together at our house. The Professor remembers exactly what my eighth grade bedroom looks like and I don’t remember ever having even seen him during those days when everyone tells me he was at my house regularly. Nor do I ever remember hearing his last name…. And if I had heard it, I would have FREAKED OUT! to know that The Boy Next Door’s younger brother was in my home.

Oblivious… completely oblivious.

I guess I wasn’t very tuned in to my little brother and his friends at that stage. I was too consumed with own social life to pay any attention to them.

One day The Boy Next Door was even with his mom when she came to pick The Professor up from my house.

She says she came to the door, while The Boy Next Door waited in the van. Can you imagine the scene if he’d been the one to come the door and I would have been the one to open it? My jaw would have hit the front stoop!

Apparently (I have no personal recollection of any of this) I answered the door head tilted to one side glued to the telephone. I got the message that she was there to pick up one of my little brother’s friends and I turned to go get them.

Being the “always-on-the-lookout-for-a-good-match,” matchmaker that she is, The Boy Next Door’s mom said to him when she got back in the van,

“The Professor’s friend has a really cute sister.”

“Mom! Stop. She’s too young,” was the reply from The Boy Next Door.

“No she’s not,” said his mom.

No answer.

You know how anxious teenage boys always are to take advice and share their interest in girls with their mothers. The truth was that me being thirteen and in jr. high, and The Boy Next Door being a Sophmore in high school on the verge of getting his driver’s license, at the time, did seem to him like a huge age gap.

But as we grew up in the same little town he continued to notice me. At football games, movie theaters, school plays… he saw me. And all that time I was noticing him too. I knew his name, and he knew mine. But neither of us ever spoke to the other.

Some time after I had graduated high school, we were both attending the same local Junior College… still not speaking…. But noticing.

While on campus one day he was in the student lounge with a friend, when I came in, with a group of people. He remembers exactly what I was wearing, exactly how I looked, and exactly what he said to his friend while he was watching me from a distance.

“Now that’s the kind of girl I’m going to marry. That girl right there.”

And I thought I was the stalker in this story!

Some time after that, one of my friends from the college Bible study had met The Boy Next Door and a friend of his, and had invited them to come on Sunday night. They were considering coming but they asked,

“Who’s going to be there?”

She began to list people who regularly attended, to see if any of her friends were also friends of theirs.

“Josh, Mike, Nikki, Jay, Ben, Christin, Rachael….” She probably continued with the list, but once she said my name, The Boy Next Door says that was all he needed to hear.

He’d be there.

And now here he was.

Of course at that moment I knew none of this.

We made a little small talk and I noticed he didn’t have a Bible with him. Naturally being the good Christian I was, I would HAVE to sit next to him so he could share mine.

I guess, in his opinion, I wasn’t so young anymore. I’d grown up a bit and so had he.

A few months had passed since our first exchange of words on that Sunday night, and by then we had spoken often, seeing eachother regularly in group settings at friend’s get-togethers, Bible Study, and at school.

One weekday morning when his jeep was in the shop, his mom was dropping him off for class. They pulled up to campus in her van and she was carrying on and on talking to him about something. He was looking out the window and suddenly he couldn’t wait any longer to interrupt her.

“Mom! Mom! You see that girl over there?”

“The blonde?”

“Yeah. That’s Rachael.”

“Rachael as in The Professor’s friend’s sister? That Rachael? The Rachael that was too young?”

“Yeah. I gotta go Mom.”

“Go! Hurry! Go!”

To be continued…

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The group officially met on Sunday evenings for actual bible study, but a lot of us had grown extremely close and hung out together several nights a week. Many from the group had become my circle of friends while remaining in my hometown, and attending community college, after High School.

It was summertime and the Sunday night crowd was always different, with regulars out of town for vacation and mission trips, and others who attended college out of state popping in because they were back home for the summer. Feeling some ownership in the group, when new faces appeared I tried to greet them, make them feel welcomed, and help get them plugged in by sitting with them or introducing them to others.

I was bopping around socializing with everyone before worship started when I saw him walk in.

I was paralyzed.

I was like stone, except for the butterflies in my stomach and the fire rising up my face. My mind just kept repeating, It’s him. It’s him. It’s… “the boy next door.”

