April 1982, Wellfleet, Massachusetts

By Chris Malcomb

“OK, so now do you like Tessa?” Samantha asked.

I blushed. She was Tessa’s best friend. I glanced up and down the locker-lined hallway. Empty. The recess bell had already rung. Math class was beginning. “Who said that?” I mumbled, looking away and shoving my hands into the pockets of my light blue cords. I already knew who’d told, but I couldn’t cave to her interrogation too quickly. Admitting a crush on the first inquisition was a death sentence to a 6th grader.

“Someone told me that you told him that you thought she was, like, cute.” Samantha leaned over me and snapped her gum with her tongue. Grape Bubblicioius. Not allowed at school. But that didn’t matter. Samantha was blonde, athletic, and popular; she towered over me like a redwood over a sapling. In this small Cape Cod beach town, she was the closest thing to royalty.

I was terrified. The only feeling more uncomfortable than liking a girl was realizing that everyone knew that you liked her. Too late to avoid that, I thought. Samantha was the transmitter of all 6th grade intelligence. If she knew, they would all know. Including Tessa. “Uh,” I slurred, secretly praying for some type of distraction — a fire alarm, a ship crashing into the gym, anything.

No luck. Her eyes bored into me. “Well?”

“Um, maybe,” I whispered. But then an image of Tessa’s cute face floated through my mind. I smiled. Oops.

“Cool.” Samantha smirked as she ran off to deliver the news.

I slumped back into the cold metal locker. The combination lock dug into my shoulder. My life was over.

I wasn’t sure how this had all happened. I was a short, skinny kid with freckles, an awkward bowl haircut, and scuffed Hush-Puppy shoes. I liked to study. I carried my schoolbooks in a stack cinched together with a rubber book-strap. Other than a brief, lunch-hour-long crush on a 4th grade classmate, girls had never even been on my radar. I was more concerned about catching touchdowns in recess football games and winning the Halloween costume contest than wooing drive-in theater dates.

But Tessa changed that. Not that I had anything to do with it, mind you. It took her genius best friend to do the math.

“You and Tessa are both short,” Samantha had said a week earlier just before homeroom.

“Yeah, so,” I replied, poised to flick a paper football toward my friend Rusty, whose arms were raised like goalposts at the opposite end of our table. Whoever hit the next field goal would win the game.

“So, you guys should, like, get married.”

“Whatever.” I missed the field goal and slumped back in my chair. Rusty ran across the room to retrieve the football.

“So, do you like her?” Samantha persisted, leaning so close that I could smell her raspberry lip-gloss.

I raised my hands for Rusty and replied directly from the 6th grade social rulebook. “Just as a friend.”

The bell rang. Rusty flicked the football straight over my head, winning the game. Samantha turned back as she walked away. “You should think about it. You guys are perfect for each other.”

I opened my Trapper-Keeper™ binder to find my spelling homework. That’s insane, I thought. How could being short foretell a happy union?

That afternoon, however, I realized that Samantha was at least right about one thing. As opposed to her lofty best friend, Tessa and I glided by each other at eye-level, a rarity indeed. And our similarities didn’t end there either.

We both had blue eyes. We both had freckles. We both liked math.

The crush caught me like a surfboard in a wave. Before I knew it, I was stealing glances at Tessa during reading period and purposely passing near her desk if I had to sharpen my pencil. Soon, my heart fluttered whenever she came into the room. I lost track of my homework. I began noticing things. Things like how her right cheek blushed slightly when she ran; that she preferred horses to teddy bears; that her favorite song was “We Got the Beat” by the Go-Go’s. As the crush deepened, I became increasingly shyer. Within a few days, I couldn’t even say “Hi” to Tessa without feeling like my kidneys were in my throat.

In private, however, I was constructing an elaborate connection with my newfound infatuation. I’d always loved to doodle — my notebooks were a constant maze of lines, scribbles, spirals, and cartoon characters — but now I’d secretly begun incorporating the four letters of my and Tessa’s initials into my art. I stacked them atop each other in the margins. I enclosed them in hearts inside my paper bag book covers. I wove them into enigmatic, indecipherable designs on the sole of my shoe. These four letters symbolized my ultimate desires. C. M. & T. K. Together. Connected. Intertwined.

It was bad. I was in deep.

A week after the scene with Samantha, Rusty sensed my distraction. On the way out to recess, he pried into me using an age-old 6th grade technique: the list.

“Do you think Samantha is hot?” he asked.

“Nah. Too tall.”

“How about Rebecca?”

I rolled my eyes.

“Daisy?”

“Please.”

“I heard that Kristin thinks you’re cute.”

“Rusty, I don’t like anyone, OK?”

“What about … Tessa?”

