She was eight when she first heard the word crush.
Her best friend Amelia giggling and sighing with giddiness over the new boy who had moved to their primary school. Amelia had told her that her stomach felt floppy, and she felt all smiley around him. She didn't understand; she didn't want to understand.
—
She was nine when she heard that word again. Crush.
Everyone around them spoke of crushes, and the little girls would run all over the playground chasing down the little boys and pressing little kisses to their cheeks.
She still didn't understand.
But when her best friend began asking things, 'who do you like?' over and over like a broken record on repeat, she looked out onto the soccer ground and let her eyes fall on a shorter boy named Cooper. Cooper was funny and sweet and, unlike most of the others he was nice to her. So she said his name, and Amelia gasped and laughed and began talking about how she hadn't thought it would be him.
She wasn't sure why, but she felt like she had lied. But Cooper was fun enough, and he was a boy. Wasn't that what it was supposed to be?
She tried doodling his name in hearts in her notebook like she had seen Oliver's name drawn in Amelia's in a glittery red pen that smelled nauseatingly of strawberries.
It didn't help; it looked wrong and like it didn't belong on the page, so she ripped it out and scrunched it into a ball, and tossed it over the fence of the school, letting the wind take it away.
She felt a little better.
—
A year later, she became friends with a boy named Ryan. He was funny, and he made her laugh, and he wasn't as obsessed with sports as all the other boys were. Amelia kept teasing her about having a crush on him, and that was when the sick feeling returned to her stomach. The word crush sounded like how throwing up feels, and it was like the second she heard the word, she couldn't breathe.
But Amelia took her blushing as a sign of confirmation that she did have a crush, and the next day Ryan had been told and wanted nothing more to do with her.
And that was the first time she would lose a friend because of emotions she wasn't sure she could feel.
—
It was her last year of primary school and that year two boys moved to the school. The first was tall and blond and the second had an Irish accent that seemed to make the other twelve-year-old girls go crazy.
She didn't care. She just wanted to be on Amelia's couch playing Pokemon with her; she didn't see the fuss of all the giggling and chatting about boys.
Amelia was happier to talk about Mario or dragons or the new episode of Merlin, and for that, she was eternally grateful.
She didn't know why her mother's teasing about her one day marrying Amelia's brother Michael made her feel ill. She would tell them it was because it was Michael, and he was Amelia's annoying little shit of a brother. But a little voice in the back of her head would whisper 'maybe you just don't want to get married.'
But she ignored it; she was only eleven, how could she even begin to know about grown up stuff like that?
—
She kept trying, though. She would try gushing about Tom, the new boy, in her diary, even though she didn't care what he did. She forced herself to keep her eyes trained on him, and if he spoke to her, she would convince herself that that feeling in her stomach wasn't there because she was feeling sick, but that they were just butterflies because she liked him. She had to like him.