I had had a crush on him from a distance since I had been eleven years old. I’d never spoken to him, never introduced myself, never had a reason too… until now.

This was my chance.

After all, it was kind of like my job to welcome people… so why not him? It wouldn’t seem out of place. It would make complete sense for me to finally walk up to him and say,

Hi, I’m Rachael. I’ve seen you around town my whole life and I’ve never spoken to you and I’m so glad you’re here and I think you are soooooo HOT, and… and… here he comes…. Oh Rachael get is straight… you can’t say all that… be cool, just be cool… umm… um…

“Hi Boy Next Door.” (I didn’t actually say “boy next door” I said his actual name.)

Oh my gosh. Did I really just say that? Did I really just say his name out loud? Now he’s going to wonder how I knew his name. Oh I blew it, I blew it. Now he knows I’ve been staring at him, stalking him since my childhood.  He can see into my soul, he knows everything, I’m…

“Hi Rachael.”

Whoa.

I froze.

The butterflies froze, and I swear they dropped their jaws and just stared at him.

He just said my name.

I didn’t tell him my name.

To be continued…

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I washed away my past and my pain in the Jordan River where Christ himself had been baptized and I felt an assured sense that God’s plans for my future were fantastic ones.  That trip was a perfect honeymoon with my Lord after a year of renewed courtship with Him. It was a year in my single life that I will cherish forever where I had the opportunity to set everything else aside and soak God in. He lavished me with His Words and His love in a way that fed my soul and repaired my heart.

When I returned back to California after my time in Israel and arrived back to my little hometown and pulled into the church parking lot we had previously departed from, everyone on the bus started to buzz. There were giggles and a whole lot of pointing out the windows and then, it seemed everyone was staring back at me with giant smiles on their faces. I stood up and tried to see what everyone was acting so goofy about.

Standing there, holding a big sign with my name on it… you know… the kind of sign you see in the movies when someone at an airport or train station is waiting to pick someone up? Standing there, with that sign, bearing my name,was a young man who had missed me while I’d been gone.

Thinking about how he looked that day, standing there smiling, in his Tommy Hilfiger shirt, dark jeans, sunglasses on looking so cool, so tall, so strong, so handsome, and waiting for ME… eagerly. The memory of him that day, how he looked, how he made me feel… it still sends butterflies swirling in my stomach just as much now as it did in that moment.

Waiting for me there, to give me a ride home, was the “boy next door.”

To be continued…

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My father has always been an unbelieving agnostic who becomes visibly uncomfortable at the very mention of God. My mother is a quiet Christian who took me to church as a very small child on an irregular basis, but couldn’t keep up with it while juggling everything else. There was never any prayer or Bible reading or the teaching of Bible stories in my home.

My mother always kept me in private schools growing up. She had a very difficult childhood and learned to take care of herself and her younger brother while still in her early teens. She put both herself and her brother through college and they each became successful, self sufficient, hard working adults. Education was of the utmost importance to my mom and teaching us to be self reliant from the beginning was her goal.

When I was in the 5^th grade we moved to an area where the only private grade school boasting a college-preparatory curriculum was a Christian one. That was fine with my mom, and she enrolled me. Immediately there was a very obvious difference between myself and my Christian peers.  While out on the playground other kids in my class would fiercely correct me when I took the Lord’s name in vain. They all knew songs and stories I had never heard and they’d never been allowed to see many of the movies I talked about.

I quietly tried to fit in with my Christian classmates, trying not to let them know I was any different than they were. I had a lot to learn about God and Jesus, prayer, and the Bible, but little by little I was gathering information and developing an understanding, as I observed the Christian teachers and students around me.

The summer before 8^th grade Jesus got a hold of my heart for the very first time. After a couple years of being surrounded by Christians in school I’d grown quite fond of the faith I saw in many of my friends. I went to church camp that summer and committed to becoming a Christian myself.

Over the next few years things were quite rocky at home between my parents, but I had some amazing families at my school and church who took me under their wings and trained me up in what it was to be a Christian, how to study my Bible, how to pray, and how to know God personally. I went on a few Mission trips, attended church on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights, went to Church camp each summer, and tried my best to live my life like a Christian should. It wasn’t always easy though, and I didn’t always succeed.

