The boy I’m in love with now is one that I met playing cards when I was a junior in high school. He caught my eye holding a pretzel rod in his mouth like a cigar and saying, “This is my last thousand,” waving his deck of cards around with his skinny arms. He ran out of chips, so he bet his baby photos at the blackjack table. It took him forever to ask me on a date because his friend told him I wasn’t interested, but I’ll never forget when he said, “Do you want to get to know me sometime, outside of school?” and I leaned up against the wall behind me and said, “Sure, let’s do it,” trying to act casual. I went home and wrote in my diary “OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD” for a full paragraph, and when my uncle called to ask my mom a question about a recipe for Chicken Balsamico, I told him I had a date on Saturday with a southern boy. A senior! He said, “Great, Mol. Is your mom there?”
Nine years before, I loved a different boy. The first boy I ever loved lived at 34 Beeker Circle. I knew, because I memorized his address and phone number and his parents’ names in the Harrison Avenue Elementary school phone book. I’d come home from school and look for his name, as if I were checking to see if it was still there. I was in second grade when I developed a tragic crush on him, and I loved him because he was the fastest boy in the second grade, and I was the fastest girl, and after we raced, he would shake my hand. For most of the second grade, he had no front teeth, but they started to show as the year went on, like bumpy little crowns poking out of his gums.
After one race, we hid in the tube slide together and exchanged swear words. The worst one I knew was “stupid,” and he knew “crap.” It was warm in the tube slide. We were very close together and I could feel his legs pressed up against mine. I realized we were alone, and he felt this; he slid down the slide onto the wood chips and laughed. All the way home from school that day, I mouthed “crap” to myself and blushed.
The boy I’m in love with now swears all the time, but never when he’s actually mad. He only swears to be funny. He likes to change idioms around; he’ll say: “a penny saved is one more penny that you have to take to the fucking bank.” He’ll do anything to make someone laugh. He pretends to throw up, he quotes television shows, he plays the keytar.
On our first date, we went to the diner with his friends because I think he was nervous to be alone with me. He pointed to everything on the menu and said “I’d recommend it” and then when the waiter came, before he actually ordered, he said “the usual” quietly to me, and as I laughed, he ordered a vanilla milkshake. It was so hot in that diner booth with all of us piled in it, but I didn’t take off my sweater because I knew my shirt would stick to it as I raised my arms. I couldn’t ask him to hold my shirt down because I was embarrassed. So I just stayed hot, and felt my legs sticking to the red faux leather booth.
His friend drove us back to school, but the boy’s car was in a different lot than mine. I told her to drop me off at his car. She said, “No, no, it’s a far walk. I’ll drop you off at yours.” I waved goodbye to him like a fool as he sat in the backseat of his friend’s car.
He told me later that he stood outside with his phone in his hand for five whole minutes, dialing my number and then deleting it. I wish he’d dialed it, because I sat in my car and stalled, fiddling with the music, blowing my nose, putting receipts in a plastic bag, before I pulled out of the parking lot and opened the sunroof so I could look at the stars while I waited at red lights.
The second boy I loved was someone I had known my whole life, since preschool. We were in fifth grade together, and our relationship happened entirely over AOL Instant Messenger. I hardly talked to him in real life-- we were once paired up for a project and I had nothing to say to him, though I talked to him over the Internet almost every night. I would sit in my closet on the computer, instant messaging him on AOL, bonding with him over my Neopets Icon. I wanted him to ask me to be his girlfriend so very badly; two of my friends had boyfriends in the fifth grade. I used to try and pressure him into telling me he liked me over Instant Message: “if u could do one thing b4 u die,” I’d say, “what wud u do?” He said “idk, skydive or somethin i guess.” I was crushed. He made me laugh alone in my closet, and I wanted to make him laugh like he made me. I would say “BRB” just to sit at my computer and think of funny things to say.
A year later, still caught up in the whirlwind virtual romance, I was at a friend’s house, and we were looking online at AIM profiles. She knew I was infatuated with this boy, my chat-soulmate, so we looked at his. It was perfect in every way, understated yet elegant, without flashy borders or TyPiiNg LiiKe THiiS as was customary in the sixth grade. Simple Times New Roman font. Dark blue. But as we scrolled down, I saw italicized writing that made my heart heavy. “I Love Nicole,” it said, with a tiny emoticon heart on either side. He had a girlfriend. He loved her. I let out a short, audible whine, to which my friend said, “You like him that much?” I softly told her about how he made me crack up in front of my computer, giggling like I believed that he and I were together, making real life connections instead of ones in cyberspace. My heart stopped when I saw his name appear on my Buddy List, not when I saw him in the hallway. Even when I saw him kiss his Nicole on the cheek in school, it never hurt as much as those tiny emoticon hearts did.
The first time I kissed the boy I’m in love with was in April. I took him to a party as my plus-one, and we spent the whole night talking and soaking up the vibes. We took celebrity shots at beer pong and he made such a scene, toppling backwards on purpose, knocking things over, and yelling “FADER!” every time he bounced the ping pong ball on the table. The night was winding down, and I wanted to get him to come outside with me so I could kiss him, but I was so scared, feeling like I had leaned too far back on a chair, suspended for a moment between comfortable stability and certain death. I felt that way for an hour as the party slowed. I told him I had to put something in my car. He followed me, and we made awful, random small talk about jelly beans and Harry Potter as we leaned against my car parked on the street.
