Firsts, by Brian Ellis

“Who do you want to marry?”

I ignored his question, my attention resting instead on a related subject of inquiry: did she like me? Gazing across the classroom, past several fellow fourth graders, my eyes landed on Anna Eckard. There I experienced an affection of such rich and unprecedented complexities. Her cherubic face. Her smile like a scimitar. A crush or two had formed before Anna, to be clear, but none had so encapsulated the all-consuming nature of infatuation. Tethered to the confines of the school desk, I was overwhelmed, outmatched and loving every minute of it.

But foremost I needed an answer to my question, proof. Earlier this month Anna had given me a Valentine’s card, a gesture, on its own, unremarkable. If you gave one kid a card, you gave every kid a card. Except, when I examined the picture, something meaningful emerged. Jasmine and Aladdin were staring deep into each other’s souls. Aladdin soaring on a magic carpet. Jasmine leaning over a balcony and uttering the words, “Be mine!” A constellation of hearts illumed the night sky behind them. Anna could have given me any card, one with the genie and the magic carpet high-fiving or Iago wincing, but rather chose an image with such evocative overtones. This led to one more question: could the subtext provide conclusive proof that Anna harbored secret affection for yours truly? Yes, yes it could. Still, further evidence in the way of eye contact would be appreciated.

“I said, ‘Who do you want to marry?’”

Sitting at the desk next to mine was my best friend Darrell. We had met at the beginning of the school year and had bonded as though related, despite sharing none of the same physical traits. Where I was tiny, fair skinned and towheaded, he was tall, dark skinned and had black hair. But what did any of that matter next to our shared appreciation for strange sounding English phrases? In one class, we had laughed for five minutes straight when our teacher read out loud “had had.”

This moment, though, Darrell was deadpan, anticipating an answer to an alarmingly profound question, featured prominently in a game we all played. An ostensibly simple pastime, MASH in truth possessed the answers to all of life’s important questions. In a matter of minutes, I would uncover not only whether I would reside in a mansion, apartment, shack or house, but also my career, number of progeny and, oh man, the identity of my future wife.

“You need to give me four names,” said Darrell, with a pencil in hand and a sheet of paper awaiting my direction.

“Oh, right. Lemme see…” I had already offered four possibilities for each of the other categories, but the most essential one remained. Should I force him to write the name Anna four times? What, no! Terrible idea! The act would reveal my crush to the world—an embarrassment like none other. I needed a better idea. I would begin with the girls I neither liked nor disliked. That’s right. I would play coy. “I don’t know. How about Penny, Candace, Debra and, uh…” Pause, baby. Ease her in there. “Anna.” Perfect.

Darrell nodded and commenced the all-important work of tabulating my future. With the help of a number decided by chance, he moved from category to category, crossing items off the list with the dispassion of an auditor. Meanwhile, he covered the paper with his forearm, leaving my lungs aching for oxygen.

After an interminable wait, Darrell fixed his attention on me, indicating that my life, as I knew it, was about to change. “In your future,” he said, “you will marry Anna, live in a shack, have 47 kids and be a poop doctor.” Oh future of futures! Could what I had heard really be true? Yes, the sheet had spoken. All would be well. Anna would be mine. What a—

“All right, class, time to get out your reading books,” said Ms. Collins, to a collective groan. While a nurturing individual well suited to shape the minds of the next generation, Ms. Collins, like most teachers, displayed an uncanny knack at deflating newfound elation. “We’ll pick up where we left off. Brian, would you continue?”

Whatever book we were reading I don’t remember. And the words, I forgot them soon after they exited my mouth. My sole aim centered on using the author’s text to demonstrate my inestimable worth to Anna. Though not a strong reader myself, a failure common to the TV generation, I soldiered on word by word, sentence by sentence regardless. Despite a couple of early stumbles, I soon achieved a flow and eloquence surpassing my ten years. While all but the final words are lost to time, the reading went something like this: “‘Yes, yes. Let us stand in amazement. Let us stand in wonder at the divine glory of the vast and majestic skis.’ … I mean ‘skies.’”

The hum of an air vent.

“‘Skis,’” Darrell mocked and chortled. The impulse of succumbing to self-consciousness and embarrassment did not exist in me at this age, and instead the absurdity of the wording caused me to crack up, too. Others in the class followed in kind—including Anna, her eyes locked on mine. What a fortuitous folly! I had achieved her unadulterated glee and attention, and all thanks to letting my lackluster reading abilities shine.

“That’s enough, class,” Ms. Collins said. “It was just a mispronunciation. We all make them. I’m sure none of you would like it if everyone laughed at your mistakes.” Speak for yourself. “Please continue.”

As I read, I began constructing a far richer narrative beneath the surface of my recitation. The plot to this tale was simple yet rife with implications: I would earn Anna’s attention and admiration, again and again, forever. The manner in which I accomplished such a noble feat, well, the specifics were sparse, hazy and frankly of little significance. We would be together, after all. Our destinies were entwined. Our futures, like those of our animated counterparts, written in the heart-shaped stars.