When it came to dating I had more freedom than I knew how to handle at that age and boys often became far more of a focus than God.

Now broken hearted at nineteen God was reeling me in. He began to teach me how to keep my focus on Him at all times, through all things, instead of compartmentalizing His reign in my life to Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights.

I began to meditate on the Bible constantly. At that difficult time in my life, reading God’s word was no longer a chore I tried to remember to do so I could check it off my list. Instead, reading the Bible became something I craved. I began to see God’s words in a whole new way and the Bible became like a beautiful love letter written from God to me.

I spent warm days out on a blanket in the grass enjoying His creation and memorizing scripture.  I spent quiet evenings on my bedroom floor in candlelight, discovering new promises in the Psalms and talking to Him, feeling His love and Spirit surround me and work to heal and renew me.

I found a group of girls through my community college Bible study who were interested in setting dating aside for a while to focus on the Lord. We became a regular group, meeting once a week at my house for Bible Study and we each made a six month commitment to not dating.

We poured ourselves into books like

“I Kissed Dating Goodbye” by Joshua Harris,

“Lady in Waiting,” by Jackie Kendall,

“Passion and Purity” by Elisabeth Eliott, and

“Finding Your Knight in Shining Armor” by P.B. Wilson.

Boy could I tell some stories about those six months!

You will never see guys coming out of the woodwork trying to date you and your friends like you will when they all get wind that there’s a group of Christian girls who have adamantly, unwaveringly sworn off dating. It makes sense now, but in the moment we had no idea what a sport we had created amongst the sex that just can’t resist a challenge.

I don’t think a single one of us made it through that six months without some major relationship entanglements with guys, but a few of us, at least two of us, credit that time with having dramatically shaped us for our husbands and for our futures as women who will forever pursue a deep and meaningful relationship with God.

For those of us who had always needed to be in a relationship, needed a guy at our side, or who had our worlds revolving entirely around belonging to a guy, this time in our lives taught us that we didn’t “need” a man. We didn’t “need” anyone but the Lord. And once we got that figured out, once we understood who we were as individuals, and the purposes God had for us, we were free to enjoy much healthier, balanced relationships with the opposite sex.

Having a guy in our lives could begin to be a true added blessing instead of a dependency. We were able to choose a boyfriend, and let go of a boyfriend, using discernment and discretion instead of blindly staying in bad relationships because we didn’t know who we were without them.

To be continued…

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Somewhere along the way I had picked up the idea that you should never date a guy you couldn’t see yourself marrying… so I didn’t. I took every relationship very seriously and never even set foot into one without first agreeing with myself that this was someone who had everything I needed in a husband.

I think that is good advice to give to a nineteen year old and above for whom marriage in the very near future can be a possibility if that is their desire. But, to tell a thirteen year old that she ought not date a guy unless she is first sure she could see herself one day marrying him, puts a young girl’s mind and heart in a very serious, very dependent, very devoted, place that it has no business being for several years. And when that kind of relationship ends… a relationship that is far too emotionally committed for high school, well… in my case… it devastated me to my core.

By the time I turned nineteen I had had my heart broken to a degree that it remained so for the better part of a year. I didn’t have any plans for my future other than becoming a wife and mother. When those plans disintegrated because of the breakup, I felt completely lost. And that is a terrible state to be in!

To not know who you are at nineteen or where you’re going because all you’d ever seen yourself as was belonging to a guy, is not a healthy place to be. But, that’s where I was. I had no college plans, no career plans, no direction for what to do now with the rest of my life.

My world was turned upside down.

In one moment I became completely devastated and completely lost. I was in a cloud of numb confusion except for when I was in excruciating, devastated, heart ache. I had some really great friends who spent the first night after the breakup with me through all my sobbing, and sleeping from exhaustion, and waking up only to start sobbing again. They got me out of the house and bless their hearts… jumped into a lake with me fully clothed, and swam around for a while, just to let off steam and have some laughs.

But most days after that were filled with hours upon hours of me just being alone.

