My Crushes (I)

When we talk about the first crush, we tend to go all the way back to when we were little. It is like an arms competition during the cold war, and everyone wants to claim they are the first to land on the moon. Well, if you think I am the exception, you are wrong. I do not even know whether the crush in my fifth grade in elementary should count as a crush, but one incident makes it very memorable. So nowadays when I think of "crush", this one will jump into my mind.

In third grade, a new transfer came to my classroom. She was transferred from a nearby rural school, where she mom used to teach. As her mom got a teaching position (music) in my school, the girl came along. At the very beginning, I noticed that she was different from most urban girls in the class. She had dark skin complexion, probably due to the exposure to the sun while playing outside. When she smiled, she showed her teeth with the mouth widened. She was not shy at all. In fact, she stood out as a wild kid in the class, running around all the time, waving her long hair in the air. To me, a shy and timid kid, her presence was quite refreshing. Let me call her May here. Oh, why the way, her mom was not a good music teacher. She is partly to blame if you hate to go karaoke with me.

Now introduce another figure in my elementary school. Let me call him Seeth here. Seeth was a natural leader in the class. He was tall and smart, full of ideas (sometimes great, sometimes dumb). For example, he began to collect other students' parents' names. When he learnt it, he began to use "XXX's son" as an insult. It resulted in some sort of escalation, as we all ended up collecting these names of parents, just in case, for assault or for defense. We also collected teachers' names (We usually do not know teachers' name. Teachers are referred as Teacher Zhang or Teach Wang, etc.). We used to badmouth teachers on their backs, and using their full names added to our satisfaction. Not surprisingly, I was one of Seeth's follower.

Seeth, May and I were among student committee, which means we were the teachers' helping hands (I was actually on the verge of being a teacher's pet). One of our duties was to come to school over the nap break, to make sure that no other students lingered around the school when they were supposed to take a nap (Until this day, I still do not get the point why we had to force students to take a nap).

One day Seeth and I (and a third guy) were in a shift together during the nap break. The campus was quiet, and we were probably the only persons there. We obviously got bored. Seeth asked whether I had a girl I liked at school. I reluctantly said yes. And how about you, I asked. He said yes too. So we tried to interrogate each other in an attempt to get the girl's name, with no avail. So Seeth said, "We can both write the name on a piece of paper at the same time and then exchange." But what if someone cheated. Well, Seeth pointed out that third guy could be the eye witness. Sounds good to me. So we got a piece of page, and I wrote down May's name, and with my peripheral sights, I saw Seeth dribbled down something too.

You can imagine what happened next. We exchanged the paper, and I realized I was cheated because his sheet had nothing on it. I began to chase after him and caught him, and he quickly put the piece of paper in his mouth and then showed me, "see, I swallowed it." Later I realized he did not. I was told that he retrieved the paper under his tongue and learned my secret crush. Since then I lived under the constant terror that one day he would disclose that to the whole world.

Eventually, I do not think Seeth did. He probably forgot about it, or thought that was really no big deal. For me, however, it was an experience that I felt shameful for liking someone, for no obvious reasons. Seeth later was my classmate in both junior and senior high. Of course, I grew up and no longer his follower. He grew even taller and more handsome. Eventually, he went to a medical university and now probably is serving as a doctor in the military. He had a kid a year ago and now a proud father. If I get a chance to meet him again, I promise myself to bring up this episode and hear his version of the story (unless he has forgotten about it).

After elementary school, May moved on to a technical junior high, and I heard of her only once after that when one of my high school friend told me that her best friend dated May in the technical junior high and later broke up. For me, that was nothing. Crushes come and go, leaving no apparent traces. Only that incident really registered in my memory, making this crush to be the obvious candidate as my first crush ever.