***

“Anna wanted me to tell you she likes you,” Darrell said.

 The saliva in my mouth evaporated, along with the contents of my brainpan. I stalled to give them time to return. “She whu…” But not enough time.

“She asked me to ask you if you want to be her boyfriend,” he said, reading my reaction, dumbfounded as it was.

We were standing on the threshold to the visual art room, during the brief transition period between regular class and art. The time had arrived to work with clay, but that could wait. An important question needed answering first. “You mean Anna Eckard?”

“Yeah, Anna,” Darrell said. He, along with everyone else in my life, was oblivious to my crush. Before then I had believed sharing so intimate a detail a surefire way to elicit laughter, perhaps because that was my brother’s default reaction or because of the schoolyard depictions I had watched on TV. Yet here, in this moment, Darrell displayed no mockery or judgment, but rather a willingness to facilitate, or more accurately initiate, my romantic life.

He turned from side to side to count the diminishing number of students in the hall, a telling marker of the seconds remaining for him to get to dance class. Less than thirty, by the looks of it. “What do you want me to tell her?” he asked.

Hold on, Darrell. Dance could wait. I needed to process this development. True, the frequency of glances between Anna and me had increased of late, but could my master plan have coalesced already, mere days since the fateful decision to make Anna mine?

Darrell’s raised eyebrows said, “Yes, you fool, yes.”

With this affirmation as my guide, I understood life had delivered precisely what I had pined for. All that remained was one word.

“No,” I said with a tinge of disgust in my voice.

“All right. I’ll tell her,” Darrell said and disappeared from view.

Whether I realized the enormity of my error that second or the next is unclear. But soon enough, I strode into the hall and to my dismay Darrell was out of sight. I had not anticipated the difficulty of admitting my feelings out loud, let alone to a friend. The sheer vulnerability of the moment, a first-time sensation, had flushed and unnerved me. Only one answer could return the life I knew—the expected response of all schoolboys whenever a girl says she likes him, unapologetic revulsion. By the time I grasped my mistake, nothing could be done. Except maybe a desperate dash for Darrell and—

“Everyone put on your aprons. Class is starting.” Oh, Mrs. Brantley. Teacher of art and dasher of dreams.

As class trudged by, my doubts persisted. Protecting myself from vulnerability had meant passing up on the chance to fulfill a longing, to experience the ineffable, and somehow my younger self could sense this, maybe not in words but in the idiocy of my contradiction.

Seconds after the art period ended, I blocked Darrell’s pathway out of dance class. He soon had a perplexed expression. “So, you’re saying you want to be her boyfriend?”

I nodded eagerly.

“Well, I already told her you said no…but I could tell her you now say yes.”

I nodded eagerly again.

Emitting a sigh, Darrell shouldered my burden as his own and ambled down the hall to perform the uncomfortable work of a true friend.

As the love gods would deem, my momentary lapse in judgment had not cost me Anna’s affections. Far from it. Thanks to her forgiveness of my gaffe, and aided by our prime placement across the classroom from each other, our mutual eye contact reached unparalleled heights over the following weeks. During the “Pledge of Allegiance,” PA announcements, class lessons, student ramblings, teacher ramblings—each an opportunity for us to grow closer one look at a time. And what an expression awaited mine, serious yet warm, inviting yet mischievous. A neophyte in all aspects of infatuation, I boldly traversed the uncharted realm with unbridled enthusiasm and an unblemished optimism.

That is, until the school day ended, severing our ties and ushering in the reign of gloom. Basketball and baseball, once cherished pastimes occupying heart and mind, were now joyless. Taekwondo lessons drudgery. Friends mere distractions. Weekends torment. Never before had school excited me, yet now I counted down the minutes until the morning bell rang and class began. The inverted reality of life with a girlfriend had upended my world and replaced it with something like sorcery, or too-much-candy-on-a-Saturday-night intoxication.

After about a month of this dreamlike bliss, word reached me through an intermediary that Anna expected more from our courtship than purposefully timed gawking. Personally, I found our arrangement more than satisfying. The dopamine rush whenever our eyes met was everything I needed from a relationship. But not wanting to disrupt the flow of newly discovered hormones, I accepted Anna’s ultimatum and agreed to sit with her at lunch.

“This morning, my younger brother was running around the living room yelling, ‘Anna likes Brian, Anna likes Brian!’ I couldn’t get him to stop,” Anna said one day in the gymnasium turned cafeteria, shortly after we had started sharing a table. She did not speak these words to me, mind you, but to her best friend, Justine, sitting beside her. Justine and I had never shared a class before, making her a complete mystery of a human being and that proverbial third wheel, but since she made Anna happy, I knew better than to question her presence. Even though I had been forced to give up my table with my friends. Darrell and the others may as well have lunched in another zip code. No matter. I would rise above pettiness, choosing a peaceful coexistence in its place. And so I consumed my peanut butter and jelly sandwich across from my girlfriend in a display of goodwill.

