I think when my crush didn’t pass, like months later when I was still insisting on watching and rewinding that part of the movie, Lucy started feeling like maybe it was a smudge on their parenting record. Millie finally banned the movie from movie night. So I broke the DVD out of the liquor cabinet where they’d stashed it and watched it on my computer in my room.

The heart wants what it wants.

I can’t really explain it myself. Even now. I just thought she was beautiful. The whole cowl thing. The ruby-red lips. Maybe I also thought I could change her.

Like if there’s a version of Snow White where she meets this really charming young waif in the woods (with orange hair) and their falling in love shows Lucille the error of her ways and she leaves that stupid mirror and castle behind and she and the waif live in the woods happily ever after?

Yeah. I guess it’s pretty weird. Never mind. Let’s never make that movie.

After that I fell in love with Katie Simpson, who was in my Girl Scout troop in fourth grade. Which didn’t really lead to anything but an extra year of scouts when I was about to quit. Then I fell head over heels for Darla Hammersmith, who sat in the seat in front of me in fifth grade when we lived in Ohio. Darla Hammersmith, who never knew who I was despite the fact that her smile haunted my dreams and I bought her a multitool for her birthday that her parents later confiscated because, apparently, it’s really just a bunch of small knives.

I changed what I ate for breakfast for a year because I saw Darla Hammersmith eating a granola bar once on the way to school and tried to eat the same granola bar instead of toast like a normal person because I had this idea one day we would walk in the door at the same time together and I would point at her bar and say, “Hey, same bar!”

It never happened.

Granola bars suck.

Millie says I fall in love with unattainable girls with long hair.

“Not a great idea,” she says, every time it happens. “Not the long hair bit, obviously. You know what I mean.”

My first kiss was with a girl I met at camp who had long hair, but was also really cool and her name was Zoey. She had long red hair and freckles and we used to canoe together. And then on the last day of camp I worked up the nerve to tell her I liked her in the boathouse. And she kissed me. And then she went home to Idaho and fell in love with this girl she played soccer with. Which she emailed me about.

We still write actually, Zoey’s really cool.

Look.