The Crush

Jace Dawkins's crush on an old childhood acquaintance is almost typical of most girls her age. Almost.

The Crush

                As every grown woman knows, there comes a time when she sheds her sexless garb of girlhood and stands, helpless and naked, before a newfound world of sensations and sensualities. And in this time of transition, before girl dons the mantle of womanhood, the fairy tales of childhood and the sensuousness of the real world comingle in mystifying ways, and by such concocting a girl acquires her first crush.

                At 15, Jace Dawkins had been swimming in these tepid waters of illusion for well longer than some might consider healthy, but that alone is hardly cause to chastise the girl. Some, after all, prove late bloomers. It was not that Jace had not yet found an object of fancy in which to enact her girlhood fantasies on a grown-up scale �" oh no, our Jace had been shouldering the weight of a crush for quite some time. And what a crush it was!

                Diggory Hawthorne was his name, and like every picturesque crush in existence, he and Jace had known each other since childhood. Jace, mind you, had never said more than a few words to Diggory �" the boy was, after all, incurably soft-spoken and obtuse, but that only added to the mysterious aura of smoldering aloofness that, in Jace’s mind, seemed to surround the object of affection. It should be noted here, that however well-intentioned our Jace may be, one would be hard pressed to defend her judgement of character. Then again, who hasn’t known the effects infatuation can impart on judgement?

                When a girl has a crush like the sort Jace experienced, which simply refuses to go away, it becomes easy for her to think of herself as having fallen in love. And, when said contrived sentiments of affection take up root in her mind, she fancies realizing her delicious feelings. Such was Jace’s case, when on a mellow September afternoon, she endeavored to reveal her feelings to her phantom amour.

                Whenever she pictured herself making such a confession, night had always been the choice time. There was something about the night that felt as intimate as a hug, even when she was in a crowd of strange faces. Perhaps she would utter the words on a beach somewhere, with cold, wet sand squishing between her toes and a lukewarm breeze nuzzling her hair. Or maybe it would take place in a basement that smelt of mildew and dampness, but which offered a familiar, saggy couch which, granted to the right company, could allow the tongue to wander where the mind dared not.

                But night never came, and Jace grew tired of waiting, so it was on a park bench in broad daylight that her confession occurred. It felt so… pedestrian. Her thirteen year old self would have been absolutely scandalized to see her now!

                “So Diggory,” she began all at once, turning to the boy at her right with a smile on her face.

                The former was engaged with the last bit of his ice cream cone, noisily slurping ice cream from cone in a manner that was not entirely proper, but which Jace was prompt to associate with puppy-like naivety. “Yeah?” he said, a chocolate grin smeared on his face. “Hey, nice weather eh?”

                Oh nonono, she was not going to start things off by talking about the weather.

                “Diggory, I need to talk to you.”

                “What’s wrong?”

                Blushing, Jace glanced down at her lap, knees clenched together. There was no turning back now. She took a deep breath. “I…well, I like you.”

                There, it was all out now, for better or for worse! She only wished that she could have seen the look on his face when she’d given her little confession �" it was probably priceless. Instead, she had been staring at her stupid, ugly knees.

                After a beat, Diggory muttered, “Oh.”

                And that was all there was to it �" or so Jace though. But then, what felt like a full minute later, Diggory followed up his initial remark with the equally insightful, “Uh, really?”

                “Yeah,” said Jace, only just realizing that she’d forgotten to breathe all this time, “I really do.”

                “Hunh.”

                To Diggory’s credit, he was taking it much better than she had expected.

                Then, he surprised her by asking, “So what now?”

                Jace honestly hadn’t thought about that question. “What do you mean?”

                Suddenly, Diggory was turning a most peculiar shade of scarlet, and Jace could not understand why. “Did you want me to, I don’t know, ask you out or something?”

                “Well, do you want to ask me out?”

                “I just don’t know what you expect me to say, that’s all.”

                As quickly as it had gotten wing, Jace’s hopes suddenly came crashing down around her. Her beloved, after all, had always been on a pedestal �" to be seen, but never to be interacted with. By pouring out her heart to him, she had readily sunk them both into a new kind of purgatory. Of course Diggory didn’t know what to say �" he had just been overwhelmed with the stupidity of her childish confession!

                Poor Jace ought to be pitied, for it’s never easy for anyone to spill their thoughts so willingly to another!

                Feeling the tears come on and her nose wrinkle in a hideous fashion, Jace shoved her disappointment aside. “I want to know how you feel about me,” she muttered.

                When she summoned the courage to look up, she was startled to see her crush’s eyes wide with despair. “Dig, what’s wrong? I didn’t mean to upset you, I’m just… confused.”

                But Diggory just shook his head and wiped his face on his sleeve. “I didn’t think I was your type of guy, that’s all.”

                “Who, you?”

                Diggory nodded, and Jace felt as though her heart was just about ready to burst. “You are, though!” she exclaimed, smiling sheepishly.

                “Are you sure?” asked Diggory, uncertainty (and chocolate ice cream) lingering on his face.

                Jace could have kissed him right then and there �" and how she wanted to! �" but daytime on a park bench in the middle of a busy park just didn’t feel right for her first kiss, so she contented herself with squeezing her beloved’s shoulder. “Trust me,” she said, “I like you.”

                For a moment, both teens awkwardly grinned at one another, not quite sure how to process so much new data. Though most fantasies remain only that, the ones that become a reality often feel so much different when we come into them, so that we cannot make up our minds between the fact and the fancy of the matter.

                Sensing she’d need time to adjust to this new fairy tale she was living in (and possibly, to call up the girls and tell them all about it too), Jace pushed aside all the little worries at the back of her head and said, “S’pose we should be getting back now, hunh?”

                “Yeah, s’pose.”

                As they got up to go, Diggory suddenly grabbed her hand.

                “I like you too, Jace.”

                Though Jace’s eyes remained glued to the ground, a smile spread across her face. It was just like in the movies �" first love, and now first handhold. Her whole body was quivering, inside and out, at the very thought of the future that lay ahead of them.

                But for now, their time together was at an end, for already Jace spied her mom and Diggory’s mother up ahead, coalescing over their own ice cream cones. And so, Diggory gave Jace’s hand one last squeeze and, for now, the two of them parted.

                When they met up with their mothers, they were just as quiet and foreign towards one another as they had been before the park bench, except every now and then Jace would catch Diggory grinning at her out of the corner of her eye.

                After they had parted ways, Jace’s mother began to pester her.

                “Did you have a good time, you and Dig?” she asked as Jace slid into the passenger’s seat.

                Jace gave a shrug. Fighting the urge to smile like an idiot, she said, “Oh, it was the usual. We walked around, didn’t say much. Did our own thing, mostly.”

                “Jace!”

                “Come on, mom! You know what Diggory’s like �" you can hardly get a word out of him!”

                “Honestly now, Jace!” her mother exclaimed as she angrily jammed the key into the ignition and cranked the gearstick into drive. “You could at least make more of an effort! Would it really kill you to talk to your cousin for once in a change?”

                As the car pulled out from its slot, Jace caught herself smiling in the window’s reflection. After all, the only thing more delicious than one’s first crush is one’s first scandalous secret.

The End

 

Reviews

[ski-pluto]

I like the way you put sentences together, but it was quite obviously building to a punch line, and it kind of let me down. It was like a really nicely written but really old joke.