Crush

by Gary Paulsen

  I’d finished my puffs and was wondering what could be taking the girls so long when Sarah finally yelled, “Kev!” I took a deep breath and headed to her room. They were sitting on her bed, lined up like a firing squad. Sarah gestured to her desk chair. I sat and faced them. No one offered me a blindfold, though.

  “We took a vote: three to two,” Sarah said. “We’ll give you some advice so you don’t make a total fool out of yourself, but mostly so you don’t traumatize and ruin the self-confidence and future dating prospects of some unsuspecting girl.”

  I figured Christine had voted against me. I’d bet that Sarah, my own flesh and blood, was the other dissenter, even though she’d called the meeting. That would be so typical of her.

  “First of all, we’ve agreed you’re not completely hideous-looking.” Sarah looked at her notes. They’d discussed me and taken notes?

  “I can live with that. What next?”

  “Personality-wise: two of us think you have the potential to be funny, one person thinks you’re half an evolutionary step from being a turtle, and two of us just want to get you paired off so our little sisters aren’t in danger of dating you.”

  “Could be worse. Go on.”

  “The best thing about you is that you’re my brother. And your best friend, JonPaul, is hunky and athletic and popular. You should stress the proximity to me and JonPaul when you talk to this poor girl.”

  “That way,” Rebecca said, “even if she has doubts about you, she’ll think she might be missing something because of who you’re related to and who you hang with.”

  “It’s vicious and deeply unkind, but it makes sense. Are we almost done?”

  “We haven’t even started,” Sarah said. “Now, moving on to your fashion sense: how do I put this gently?”

  “You don’t have any and you look like you just left the site of a natural disaster.” Christine clearly loved getting her two cents in.

  “What’s wrong with my clothes?”

  Sarah ran her eyes appraisingly up and down my body. “A faded T-shirt from a Buket o’ Puke ’n Snot concert and jeans that sag in the butt, with ripped-out knees, don’t say ‘Your dad will trust me and your best friends will be jealous of you for having landed me.’ ”

  “Okay, fun as it is to be eviscerated by you, let’s shift into the Q&A portion. Now, how many of you have a boyfriend?” Only Sarah’s hand went up. “Then how are you qualified to give me advice?”

  “We’re not giving you advice, we’re sharing our experiences with you. Four of us don’t have boyfriends at the current moment because we chose wrong in the past. We made mistakes that we can help you avoid becoming,” Rebecca said.

  “Yeah.” Carrie jumped in. “And we’d like the chance to mold a guy into something worthwhile. By the time you’re our age, guys are pretty much set in their ways. But you’re like raw clay, and we could turn you into something … well … not horrible. We wish some of the older girls had been so considerate of us a few years ago. It would have saved us a lot of wear and tear, I can tell you.” Carrie blazed with anger.

  “I wish we could get community service hours credit for this at school,” Sarah grumbled. Sarah tries to turn everything into extra credit or a compensated task. She’s very ambitious.

  “Well, okay. Thanks for your time and I appreciate your suggestions, but I’m gonna get going now.” If I’d been a foot closer to the door—or the window—I’d have thrown myself out of the room.

  “You can’t go yet; we still have to tell you about all the ways you could inadvertently ruin the mood on a date.” Carrie looked panicked.

  “And we have a top-ten list of ways loser guys make girls feel weird in the hallway at school.” Amie waved a piece of paper in the air. “Number one: staring at their boobs. Number two: thinking farting is still funny after kindergarten. Number three …” I stopped listening.

  Man, I thought, if this is what girls in high school are like, I’ll just stay in middle school. I’d better get Tina to be my girlfriend quick, before she turns into something like these girls. I slipped out of the room as unobtrusively as possible, but I don’t think it mattered: the girls were happily talking about everything that was wrong with guys.

  I threw myself on my bed, feeling totally crummy about my dating future, but then I realized that the blame rested with the girls. They were just bitter because they’d had bad experiences. I was lucky—as far as I knew, Tina had never dated anyone else. But I needed to move fast, before Cash got a chance to take her out and be perfect. Or, worse yet, some random guy asked her out and did something stupid, which was starting to sound even easier than I had thought, and ruined guys for Tina forever.

  It was going to be hard enough to be an amazing boyfriend without having to live up to Captain Fantastic or make up for some other schlub’s mistakes.

  The Scientific Mind Comprehends Variation in Romantic Behavior

  arah and Doug do not have the kind of relationship I want. If I ever join the army and need to learn how to handle a drill sergeant, I’ll be sure to take another look at her.

  It was time to consider someone my age, someone more like me, someone happy. I had to find a paradigm worth emulating.

  JonPaul and Samantha.

  JonPaul’s been my best buddy since forever. He’s great. Part of the reason we get along so well is because he does every sport known to mankind and a few that have yet to be officially sanctioned so we don’t get to spend much time together and we never get on each other’s nerves. We’d been hanging out even less the past few weeks because he’d started dating Sam.

  I’d spent a fair amount of quality time with Sam myself; she and JonPaul had partnered up with me in a business I invented, ran and shut down in about two weeks’ time. Sam was pretty cool. But I’d been so busy with the business that I hadn’t really studied them as a couple.

