My first crush was in Kindergarten. I liked a boy who was very mean to me.

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…