The whole reason I got through the sixth grade was Luke.

We’d met at the end of my fifth grade year and his fourth grade year. He was friends with one of my friend’s little brothers, and Luke was adorable. He had these lovely deep blue eyes, this cute little smile, and he was all geek. And I must admit that I have always had a soft spot for geeks.

We’d never spoken or really interacted before the day he snuck up behind me and tickled my sides. I was sitting on top of the slide at what was called “The Big Kid’s Playground”, and found myself so surprised that I shrieked, slid down the slide, and was completely stunned. When I hit bottom I looked back up at the top of the slide—Luke was perched at the top, chuckling to himself. It was, for me, love—it had to be, and it lasted for a very long time.
Luke called the whole grabbing my sides thing “zapping” or getting “zapped”. I was a timid, jumpy soul, and I think he really enjoyed me squealing every time he came up behind me and grabbed my sides. Eventually I started doing it back. It was Our Thing. It didn’t last beyond my sixth grade year, which is probably best.

During my sixth grade year we met every recess at the swings (except during the time when I was practicing for the sixth grade play—the fact that I loved drama more than Luke says something , I suppose) and we’d swing and swing and swing. We’d discuss the important things in life: how our swings were “going together”, how Han was better than Luke, the nature of time travel, atoms, and what books we liked. We talked about everything there was to talk about, everything except for how I was absolutely crazy about him and wished he was crazy about me. In hindsight I know he must have liked me a little, in some way; what fifth grade boy abandons his friends for effectively a whole year to hang out with a sixth grade girl?

So it was Luke who introduced me to Madeleine L’Engle. We were discussing time travel in September or October and he mentioned the concept of a tesseract. I didn’t know what one was, and he told me I should read A Wrinkle in Time; he’d bring me his copy the next day. The title was familiar, and I ended up digging an old copy out of my mother’s library. She said she’d got it for a dime at a library sale. I appropriated it. (It’s on my bookshelf this very night, over twenty years later. On the inside of the front cover is a spot where Luke wrote his name and I drew a purple around it.) I read the book that night, and absolutely loved it. I had a special place in my heart for it because of Luke of course; I am, after all, a romantic, but this book was special. I read it over and over again. I had parts of it memorized. Over the next year I devoured all the books I could find that Madeleine L’Engle had written. That Christmas I found A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet--you can’t imagine the squeeing when I found out that Meg and Calvin had married. Oh, the intense joy at this discovery…

In any event, when I wasn’t in my horrid classes with my horrid teachers (okay, all but one of them was horrid) I was with Luke, or I was thinking about Luke, or I was writing. Sometimes stories were written that had nothing to do with him (like my Nike story), but a lot of times my stories were total wish fulfillment stories.

Let’s begin with the novella. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to write a novel, and a novelette seemed too short, but I figured a novella length would be perfect. I had actually gone to my English teacher, you remember Mrs. Earwig, to ask about novel and novella and novelette lengths. She couldn’t even define what these were for me. I had heard of them, and knew that novelettes and novellas were shorter than novels, but that was all I had. I ended up looking up the definitions in a dictionary, and then decided to write the novella.

The novella was about seven friends, three boys and four girls. They were thinly veiled versions of me and my three best girl friends and Luke and his two best guy friends. The whole thing began when we were all on the swings and ended up falling through a portal in the earth. The rest of the novel was about us underground, trying to find our way home while we had adventures. Eventually, the other members of the party conveniently disappeared so a good portion was about Luke and I having adventures together without any interference. I wrote it with a slim, short, sky blue pen that had gold embellishments and wrote in blue ink. I preferred black ink, but it was a cool pen and didn’t clash all that much with my teal blue spiral bound notebook with the white Mead unicorn on the front.

Once I wrote a twenty-five page typed story about thinly disguised adult versions of Luke and myself on a starship. It was sort of like the Starship Enterprise. We had insane amounts of fun on the holodeck. It was just he and I—I was the Captain and he was the first mate except for when I was feeling magnanimous and let him be Captain. Eventually I ended up in sick bay where he was treating me and some bad dude showed up from nowhere and tried to kill me, so I totally had to kick his ass. Luke was totally impressed with my kickassitude.

Once I wrote a story about how we had grown up and ran into each other during the holidays at the Rupert Square. His wife had died and left him with a young daughter and I had never married. We totally hooked up. The plot totally sucked.

I also wrote a story about how we had both grown up and gone our ways, but both ended up going home. (I can’t remember why.) When we had been young there had been some bad nameless thing terrorizing our town, but we had forgotten about it and it had gone dormant. As adults we ended up eventually remembering what had happened when we were kids, and then went to kill it as adults. And we hooked up. Later, in junior high, when I was introduced to H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King’s It I had this irreal feeling of déjà vu…

And that’s how I survived sixth grade where my homeroom/science teacher would look down my shirt and play with himself through his pants pocket and my Reading/English teacher was… well, we called her Mrs. Earwig. What do you think?

And for Luke? I remained crazy about him through junior high and high school. I seriously did. We never hooked up—mostly because he was a silly boy with no social skills when it came to girls and I usually ended up feeling like an idiot. But we both went to the same college and spent time together as friends. He also ended up in love with me and didn’t talk to me for a year after I got married. He went to grad school in Tucson where I had mentioned I would like to go to grad school, but didn’t end up going to. If I thought about it I could remember the feeling of yearning and excitement I felt when I was in the sixth grade, whenever I talked to him, but I wasn’t the same person and, to be honest, he was.

But we still e-mail. We’re still friends. I love him dearly, but it’s completely different now. And I don’t write about him anymore. Maybe someday. Maybe someday he’ll come through.

But even tonight, as I write this, I can remember the feeling. I can feel it once again—the excitement, the rush of dopamine and adrenaline, the intense yearning radiating from my chest. Suddenly it’s Christmas break, and because of how the dates have fallen I will be apart from Luke for two weeks. I’m on one of the top floors of the Howard Johnson in Salt Lake City. It’s late at night, and the sky is completely dark, but the town is illuminated by lights. I’m holding A Swiftly Tilting Planet in one hand and a cool cloth to my forehead in the other. It’s hot and I can’t sleep. But I’m excited—Meg and Calvin got together and were going to have a baby, just like they were meant to. I want to tell Luke about it, but I’m not sure he’d understand. He’s a boy, and boys don’t understand love or soul mates or anything romantic like that. But if he were here, we could discuss time travel, and he’d smile at me and chuckle and I’d refrain from reaching for his hand.