Fifth Grade.
Libby Abrams and I are BFFS. We each have a crush in Mrs. Simpson’s class. Reed and Braden. Both athletic, tan, and handsome. Reed is smart, but not funny. Braden is funny, but not smart. No matter, though. You can’t have it all together at age ten.
Unfortunately, we are not in Mrs. Simpson’s class. Which leaves more time and room for Libby and I to admire them from a distance.
Do we talk to Reed and Braden? Rarely. Have we confessed ourselves as their secret admirers? As if! Do they even know they have secret admirers. Likely no. Things are going perfectly.
However, Libby and I hang out with Buzzcut Steve in our class who happens to be friends with our crushes. If he finds out who Libby and I are talking about all the time, we’ll be doomed. So, like the geniuses we are, Libby and I come up with a few code systems in our unofficial Secret Agent Meeting. The first is this:
Every time one of us sees the other’s crush nearby, the signal is to repeatedly raise our eyebrows.
Day one as a Secret Agent: Mrs. Simpson’s class walks toward our lockers, I scout the area and upon sighting Braden, I alert Libby with the signal. I am stealth. I am shadow. I am– being laughed at. Libby is has bursted into a laughing fit. This is not how to receive the code.
Apparently, try as a I might, I can’t wiggle my eyebrows without simultaneously flaring my nostrils like an angry gorilla. However, we must keep the system. No turning back.
The second system are code names for our crushes. We take their names and bump each letter in the alphabet down once. “Reed” is now “Sffe” and “Braden” is “Csbefo”. High security stuff here.
Come to find out, these code names are nearly impossible to pronounce in our native tongue, so we mostly communicate this way in writing.
One day with our mediocre origami skills, we each take a lined paper and fold it into a rectangle bookmark. (Tutorial coming later.) Then we color our crushes’ code names in block letters.
Buzzcut Steve sits right by me. Since he regularly cheats off my paper to go to recess earlier, he always has his eyes on my desk. One day he spots my bookmark and asks, “What does that say?”
“Psh. Nothing.”
He isn’t the smartest, (I am. Hence, the cheating) so I am like 0% worried.
Until one day. Buzzcut Steve looks over as I’m putting away my chapter book and says, “I figured it out!”
Slight panic.
“What?”
“‘Sffe’. It stands for ‘Reed'”.
“No it doesn’t.” (It does.)
“Yeah, it does. It’s just the next letter in the alphabet.”
He’d figured it out.
However, Buzzcut Steve is one to question his own answers quite often, so this next trick may just work.
“It doesn’t stand for Reed!”(It’s lying. The trick is lying.) I go on.
“Why would I even do that?”
He doesn’t know why, so he pauses.
“Well, what does it stand for then?”
I can sense genuine curiosity in his tone. My plan is working.
“I’m not telling you!”
And like a lifesaver, our teacher asks for the class’s attention. Buzzcut Steve drops the subject.
Later at lunch, I tell Libby that they are onto us.
I bring the bookmark home to put in my keepsakes away from Steve’s eyes.
And Reed never finds out about my head over heels crush on him. …Until six months later when I befriend a Class-A Bona Fide Nark named Cherity Mendell.