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I was in seventh grade. When I was eight years old, I had envisioned seventh grade as being all grown up, with spiral notebooks and Tic Tacs and more notebooks and pens and hair accessories. Now that I was in seventh grade, I had spiral notebooks and pens and hair accessories, but no Tic Tacs. More to the point, I was not all grown up; I was nearly a foot shorter than everyone in my year, the last to start shaving my legs, mocked in P.E., and prone to falling off my bicycle on the ride home and receiving scraped knees. One particular incident led to me standing, furious, in the assistant principal's office and threatening to sue if the school didn't clear the tree branches off the bike path. His condescending smile faded quickly, and the tree branches previously obstructing the path mysteriously vanished almost immediately. Nevertheless, seventh grade was a good year for me. Actually, I nearly died from strep throat, had two of my least favorite teachers ever, and lived in a house that was so bad we couldn't invite people over. But it was the year I discovered the Beatles, school was easy, and there were many beautiful autumn afternoons to enjoy as I cycled home (when I wasn't busy scraping my unshaven knees, that is). A couple of years previously, I had begun regularly watching Red Dwarf. It became an obsession with me, as so many things do. I reveled in it, frequently alluding to it at school, not quite realizing that no one else caught the allusions. I borrowed from the show's jargon and joyfully scrawled "smeg off" across the paper book cover on my history book. Inevitably, it caught someone's attention, but not, alas, another fan of the show. The guy who sat in front of me in my history class was tall and fairly good looking, sweetish but not soppy, loudish but not obnoxious. I harbored a crush on him, which, naturally, I kept totally secret. To everyone else, that is. At home I had his name scrawled everywhere, but I was not so stupid as to doodle hearts and initials on my notebooks like many other girls did. Instead I wrote rude slogans from British comedies. Perhaps it was the lack of hearts and doodles that caught his attention—perhaps he hoped to see his own name there?—I'll never know. In any case, I was not unpleasantly horrified when he developed a habit of turning around and grimacing at me in the middle of class. He did. He'd turn around and grin widely in a contortion impossible to describe as glee. I have no idea why he did it. Probably he was trying to make me laugh, or else he was just passing the time. Either way, though it was confusing, distracting, and unproductive, I didn't exactly mind since my crush was paying some form of attention to me, after all. We developed a routine in which he would turn around and grimace and I would hold up my book with "Smeg off!" written on it. I added "smeghead" somewhere else on the book. He was puzzled but never actually asked what it meant, probably out of embarrassment. I tried to explain about Red Dwarf, but in my usual garbled non-talk of rapid fire mumblings sprinkled with obscure references and bone-dry wit, I think the message got rather lost in translation. One day we were assigned to work in pairs on worksheets. I did not work with him; he went to sit with a friend a couple of rows away. I worked on my sheet with the girl next to me and tried not to be obvious in my eavesdropping. I strained but gathered nothing from their whispered conversation. Totally shocked, then, was I when his friend turned around and said, "Hey Lauren; he thinks you're cute!" "No!" the Smeghead tried to shush his friend, too late. I went completely numb. I said nothing about it and went home and agonized quietly. The friend said he said I was cute. He denied it. Was he denying his opinion, or that he had said it, or that he wanted me finding out? I went around and around, but the Smeghead never clarified. Without so much as an awkward glance the next day—well, maybe a little one—well, maybe a searing, red-faced, stunned moment of silence that stretched into a yawning chasm of horrific embarrassment in epic proportions grasped only by a twelve-year-old whose secret crush has just been blurted to the recipient in a full classroom—we tacitly agreed to pretend it had never happened. (It was just like the Cherub, but in reverse. I could understand that. I pitied him and needlessly reminded myself not to tease him.) There was a marked decrease in incidents of grimacing. I rather missed that, but my productivity probably benefited. I wondered whether I should expect him to ask me out. It didn't seem likely since he'd denied . . . something, but then again, his friend had said so. I couldn't tell. As time went on and nothing happened, I concluded that if the Smeghead had been plotting anything, his stupid friend had probably embarrassed it out of him. I reflected that I was only twelve and couldn't have people over to the house anyway. I didn't see him in the halls the following year, and though I looked for him in the yearbooks in high school, I never saw him again. In the ensuing years, it has become quite obvious that he did have a crush on me and was being . . . a twelve-year-old boy about it. I would have liked to have realized it so clearly then, but even if I had, probably nothing would have happened. After all, I was still too young. |