I stopped — for less than a second — but I might have well have written I love Tessa on every blackboard in the school. It was out. Twenty minutes later Samantha had me pinned against the locker and extracted my confession. What she didn’t know, however, was that my feelings went far beyond like. The crush had blossomed.

She was right: Tessa was perfect for me. And there was only one emotion for perfect.

That night, stretched out on my bed, staring blankly at a Jack London short story, I contemplated my fate. Tomorrow everyone, including Tessa, would know. But know what? Whatever Samantha told them. I panicked. This would not do. I ripped a piece of paper out of my notebook, grabbed a pencil and began to write. “Dear Tessa….”

I found Samantha before school the next day and handed her my neatly folded triangular note. “Can you give this to her?” I asked.

“To who?” She smirked and tucked it into the nearly invisible pocket of her tight Jordache jeans. She was in complete control, a position she knew, and liked.

“Very funny.” I walked away on legs that had suddenly turned to Jell-O.

After a few paces, I stopped and contemplated what I’d just done. The deepest confession of my young life was no longer in my possession. I envisioned all the cruel things Samantha could do: read my note to a crowd of giggling girls in the bathroom; post it on the science bulletin board next to the diagram of the human heart; broadcast it over the loudspeaker during morning announcements. I cringed.

The rest of the day was a nightmare. It seemed that every whisper or outburst of laughter was about me. I dropped four passes in the morning recess football game. I stumbled through the hallways in a daze and avoided Tessa’s eyes by burying my face in a book whenever she passed. During lunch I considered moving to a small shack by the mudflats and living out the rest of my life gathering clams and talking to hermit crabs. When the afternoon bell rang, I sprinted to the bus like an emancipated prisoner.

Samantha showed up at my locker the next morning. “She wrote it last night,” she said, palming a thin, folded rectangle of paper into my hand. “Don’t read it here.” She winked and spun away like a runway model.

I gazed at the note, stunned. Tessa had written back. This was amazing. My heart pounded in a frenzy; my mind flittered. It could say anything, I thought. Maybe she really likes me. I could have a girlfriend by lunchtime. I could have a girlfriend … now! The bell jarred me out of my daydream. A frenzy of high-fives, slamming metal and running kids erupted in the hallway. I shoved the note deep into my pocket and skipped to my first class. Over the next two periods, I checked seven times to make sure it was still there.

At morning recess I sprinted to the bathroom, pushed open the large green door and peered under each stall door to ensure my solitude. Slipping into the second stall, I carefully locked the door and extracted the folded paper from my pocket. It was warm and soft like a beach rock. I held it to my nose and inhaled. It smelled like her.

I exhaled, sat down on the toilet seat cover and began to study the inscription on one of the folded sides. Penciled in soft letters was the message: To C.M. from T.K. My heart leapt. The four letters. Together. In her handwriting!

A whirlwind of images flashed through my mind. Holding hands. Sharing an ice cream cone. Hiding under the harbor pier. Kissing.

I began to unfold the note. My hands shook. The gray graphite of penciled words emerged like shadows perched on blue clotheslines. Feeling a bit short of breath, I set the paper in my lap and closed my eyes. What if she doesn’t like me? I thought, trembling at the notion of walking into math class and having to face the peering eyes of the all-knowing crowd. I took a deep breath and unfolded the last crease. The writing was soft and feminine. The words were small. I raised the note to my face.

“Dear Chris, Thank you for your note,” it began. Good start. Such a cordial greeting could only be a preamble to kind words. I read on. “I’m really glad that you are in my class. You are smart, funny and cute.” Things were looking good! My heart pounded. I shifted my position atop the toilet seat. “I like you a lot,” it continued. This was amazing! Images of union blitzed through my mind. My hands were sweating so much that the blue ink from the paper’s lines was bleeding on to my thumbs. I stood up, ran my hand through my hair and read on. “I consider you a good friend … but I like Rusty more.”

I gasped. Rusty? My friend? The one who …

A flush of adrenaline slammed into the back of my throat. My head spun like a teacup ride at the fair. I slumped against the cold, gray metal stall divider and slid down towards the toilet. I felt ill. Tears welled in my eyes as I skimmed the last few lines of the note. “I’m sorry … I hope you’re not mad … are we still friends?”

It ended with those two delicate letters — T.K. — preceded by a simple dash.

No sensitive closing.

No little heart.

No term of endearment.

Just a tiny horizontal line that may has well have been a miniature sword.

Chris Malcomb teaches writing to kids and adults in Berkeley, California. His essays have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Teachers & Writers, and the East Bay Monthly. The writing of this childhood story was inspired in part by last week’s essay, Spin the Bottle.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 | Email This Post

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