  I caught up with JonPaul at his locker before homeroom bell Tuesday morning.

  “How’d you get Sam to go out with you?”

  “I asked her.”

  “You just asked her?”

  “Yup.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “ ‘Will you go out with me?’ ”

  “That’s it? How’d you decide what to say?”

  “I wanted her to go out with me. I asked her to.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah. What’s up with you?”

  “Collecting data. Gathering facts. Analyzing info.”

  “Cool.”

  JonPaul almost completely lacks curiosity. That’s one more reason he’s so easy to get along with. Me, I might have too much curiosity. It doesn’t seem to bother JonPaul, though.

  “When’s your next date with her?”

  “After practice today.”

  “Can I come?”

  “Sure.” He dug in his backpack for a protein bar and then looked up at me, suspicion in his eyes. “You don’t have any more get-rich-quick plans, do you?”

  “No. I’d just like to spend time with you and Sam. Get to know her better. It seems right that I should be better friends with my best buddy’s girl.”

  “Cool.”

  “What do you do on your dates?”

  “Homework mostly, watch TV, eat. We just hang out, it’s no big deal.”

  “And you both like that?”

  “Yeah. What’s not to like?”

  “You don’t go fun places and do exciting things?”

  “Not really.”

  “Oh.”

  Everything I was learning about romance was so ordinary. Where were the butterflies in your gut and the shaking hands and the wanting to build big white Taj Mahals in India to prove your love?

  I’d really been hoping for some … grand and sweeping gestures. I think big, always have. Maybe actually observing a date in progress would give me a better sense of how everything worked. I could hardly wait for the end of the day to tag along with JonPaul and Sam.

  I killed time at the library while JonPaul was at
practice.

  Tina and Katie walked in together and took over a table for some project they were working on.

  Tina smiled and waved, but I pretended I hadn’t seen her and tried to look busy, because I wasn’t ready to talk to her yet. It was important that the very next time we spoke, I knew what to do and say.

  I kept peeking over at her from behind my stack of books, making sure to drop my eyes fast so she wouldn’t catch me gawking. I saw Katie studying me a few times, but she’d look back at her books as soon as she saw that I saw her.

  I saw Cash, too. He didn’t see me. He definitely didn’t see me watching him watching Tina. I couldn’t tell if Tina noticed he was noticing her. I think Katie saw me scoping out Cash, but I’m not sure.

  It was a confusing afternoon, observation-wise.

  I was relieved when I could leave all that watching behind and meet up with JonPaul at the locker room door. We walked back to his house. Sam’s mom dropped her off as we went up the sidewalk. Their timing was impressive, in synch, proof of mutual devotion.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  So much for passionate greetings. Sam smiled at me.

  “HeyKevgoodtoseeyou.” Sam talks really fast.

  “You too.”

  We headed for the kitchen, where JonPaul dumped trail mix in a bowl and Sam pulled three bottles of vitamin water from the fridge. They unpacked their backpacks at the kitchen table, organizing their books and notes. The room was silent except for JonPaul crunching trail mix as he did math problems and Sam riffling through the pages of her social studies textbook. I sat at the counter and watched. I yawned.

  I had to fight the urge to hide in JonPaul’s front closet and observe them when they didn’t know I was there. Maybe my presence was hindering their natural behavior, date-wise.

  “Can I borrow your calculator?” and “Do you have an extra blue pen?” were the only words JonPaul and Sam exchanged in the forty-seven minutes they sat at the table together.

  Finally, they both finished and Sam pulled a bag of beads from her backpack. “Ibroughtthosenewbeadsyouwanted.” JonPaul and Sam shared a love of making jewelry; they’d discovered that when my business collapsed. Now they spent all their free time stringing beads on bendy wire and then selling what they made at weekend art fairs. They’d asked me to go with them, but I was still working at Amalgamated Waste Management from twelve-thirty to five p.m. and at the storage facility from five-thirty to nine-thirty p.m. on Saturdays and school holidays. It didn’t leave me any free time.

  “Awesome.”

  The three of us went into the living room and sat on the couch. I watched them organize beads into color groups. I fell asleep while they were separating blues into different piles, and when I woke up, JonPaul and Sam were dozing too. Some date. At least he had his arm around her.

  JonPaul’s idea of dating was a whole lot like Markie’s preschool’s idea of quiet time, only without the duck mats and blankies.

  I leaned over, woke JonPaul up and whispered, “How can you tell she’s your girlfriend?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t go out and do fun things, neither of you seems nervous around the other person, and birds don’t serenade you with tweeting love songs. What makes you girlfriend and boyfriend?”

  “We like each other.”

  “It can’t be that easy.”

  “Why would it be hard?”

  “It just is. Everyone knows that.”

  “Sam and I don’t.”

  “I think you’re doing it wrong.”

  “Maybe so.”

  JonPaul never hits below the belt or picks a fight, and he won’t even respond if you try to start something with him. His complacency, usually one of his best qualities, was making me crazy.

  “You seem a lot like my parents.”

  “Thanks. Your folks are cool.”