Finding another guy was not an option at all. I wanted nothing to do with dating.  I was too scared.  How could I ever get close to a guy again?  How could I give my heart to someone and believe we would be headed toward marriage only to have it handed back to me in pieces?

I couldn’t even escape my loneliness when I went to work. I was a hostess in an off the strip resort restaurant.  When the hotel was busy with guests, so were we.  But on many days during the week we had no guests at all in the hotel, and not a single person would come into the restaurant.  As a hostess, that meant long hours of me standing by myself, behind a podium at the front door, in total quiet, alone with my thoughts, my broken heart, and a whole lot of questions.

All I could think about was him and what went wrong.

I couldn’t see any solution for my broken heart, or any hope for my future, beyond his saying he made a huge mistake and needed me back forever. That would heal the pain. That would show me my future again. That was the only possibility I could ever come up with to fix my life. But when he broke up with me, he made it VERY clear, that was NEVER going to happen.

I was drowning in memories of us that were sinking me lower and lower into misery.  I had to find a way out.  I needed a lifeline to lift me from this deep loss and set me on a path toward a new future.

With nothing else to do, nowhere else to turn, and a heartache that no one and nothing else had been able to heal, I took my broken mangled heart to God and begged for His help. I couldn’t see any hope. It was a tiny speck of faith that allowed me to lay all of this before the Lord and believe He could make it right, but that was it… that was all I had. Just a speck. Just enough to get my broken self to His feet.

I had no idea that the itty bitty ounce of faith I placed in Jesus at that time, would lead me into what would become one of the most dear and treasured seasons in my entire life.

To be continued…

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My friends and I continued on in true Jr. high fashion to have all kinds of confusing crushes and experiences with rumors of returned affections and rejections in folded up notes passed between friends.

Thanks to my sixth grade boyfriend I had discovered the world of talking to boys on the phone and I loved it. In Jr. High I spent much more time getting to know the boys in my class on the phone at night, than I was able to while at school.  At school the boys had to keep up their reputations. They were too busy teasing and cracking jokes to carry on a real conversation with a girl.

Even though I wanted to be popular, wanted to talk to boys, and wanted to be liked by everyone, being outgoing and interesting didn’t come naturally to me. I approached talking to boys on the phone with a lot of thought and purpose, hoping to win them over and cause them to like me.  Before I would call them, and just in case they would call me, I kept a notebook by the phone in my room filled with lists of questions I could ask, and things I could talk about to keep the conversation interesting. I didn’t want to have any awkward moments of silence.

I had plenty of girlfriends who weren’t allowed to call boys on the phone but at my house there were hardly ever any rules. My mom always felt that I had such a strong will, that if she buckled down and bound me in by a bunch of rules, I would completely rebel. Instead her mantra while raising me was to carefully “Pick her battles” and talking on the phone and curfews were never two of the things she put restrictions on.

Girlfriends who had restrictions at their house about talking to boys on the phone got to enjoy conversations with them while staying the night with me. After we would hang up, we would day dream about who we wished would ask us out, give us a single red rose, or be the giver of our first kiss. We even came up with code names so we could write about the boys in notes at school and if found no one would know who we were talking about. Each boy had a secret name and each boy had at least one popular song from the radio that if brought up amongst us girls we knew exactly which crush it referred to.

I am so grateful that most of the conversations from those Jr. High phone calls never turned into complicated romantic relationships, but instead produced true and lasting friendships with now, men, who have become like brothers from my childhood. To this day some of those boys from Jr. high remain cherished among my Facebook friends and I often see them a couple times a year at get-togethers.

Those boys have filled my prayers for over two decades as I have watched them become husbands, fathers, creative entrepreneurs, and ministers of the gospel, and it all began over the phone… in Jr. High.

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He tried to drag me under the mistletoe for a kiss once, at a Christmas partyI had at my house. I dug my heels into the carpet and became like an elephant being dragged toward a mouse. I was terrified of being kissed and I was panicking about my mother being just around the corner in the kitchen. I got away from him and we didn’t talk for the rest of the party.

We were still dating though.

On Valentine’s Day at school I gave him a jumbo size Hershey’s Kiss and he gave me a little gold bracelet in a white box. I wore the bracelet every day with pride.

