Last night as I struggled to fall asleep, my thoughts jumped to a nearly deserted seaside road outside of Fairhaven, Massachusetts. It had a crazy name. Sconticut Neck Road. No, really. Say it fast.
One mild summer day, I walked alone past the small cottages on stilts toward the bigger mansions down the street where I’d seen a boy playing in a yard. I strolled to a field, then back past his house, then down to the rocky shore, and then back to the field. Over and over. My heart skittered a little as I imagined meeting him. I imagined talking to him. I wanted to talk to a boy.
I was thirteen or fourteen, and boys made me crazy. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with one, but I knew that they made my stomach flutter and my face heat up. I knew that I wanted, more than anything in the whole world, for a boy to like me.
The boy in the mansion never came out. I glanced surreptitiously at the window I imagined to be his. I pictured his bedroom—full of video games and model cars and dirty sneakers.
Another summer up north, when I was twelve or thirteen, my parents spent a lot of time with a couple they’d recently made friends with. For three days we played in the woods behind their house in Taunton. The neighbors were in the middle of some sort of renovation, leaving the scrappy lot along the treeline littered with piles of gravel and big rocks and excitingly sharp objects.
My brother and I played manhunt with a group of neighbor kids.
I scrambled up onto a huge granite boulder and panicked, scared to slide down onto the rough, sharp rocks below. A boy from down the street pushed up on his tip toes and offered me his warm hand. I clasped my fingers around his and let him ease me down. And then he darted off.
When we drove away that night, I lingered beside my parents’ rental car, hoping to see him again.
In seventh grade my parents enrolled me in private school. My zoned public middle school had been a nightmare, and while I hadn’t specifically asked to go somewhere else, they figured it would be better for me to go to a smaller school.
I went from being pushed and hit for pocket change to the subtle ferocity of wealthy private school kids. The first week of school, a boy asked me out. I blushed and stammered and said yes.
“I have a boyfriend,” I thought, hiding in the bathroom until the flush in my cheeks subsided. I whispered the good news to my grammar teacher, who smiled indulgently.
By the afternoon, I started to notice pointed looks and muffled laughter. By the end of the day, I’d figured out that he’d asked me out as a joke.
I went home and shut my bedroom door and placed my hand over the cold pit in my stomach. Boys were cruel.
Last night in my bed I sharply recalled the electricity of puppy love and the searing sensation of longing I felt ever time I’d had a crush on a boy. The sensations were as real, as physical, as the feeling of cold sand against my bare feet or the kiss of a cold, salty breeze.
Then I remembered being eighteen and squealing to my roommates when a boy I’d just met from class asked me to go to the library with him. It was like everything I’d ever read or seen on TV. A date–is it a date, I don’t even know, do you think he like likes me?–to the library.
We walked across campus that night, not holding hands but walking side by side, just close enough to feel the warm energy of our bodies almost touching. I didn’t know how the library worked. It was the only time I’d visit it in the six years I lived in Gainesville.
That night, the shy advances of a boy from my class eclipsed every boyfriend I hadn’t had and every crush I’d ever cried over and every heartbeat of longing and desire I’d ever felt.
Last night when I couldn’t sleep I smiled into my pillow and remembered, in a way I hadn’t remembered in a long time, how much I loved my husband. I’m glad he asked me to walk to the library with him.
I’m glad he was the boy who liked me back.
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