  What can you do with a guy who doesn’t take offense and can’t decipher sarcasm?

  He smiled at me, rested his cheek on the top of Sam’s head and fell asleep again.

  I let myself out.

  I could do better than this. I had to do better than this. I just wished I knew how. Observation, study and rigorous questioning had been a total bust.

  I needed to go from study mode to action.

  The Scientific Mind Relishes the Mixing of Two Elements

  y only conclusion thus far: no one in a relationship had anything helpful to share.

  People who had already been part of a couple were worse than useless.

  As I walked home from JonPaul’s, I thought about how fruitless observing my parents, Auntie Buzz, Sarah and her friends, and JonPaul and Sam had proved to be. I was going to have to up my game from passive observation to aggressive experimentation if I wanted to learn anything valuable.

  I needed to watch a relationship from the beginning. I wasn’t discovering anything meaningful about how to start a relationship from people who weren’t in the same boat I was.

  And that was when I thought of my older brother.

  Daniel, as far as I knew, had not only never been on a date, even though he’s fifteen—he might well have never even noticed a girl. Unless she was holding a puck. Even then, he’d have focused on the black rubber disk and missed the girl entirely. Daniel lives for hockey. I asked him once what was important to him besides being on the team and he said, with a straight face, “Kev, nothing else in the world exists except performing well during the game and leaving it all on the ice during practice sessions and taking care of my gear and watching out for my teammates and listening to what Coach says and warming up and cooling down so I avoid injuries and keeping my grades up so I don’t get benched.” I was impressed. Typically, conversation from my brother ran along the lines of “You going to eat that last pork chop?”

  Now I realized that he needed me to help broaden his interests and add color to his life. Therefore, I was going to find a girl for my brother. He didn’t know it yet, but he’d been crying out for me to set him up on a date.

  And then I could watch what happened.

  Except he never does anything alone—only as part of the first string of his hockey team. So I was going to have to find six girls, one each for the center, the two wingmen, the two guys on defense and the goalie.

  Daniel spends so much time with the guys that it feels like I have six older brothers. And I just happened to have read an article in the newspaper that morning about quadruplets: four sisters—Annabeth, Alexandra, Meghan and McKenna Welsh—who go to the private high school in town. It pays to be curious about the world around you and to be well read in terms of current events, it really does. The Welsh girls are famous in our town—they’re championship skaters, and they were about to go to the junior nationals to compete. They already had ice in common with the hockey team. Too bad they were quads and not sextuplets, because I was two girls short. Oh well, they’d have skater girlfriends. I wasn’t going to let a little thing like numbers get in my way.

  Leap and the net will appear, that’s my theory.

  I checked the time on my cell phone—seven o’clock. Perfect. The hockey team and the Welsh sisters would be practicing. I knew that because skaters are always practicing. They must get withdrawal symptoms if they’re off the ice for too long—if they can feel their toes again, they know it’s time to get back in their skates. I sent a quick text to my mother, “was @ JPs going 2 rink now did my hmwrk home l8er.” Good communication skills are essential in a healthy family unit. Then I turned my matchmaking feet toward the rink.

  Before Daniel and I got old enough to be on our own after school, I practically lived at the rink. So I knew that the hockey team would be practicing on the NHL ice and the figure skaters would have the Olympic ice on the other side of the lobby.

  I also knew that most likely, the team and the girls hadn’t crossed paths. Everyone’s very focused during their ice time. They should be—it’s really expensive and they guard it with their lives. I�
�ve seen them tapping their blades impatiently when they’ve felt that the Zamboni driver was making new ice too slowly and eating into their allotted time. So each group probably didn’t know that the other group existed. It was up to me to change that.

  I grabbed a slice of pizza and a soda at the snack bar and headed to the bleachers overlooking the Oly rink. I picked out the Welsh girls easily—they were the prettiest skaters, the highest jumpers, the fastest spinners. Every so often they’d huddle up next to the boards, queuing their program music for the CD player. I noticed they were chummy with two girls in matching warm-up jackets. Perfect. Here were my six girls. I just had to find out who they were, which Welsh girl was which and how I was going to get them to go out with the hockey team.

  “Hey, Kevin, long time no see, buddy.” Patrick, the rink manager, walked up. “Where you been keeping yourself, and when can we get you on a hockey team like your brother?”

  “Pat, good to see you. It’s been a while. Hey, who are the girls in the purple jackets?” I pointed.

  “Kris and Carol Connor, they looked really good at regionals. Nice girls. Their parents are never late with contracts and checks. I like that in people.”

  “Yeah, I bet. Hey, I read about the Welsh girls—them going to junior nationals must be good PR for the rink, huh?”

  Patrick smiled and turned to study them on the ice.

  “Which one is which?” I asked.

  “It’s like the twisty ties on a bread wrapper.”

  “Pardon?” How many pucks to the head had Patrick taken over the years?

  “If you look at the twisty tie on a loaf of bread at the store, you can tell which day it hit the shelves. Monday is blue, Tuesday is green, Thursday is red, Friday is white and Saturday is yellow.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The colors are alphabetical, in order of the days of the week they’re delivered.”