"Prep"

[fiefoe]

<Anatomy of a grand crush:>

• I didn't know enough then to realize that doesn't always happen-that sometimes you cannot settle on an angle with the other person, your weight won't balance, your bones poke.
• Every so often, he rubbed the back of my neck with his thumb. My whole body was hot liquid; I felt beholden to him, and painfully happy.
• But I had thought of him so often that sometimes when I saw him, it was weird-real Cross, moving-around Cross, Cross talking to his friends. He was the person I always thought of?
• In equal parts, I was mortified that I had started crying, and I wanted to leave her office while I still looked teary, because maybe Cross would see me and think I had been crying about something that mattered and then I would seem intriguing.
• But I never thought of what Cross wasn't, I never had to explain or defend him to myself, I didn't even care what we talked about.
• When people asked, which not many did, I said I was staying on campus for long weekend to work on college applications. Really, I was staying at school because school was the place of Cross.
• But then, in its uncomfortableness, I felt a sort of nobility - a kinship with all the girls who'd done this before me for the boys they liked.
• The first night of long weekend , while I was lying on the futon, the memory still felt bright and thick; I didn't sense yet how over the next few days I would return to it until it was frayed and diluted...
• As I felt myself implying that circumstances had prevented our kissing, I thought maybe this was why you told stories to other people - for how their possibilities enlarged in the retelling.
• Food, like almost everything else, now seemed beside the point. Certain foods I was ravenous for, like avocado, which I craved so badly I rode Martha's bike to town, bought four, ...and ate them like apples. Vanilla ice cream also - these foods seemed somehow pure, they would slide down my throat instead of getting caught in my molars. Casserole, on the other hand, made me want to vomit.
• It was unbearable to know that to act would be to mess things up, to know that my own impulses were untrustworthy.
  
• Our relationship, for as long as things were good, and in that moment when they could have been good again, was about the irrelevance of words. You feel what you feel, you act as you act; who in the history of the world has ever been convinced by a well-reasoned argument?
• the masculine response (maybe I just mean the more detached response) was to realize that our final interaction had been overblown and unfortunate but that we each understood well enough where the other stood. Another exchange would be reiteration, not clarification.

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