Over spring break my family and I went on a house boating vacation to Lake Powell and I was out of school for an extended week after the break. When I returned I had several friends coming and telling me that Ryan had been sitting with Betty ever day at lunch while I was gone and that he liked her.

I was mortified.

I didn’t know what to do, however… my friends made it clear that there was only one thing that could be done… Ryan must be “dumped”.

If what people were saying was true, and Ryan really had started liking Betty, then I might me the one getting dumped. I had to dump him first and I had better do it soon.

Once I set my mind on dumping him, I felt empowered. Wow! This was just like a movie. I knew this part well. I puffed out my chest with pride.

I would not be treated this way.

Boy did he have it comin’!

When it was time for P.E. I hid in the bathroom to avoid meeting him for the usual hand-holding walk. I arrived to P.E. late, snuck into the locker room, changed, and caught up with my girls only P.E. class.

Through out the time my friends and I were supposed to be running a mile, we instead walked, and plotted, and planned.

It was decided. The breakup would happen as soon as P.E. was over!

I changed out of my P.E. clothes and headed with my friends out in front of the gym to wait for him. We were all very excited. I was the only one of us whom had, had an official boyfriend for so long and the thought of a real breakup unfolding before all of us was very dramatic.

I hadn’t spoken to him in two weeks. We saw him in the distance and as my girlfriends stepped off to the side to watch the saga unfold, I smiled at him to lure him over. He fell right into my trap and walked up to me.

“Hey,” he said kindly with a smile on his face.

“Hi,” I said, “I have something for you.”

I held up my hand with a closed fist motioning like I had something tucked inside to give him. Perhaps a gift brought back from my vacation.

He held out his baseball glove ready to receive what I was offering. Into it I dropped the little gold bracelet he had given me for Valentine’s Day.

His eyes quickly met mine with a question in them and I was ready with the well rehearsed answer.

In the most dramatic and scorned tone I could summon, I hissed,

“I don’t want this if you don’t want me.”

And with a flip of my hair I turned on a dime and headed up the hill with my friends.

“I never liked you anyway!” He yelled after me.

His harsh remark didn’t even make a dent at that moment. I was on a high, giggling with my friends about the dramatic, very grown up, event that had just taken place. I felt like a mastermind.

When we got to the top of the hill, we turned and looked back down to see him coming up. He was now with his friends and it was clear the word was spreading about what had just taken place. He was ranting and raving a bit and as he passed our campus lake (more like an oversized pond really) and he threw the bracelet into it.

That part actually stung a bit.

I finished the day of school surrounded by my girlfriends who had all moved on to other subjects.

When I got home I cried for an hour about the fact that he threw my bracelet in the lake (pond), and that he said he never really liked me, and because I suspected he liked Betty more. I felt rejected and I couldn’t see how my heart would ever heal.

To be continued…

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Joey and Jordan had my heart, my wardrobe, and my bedroom walls. I was up front and center at Dodger Stadium for one of their concerts. I even made a (now I realize monstrously, shamefully, LAME) scrapbook for them that I dropped in one of about twenty trash can sized bins filled with gifts from fans, on my way into the concert.

The bins, which were overflowing with roses, teddy bears, and wrapped presents, were shocking. I hadn’t expected that anyone else would think to bring them a gift. I was sure that the scrapbook I had made full of magazine articles, and newspaper clippings about them, decorated with my artistic touch of stickers, glitter puffy paints, and a few pictures of myself, was going to be my ticket backstage.

After all, it was such a unique and thoughtful idea that I was sure they and their mothers would greatly appreciate. I thought all I had to do was present my brilliant homemade gift to the first security guard I saw, and he would be so touched, he would immediately escort me to their dressing rooms to meet them.

That’s not what happened.

I was jolted in my black lace leggings, NKOTB “Hangin’ Tough” T-shirt, and signature Joey Mcyintyre black hat, to see that I was not the only one, and was instead one of hundreds, with that exact same (terrible)… (ridiculous)… (pathetic) idea.

In the sixth grade I exchanged my love for the New Kids on the Block for a new found appreciation for, and crush on… Vanilla Ice. And, lucky for me there was a boy in my class who everyone was saying looked like Vanilla Ice. So naturally I developed a little crush on him, and magically, he began to express an interest in … Me!

