Spring had just begun to tiptoe in, ignoring the heckling of Old Man Winter, who as usual was violating his seasonal curfew. It was a late March afternoon and love was in the damp air.
A seventh-grader at Nokomis Junior High in Minneapolis, I was smitten by Jay (all names have been changed to protect the innocent and not-so), a boy who wore long bangs that flipped up at the ends, and bell-bottom jeans whose frayed hems swabbed the ground.
After the dismissal bell a group of us headed down the Parkway, strutting, ambling and racing in that particular way of adolescents who're trying to prove something but aren't sure what. Yellow crocuses and red tulips, their petals still wrapped tight against the chill, poked through patchworks of mud and snow, bright flags staking their claim. Trees showed off their new green finery but the sky scowled, gray and overcast, and a brisk wind blew back the ponytails and home-permanents-gone-wrong we girls wrestled with between classes in front of wavy lavatory mirrors.
Raw and windy as the day was, we left our corduroy jackets and poplin coats unbuttoned and unzipped, untamed as the season.
At Minnehaha Park, behind the stone wall that overlooks the falls, we elbowed and poked one another, watching the finally melted ice curtain gush over the stony gorge. From the jostling, a game of tag arose, and we chased each other around the Pavilion and the rickety old bandstand. When Jay was It and his hand slapped my shoulder, I almost swooned, recognizing a love tap when I was nearly knocked over by it.
A goofy, flat-chested girl with a chipped front tooth, I had a big personality around my girlfriends but it went undercover around boys, especially around Jay, who was out, way out, of my league.
"Just say 'hi' to him," counseled my best friend, Robin, when he passed us (me in full blush) in the school halls, but my greetings and declarations of love were only telepathic, sent to him — or more accurately, to the back of his head — during Assembly.
On cue, April was filled with showers, and one rainy morning in Geography, I furtively paged through a Slam Book. Furtively, because teachers confiscated these outlawed notebooks, filled not with diagrammed sentences but with diagrams of one another. Each page heading was the name of a classmate, and underneath we gave anonymous pats ('David Cassidy's twin!') and punches ('Pizza Face!').
