Summer Crushes

We had it worked down to this: the girl he liked was short, blonde, in Mrs. Bennion’s class, and her name started with a K.  We both knew he was talking about me, and we both knew I liked him, too, but we were twelve, and this was how the game was played as we sat side by side, not touching, waiting for our team’s turn to perform.

“Well,” I said, trying to keep my butterflies down, “What color are her eyes?”

He frowned, but didn’t look over at me.  “I don’t know.”

And just like that, the butterflies died a horrible, smashing-into-the-windshield-on-the-freeway death.  He didn’t know what color my eyes were?  He was supposed to like me, have a crush on me, prefer me above all others in our twelve-year-old world, and he didn’t even take the time to notice that my eyes were green?

I found this pattern to be true even as I matured past the telling friends to tell his friends to tell him that maybe I liked him stage.  I’d like a guy—really, really like a guy—but in the end either he didn’t like me back, or he did, which made me realize that I didn’t actually like him all that much anyway.  But still I soldiered on, crushing like a pro on whatever boy at school struck my fancy.

Until summer came.  Summer was a wasteland of boredom and despair when it came to crushes.  The boys in my neighborhood were the only ones I saw (until I was sixteen and could actually drive myself to boys), and I’d known them since I was six.  Sure, I could meet boys at the pool or other places, but these were the pre-Facebook days (Gasp! I’m so old!) when we didn’t even have cell phone numbers to trade.  And liking a boy for two hours at the pool could only entertain you for so long.

This is why my real summer crushes for all of those years were . . . books.  Ah, books.  Books with boys and flirting and adventure and love!  I didn’t care what they were about, as long as they took me somewhere else, and as long as there were crushes I could have and romances I could root for.  Because those book crushes?  They never forgot what color my eyes were.  They didn’t disappear for the summer.  And the butterflies I got by diving into other worlds?  No windshields for miles and miles around.

—Kiersten White, author of Paranormalcy