The details have been reworked in my mind as I’ve replayed the kiss a million times. I looked down at my shoes for a second, drawn to them by my shyness as if by a magnet, and then the boy I love now put his hands on my face and kissed me. A man drove by in a car and the boy said, “Hi, mom,” and then he kissed me again. I remember thinking that he smelled like pretzels.
The third time I loved a boy was the summer after 8th grade. He was a year older than me, smart, tan, and funny, and we sailed in the same fleet. He didn’t smoke or drink like his friends did, and he was always nice to me even though I was younger than he was. He called me “Smalls.” He used to wave to me from his boat, and we’d swim together and every prank he pulled made me laugh. I was infatuated. Every time I saw him, I tried to think of something clever to say, and all I could muster was a squeaky “hi.” We used to sing show-tunes out on the ocean. We especially liked The Sound of Music. One time, we built a fire together, and he gave me camping tips. When he took a piece of firewood from my hand and our fingers touched, I thought I was going to faint.
One summer night, when the air was soggy and hot, and the air smelled like honeysuckle, I rode on this boy’s bike handlebars away from all of our friends. He talked quietly to me as I sat on the handlebars, and his lips were next to my ear. He kept saying, “Are you okay, Smalls?” We rode through the night with the sound of the tires buzzing on the pavement.
I used to try to hang out with him alone, but he never wanted to. He would tell me in the morning that his phone was broken the night before, but I knew he didn’t love me like I loved him. I once showed up at his house, desperate to see him and to hear him, and he was watching a DVD with his brother about surfing. It was a Redbox movie, a one-dollar-movie from the gas station. There were topless girls in the movie. He kept telling me to cover my eyes.
The first time he got drunk, he was with me. I wanted to take advantage of him. He kept telling me, “This isn’t me. I’m too drunk.” I sat so close to him on the boardwalk, and I put my arms around him, and I stared up into his face. He didn’t kiss me, and I didn’t kiss him because I was scared. I called him the next day and he told me he was on his way to church. He didn’t remember any of what had happened.
Whenever I think of the boy I’m in love with, I think of sleep. I think of how when I’m lying in my bed, falling asleep, I try to feel his arms around my ribcage. I’m doing more than just remembering the feeling; I convince myself that the weight of his arms is there, that I can feel the rise and fall of his breathing, that his pretzel smell is in my nose and not in my memories. I fall asleep with these feelings, and then wake up in the night to my belly feeling suddenly stripped.
I think of my sleep when I think of this boy, but I also think of the naps we’ve taken together on the Sundays when I visit him. His pretzel smell is real then, and his arms are real too. The light that saturates my dreams during these naps is always the same; it looks like October.
The boy I’m in love with has made me cry, though he’s never seen it. He says hurtful things, backhanded things, on the phone. He’s told me that he doesn’t consider me a confidante, and that the things I say are scripted, and that I’m ironically cute. Sarcasm grips his words like molasses. I used to keep a list of things he’d said, to try and make myself see that he didn’t love me. It only made me more upset because I would forget about the list when he made me laugh, which was every time we spoke. Then I made him cry with a letter I wrote him, and I forgot about my list.
The first boy who ever loved me was my best friend. We watched Nacho Libre together in his house, and he kept trying to kiss me during the movie but I wanted to watch. When the credits rolled, we made out until his mom yelled upstairs and asked me when my parents were coming to pick me up.
A few months later, we were lying out on a blanket in my backyard, star gazing. He was telling me about Colorado, and about how the stars were so bright there, and so numerous, that it looked like the sky was white, splattered with dark paint. We rolled over to look at each other, and he said “I love you, Molly.” I said “I love you too,” and he kissed me. I said it because I thought it was true, but I found myself in my bed after he’d gone home, thinking about Colorado and its stars, instead of about the first boy who’d ever said he loved me.
One night as we talked on the phone, the boy I’m in love with now told me he didn’t believe in love. He said he was sick of all of the teenage-love bullshit, corrupted by movies and songs and Facebook relationship statuses. I said I agreed. I was sitting on the tile in my bathroom, whispering so I didn’t wake up my parents, twirling the telephone wire around my finger. I wondered, if he didn’t believe in love, whether we were going toward months of butterflies and shyness and holding hands instead of whatever it is that makes love deeper. I didn’t question him, but I thought about it after. I thought about it a lot, whenever I wondered if what I was feeling was love, when I found myself thinking about him before I went to sleep, or when my heart started to hurt a little when we said goodbye. I wasn’t sure, but even if I was, I don’t think I would have said anything.
One day, after a glorious Sunday nap, I lay on the chest of the boy I’m in love with now. He traced circles on my back, and he said “I love you.”
I lifted my head and I brought up the conversation we’d had, suddenly, accusingly, motivated by the heat of exposure. He said, “Forget it,” but I fought for his words, because I knew that they were weighted, lifted from the mouth of a boy who didn’t believe in love. He had changed his mind, he told me. He stuttered. He sighed. “I don’t know how else to describe... how I feel...” Pleading. His eyes were the same color as Sully from Monster’s Inc. I lowered my head and the boy I love now started drawing circles on my shoulders again. I heard him say “I love you” once more as I fell into dreams that were pooled with the pale, yellow light of autumn.