My first crush

In 1994, I was eight years old and in third grade. We took a field trip. I found a rock. Some kids picked up the "S" encyclopedia and were giggling about something inside but they wouldn't say what. Amanda was my best friend. I was starting to pay attention to the music my older sister liked.

There was this one song on the radio that I liked a lot, it went "Oooo baby I love your ways," and there was a part about holding hands and taking a walk and the moon and fireflies. I would come up with pictures to go along with it and I always imagined me and Amanda. Amanda and I liked to spend all of recess off by ourselves holding hands and talking. I would look up and close my eyes and the sun would glow orange through my eyelids and I remember thinking it felt like that in my stomach, too.

Then one day the other kids called us gaywads and Amanda started crying and took her hand back. I tried to convince her that it didn't matter and the other kids were just being immature and what was a gaywad, anyway, why was it so bad, but she wouldn't listen, and then I got mad at the other kids and yelled at them. I said, "OH MY GOSH! YOU GUYS ARE BEING SO IMMATURE!"

My grandma told me that when you say oh my gosh, God is listening and he knows what you really mean to say in your heart. But I was mad.

Amanda wouldn't hold my hand anymore after that but I still had my song pictures. The songs I liked always ended the same way, with people getting married. I thought about me and Amanda in wedding dresses, kissing, and I thought, maybe I will marry her when I grow up. But what kind of cake would we have? I tried to remember if I had ever seen a cake with two brides on it. I was pretty sure I hadn't, and that seemed really weird to me. Like, I came up with that all on my own and I was just a kid. My imagination was pretty good but it wasn't that good. Someone else must have thought about it before me. I thought I'd ask my mom about it.

My mom said, "WHAT?" and stopped the car and turned around to look at me.

"I said, can a girl marry another girl?"

"WHO TAUGHT YOU THAT. WAS IT YOUR TEACHER? DID YOUR TEACHER TEACH YOU THAT AT SCHOOL?"

"No, I just thought--"

"WHO TAUGHT YOU THAT."

"Nobody, I just thought maybe I'd like to marry Amanda when I grow up." I was a little scared. She always said it was good to ask questions. I didn't think she would get mad at me.

"The Catholic Church does not approve of that."

"Yeah, but could we. Like what if we went to another church?"

All she would say was, "The Catholic Church does not approve of that. Do you understand."

I was very annoyed. That didn't answer my question, a chuch doesn't have opinions about things, a chuch is just a house with people inside and people have all kinds of different opinions. And if the Catholic Church didn't like two girls getting married then that meant that somewhere, at some time, two girls had tried to get married, so I wasn't the first person to think about it, she just didn't want to tell me. But she wouldn't tell me anything else.

A few weeks later I found a book at the library called "Questions and Answers About Sex and Growing Up." It said that sex is what boys and girls do together to make a baby, and that there ways they can do sex together without making babies, too. A girl could not give another girl babies. Towards the back of the book there was a chapter called "WHAT IS HOMOSEXUALITY," and it said, "People do not like homosexuals. Sometimes people try to beat homosexuals up. Homosexuals want to get married but they cannot." Mom got mad probably because she thought I sounded like a homosexual, but that was dumb, clearly I was person, which meant I could not be a homosexual. I was just being immature.

I went back and fixed all of my song pictures so I was holding hands with Bobby instead of Amanda, and then I fake married Bobby on the playground. Bobby chewed with his mouth open and had gross lips like worms so I kissed him through my hand. All of the other kids were like, "oooooOOOOooooo!" and my brother was like, "You have a cruuuush!"

I got bored with my song pictures and bored with the radio.



The next year, they put Amanda in a different class and I didn't get to see her anymore. I was really sad. I wrote about it a lot in my diary.

There was a song on the radio that went "I wanna come over!" and whenever it came on my older sister would smirk knowingly. I was like, "What's so funny?" and she said, "Melissa Etheridge is a lesbian." I said, "Oh."

"Do you know what a lesbian is?"

I had this baby doll I never played with because its head was too big and its eyes were buggy and it had a belly button and a small wrinkly vagina and I could never find its clothes. I thought a lesbian was probably someone who looked like that. I said, "Not really."

"You don't KNOW?"

"No. What is it?"

"I can't tell you."

"Why?"

"If you don't already know I can't tell you."

"Tell meeeeee!"

"It's something to make little girls ask questions."

I found out later that she didn't actually know and she was testing me to see if I knew, and she was too embarrassed to say she didn't know.

I kept pestering her about it for weeks until she finally told me what a lesbian is. I didn't believe her. I listened very carefully every time the song came on but Melissa Etheridge never said "she" or "her" or anything about girls, it was always just "you," so I thought my sister was probably lying.

"Why do you care?" she said. "Are you a lesbian?"

I said, "No."


Some pages are torn out of my fourth grade diary, and some of the stuff I wrote was scratched out, hard, in red ink. I can read through the scratched out part. It says, "Amanda being gone is like how you feel when you lose your favorite stuffed animal. I love her."

A few pages later it says, "My sister wanted to know if she could read this and I said yes but first I had to cross out the parts I didn't want her to read."

A few pages after that it says, "Jaimie said she would be my new best friend. We traded middle names and now we are pretending to be sisters. I have to ask Mom if it's okay but if she let me fake marry Bobby then probably she won't get mad."



I forgot about Amanda until I was 24 and fell in love with a girl who reminded me of her. She made me think in song pictures again.