When not eating, and during pauses in their conversation, I was greeted with eardrum-searing silence. Not from the cafeteria, as it bustled with activity like most others, or even literal silence, but the kind that faces a boy who has no idea how to speak to a girl. I learned then that conversing with girls did not proceed as naturally for me as conversing with boys. My level of fluency consisting of two words, hi and bye. Growing up with an older sister had not granted me the competency one might expect, maybe because she was in high school now and only home long enough to fight with our parents and storm off to her room, or because I spoke with her too infrequently for the exchanges to have a meaningful influence on my conversational skills. Whatever the case, I conceived a plan to compensate for my linguistic failings: Justine would occupy the majority of Anna’s time and interest, while sips on my Squeezit Chucklin’ Cherry artificially flavored beverage would comprise the remainder. I would continue this strategy until we were married.

“Ew, what’s with your lunchbox?”

I had a mouthful of chocolate chip cookie fragments when those five words, laced with contempt, struck me with the leaden force of that kid who punched my face with a regulation boxing glove. This time the attack came without warning and from Justine. And not regular Justine, a person who had never spoken a cross word, or any word, to me, but an alternate Justine consumed with prepubescent rage.

“Those characters are so dumb,” she followed.

She had just assaulted my lunchbox, my identity, the cerulean blue and cartoon Avengers as cool as ever. “What are you talking about?” I said, a hand atop my conveyor of sandwiches. “Mine is great!” Justine, too, had brought a lunchbox—I’m now envisioning a yellow one with a Disney princess of some kind, two potentially spurious details—and the urge to decimate it grew. “Not like that stupid girly thing!”

“Stop, okay, just stop!” Anna pleaded.

Us combatants yielded our voices and with that gesture, the Great Lunchbox Battle of 1994 came to a close.

“I can’t have my best friend and my boyfriend fighting,” Anna continued.

Still disoriented from the unprovoked attack, I proved incapable of deflecting the blame and meekly surrendered. For my passivity, I received the harshest blow yet.

“Brian, I can’t be your girlfriend anymore.”

While my present self admires such a cogent decision from someone so young, my former self was decidedly less impressed. Still, I had the opportunity to respond in kind, questioning why Anna needed to take such a drastic measure over a modest skirmish concerning two plastic receptacles. I chose rather to flee the lunchroom and run down the hall. Whether one of our stalwart safety patrollers yelled for my swift return, I cannot say.

Sheltered inside the bathroom, I confronted myself in the mirror, surprised at the tears I found reflected back at me. Our whirlwind romance had ended and the suddenness was dizzying, unfathomable. Just seconds ago life had tasted like cookie dough. Now the flavor profile was salty and bitter and I could do nothing but grimace and acquiesce.

Staring at my reflection, this neophyte in all things romance, I had no way of knowing what really happened in the cafeteria that day. But my present self has a pretty good idea. While I strategized the long-term offensive of making Anna my wife, I had failed to notice an enemy stalking my flanks, waiting for the opportune moment to deploy an offensive of her own. The best friend had wanted me—the actual third wheel—gone and succeeded with a single strike. Cue the bugle.

With the war now over, I had a decision to make. Would I cower in humiliation or prevail in the long run? When some kid entered the bathroom, I forced away the tears. He would not see me cry. Darrell would not see me cry. Anna would definitely not see me cry. No, I would return to my pre-Anna instincts, shielding my feelings, avoiding the possibility of exposing them to another.

Perhaps that begins to explain why, as elementary school became middle and eventually high school, and feelings for Anna resurfaced, I refused to share them with her, with anyone, regardless of how strong or how long they persisted. The other crushes during those years followed the same course. While other reasons beyond the first breakup contributed to the inaction, like a growing self-consciousness and a diminishing sense of self worth, nothing could paralyze me more than the thought of rejection. I would not open myself to another again until college, more than a decade later. When those sentiments went unreciprocated, yet more years passed before I attempted again. This unfulfilling, solitary course led me to my thirties, a period when the sharp light of understanding finally penetrated my defenses and I could recognize vulnerability for what it is: strength.

But in that elementary school bathroom, my view of strength took another form: me emerging on the other side of the door with my dignity intact. I checked over myself and the puffiness had faded, the tears had dried up. I sniffled one last time and left for the bathroom door, head held up. I then remembered leaving my lunchbox across the table from Anna. I didn’t really need that dumb thing, did I?

–

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Brian Ellis is a writer and editor based in Roanoke, Virginia. A graduate of the Hollins University Creative Writing MFA Program in 2022, Brian is currently at work on a collection of personal essays that explores childhood, adulthood and the unfortunate decisions made along the way.

© 2023, Brian Ellis