This was it!

This was the first time a boy had ever chosen me!

It was my second year at the school we were attending and his first. We didn’t know each other at all and we hadn’t hardly spoken. But, somehow, word had gotten around from a few of my friends that he liked me. I didn’t know what to do about it so naturally, I didn’t do anything.

It really was enough just to know I was liked. I didn’t need much more. But one night, much to my surprise, I got a phone call. It was him. And it was my first phone call from a boy.

Any boy.

Ever.

I took the call in my room (where was my father?) and blabbed on and on with Ryan Spriggs for a good twenty minutes. We talked about all kinds of things, mostly just getting to know each other.

At the end of the conversation, just as I could tell he was getting ready to say goodbye, he caught me completely off guard and asked,… say it with me now…

“Will you go out with me?”

Now of course that phrase, “Will you go out with me?” didn’t actually mean he wanted to go somewhere together. We were ten. Where were we going to go, and an even better question… how in the world would we get there? Nope, I knew what he meant. He meant that he wanted ME to be his girlfriend. All I could think about was owning the title of “Girlfriend.” And of course I was thinking about telling all the girls at school that I had talked to Ryan Spriggs on the phone and that he asked me out.

My stomach dropped like I had just taken a dive down a roller coaster, my face lit up I’m sure as red as an apple, my temperature went up at least 50 degrees and my cheeks were on fire.

I slowly, boldly, proudly, nervously, said,

“Okay.”

“Cool,” he said. “I gotta go.”

“Okay.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

To Be Continued…

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One day he brought a toy into our Kindergarten class for “Show and Tell.” It was battery operated and it had five colored penguins on wheels that would climb stairs and when they reached the top they would rush down a slide until they reached the bottom of the stairs, climb to the top again, and repeat. I always wanted one of those toys for myself.

After “Show and Tell,” a group of us were girls were sitting together playing and the boy I had a crush on brought his penguin toy over to us and sat down to play. He  told us he was the blue penguin. He then began to assign girls names from our little group to each of the other colored penguins on the track.

“Jan is the red one. Rebecca is the yellow one. Stacy is the green one. Jennifer is the black one.”

Then he topped it off with,

“You are all my girlfriends.”

I was the only girl in the group whom he did not assign a penguin to. He completely left me out of it.  So, I asked,

“Which one am I?”

In a disgusted tone he replied,“None of them!” He then proceeded to play happily with the other girls while ignoring me the entire time.

I was crushed.

Some time after that, one afternoon when he was building a block tower to see how high he could get it without it falling over, I walked right over and kicked the whole thing down. In a fit of rage he darted at me and bit me on the nose. He bit so hard that he drew blood and I had a scar for most of my elementary school years.

And so began my tumultuous life as a boy crazy girl.

In the first grade I attended a Montessori school where the age groups were all merged together. I had a desperate crush on a fourth grader named Aaron. At the end of the school year they laid hundreds of pictures out on a table that had been taken for the yearbook, but hadn’t been used. They sold the pictures for a few cents each. I searched through them vigorously and found just the one I had been looking for.

It was a picture or Aaron.

I gathered up a handful of other pictures without taking any care at all as to what they were of. I just didn’t want anyone to notice I only cared about buying the picture of Aaron. When I went to the teacher to pay my money, I fanned out the pictures with the backs of them facing her to show how many I had, but to conceal what they were of. It worked. I had my prize and when I got home that night I hung it on my wall next to my bed, a bit concealed by a bookshelf and bedside table, so my mother wouldn’t notice it.

There I was… seven years old, gazing lovingly at a ten year old and wishing he could be mine. He never was.

I had a crush on Aaron until I changed schools in fourth grade. I was only at that new school for one year, but in that short time Rob, Collin, and Todd all caught my eye… enough so that I still remember their names and faces. And that’s pretty much the end of that story. Sure… I probably wrote about them briefly in some diary and doodled my name with their last name attached to it, just to see how it looked. But that’s it.

No dating, no hand holding, no stolen kisses. After all… I was only in Elementary School. It was just me crushing silently on boys from afar.

I would master this technique in years to come.

To be continued…

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