The first girl Allen ever had a crush on was a curly-haired blonde sixth-grader named Candy. They were both twelve years old, they were both just starting to feel the onset of the approaching hormone storms, and Candy had no idea that Allen had a crush on her. Allen really had no idea why he had a crush on Candy, either; in later years he figured it came from the day in class when he had been walking back from the pencil sharpener past Candy's desk while she was leaning over to pick up a dropped eraser and by pure happenstance got an el primo peek directly down the front of her blouse. He hadn't been trying to look down her blouse, and even if he'd really known the full significance of what he was looking at, there wasn't much there, because Candy was only twelve years old, for God's sake. Besides, it wasn't a frozen prepubescent tableau; it couldn't have lasted more than half a second. And even if he had had the chance to stand there and feel her up with his eyes, he'd never have been able to do it. Allen, you see, was shy. And after he worked up the courage to tell Candy that he "liked her-liked her," and she replied by calling him "Pruneface" for the rest of the semester and regularly sprinkling pencil shavings in his baloney sandwiches, his bashfulness grew to neurotic proportions.
Two years later Allen was sitting in science class trying to pretend that mass displacement in liquid media was as captivating as the NBA playoffs when his teacher, Mr. Comstock, announced the long awaited and dreaded science project. Mr. Comstock, like all junior high school teachers, loved to make his students pair up into teams, and also loved to pair up boys with girls. Allen didn't know whether Mr. Comstock wasn't getting enough at home or whether he just got his jollies from adolescent awkwardness. Mostly he just wished the science teacher would find some liquid medium someplace and use himself to displace some of it. It was bad enough that everybody was silently, furtively laughing at him on a daily basis for reasons they tauntingly kept to themselves, but which he was SURE was his bashfulness around girls - now he was being forced to team up with…a girl! Terror welled up within him. What was he going to say to her? How was he going to get through this project? Oh, the life of an eighth grader is truly the toughest plight of all.
Time passes quickly during an anxiety attack, and by the time Allen managed to refocus, Mr. Comstock had reached the “G’s” on the class roster. "Grosserhahn!" "Um, yes, sir?" "You're with Miss Miller." Allen looked around, the name not striking him as being familiar.
Then he saw her, and his heart skipped a beat. She was beautiful - tall, with long brunette hair, big limpid blue eyes, an absolutely angelic smile, and the fixings of a small but firm bust. She was new, her family having just moved to town the previous summer. He hadn't met her previously, but he had heard through the grapevine that she was very nice and was very easily embarrassed.
"Hi," she said softly, "My name is Jill."
"Um, hi. I'm Groslen Alhahn. I mean I'm Hahnal Algrosser. I mean-"
His stammering was interrupted by a nervous giggle from Jill, which simultaneously entranced and humiliated him. Without thinking, he blurted, "Is it true your nickname is H.H.?" This meant 'the Happy Hooker,' one of the primary monikers used to tease Jill, or so he'd also heard.
That cut off her giggle in mid-throat, if not her own nervousness. "No," she replied, blushing furiously.
"Oh," murmured Allen, "sorry. I didn't really think you were one. A hooker, I mean." Oh, great, he chided himself, you just meet the nicest, prettiest girl you've ever seen, even if it is only as your science project buddy, and you're discussing her future career in the red light district. Come on, man, you can do better than this!
"Um, so, anyway, what project were we assigned?"
"Weren't you paying attention?" Jill asked.
"Er, ah, well, no."
"Well, it's okay, I took notes. You can look at them if you want. We'll be doing the one where you use a dill pickle to power a light bulb."
"Oh," opined Allen. "I was hoping for the one where you light a paper towel on fire inside a milk bottle and it sucks a hardboiled egg in the top. It makes a really cool sucking sound." Oh, crap, he thought, I just said "sucking" in front of her!
"Yes, well, we got this other one," Jill drawled, appearing to be losing interest in the exchange. "I've got light bulbs at home. Can you provide the pickle?"
Allen snorted a loogie halfway across the room to splatter against the front of Mr. Comstock's desk, which he covered by pretending to have sneezed. Great, he thought, the one good thing I've done is not blow boogers in Jill's face. When, in his deepest heart of hearts, what he wanted to do was kiss that face all over - and not stop there.
But such thoughts never got out of his deepest heart of hearts, and so he and Jill went on to collaborate on their pickle bulb project without incident, good or bad. The two got to where they weren't mortified in each other's presence any more, and actually came to be something like friends. Which, for junior high school, was more than sufficient.
But as the next few years passed, what seemed to still be sufficient for Jill was becoming manifestly insufficient for Allen. They were both good students, so they shared many of the same classes and were both in Honor Society and other activities together. They had many of the same friends, so they ran around in the same social settings. But they never had any real time alone together - not because Jill wasn't open to the possibility so far as Allen knew, but because he didn't dare take the risk of asking her out.
It really was a pathetic state of affairs, and it was all the worse for Allen's acute awareness of it. He was in love with Jill, or infatuated at the very least. He longed to be with her in any setting. He would go to places where he knew she'd be walking by and act like he just happened to run into her just so he could say hi. But actually asking her out on a date was out of the question. Even the slightest chance that she'd point and laugh and call him "Baby Dill" the rest of the semester was too much to take. It was an intolerable situation that was bordering on obsession.
The school year came to an end, and he went with his dad on the annual trip to Ohio to visit his grandmother. And he got an idea: he would write Jill a letter. Yeah, that was the ticket - a nice, friendly letter sharing with her what was going on with his summer and asking her what she was doing, and then hinting ever so slightly that he'd give her a call when he got home.
So he did just that: he wrote his letter, he shared what was going on with him, inquired about her summertime activities, and told her that he'd call her when he got back. He folded the paper, stuffed it into the envelope, stamped it, and dropped it in the mailbox.
And when he got home…he never made the phone call. He just couldn't do it. He was too scared. What if he'd overdone it? What if he'd come on too strong?
When school started in September, Jill was colder than a penguin's scrotum. She acted as if they inhabited separate quantum realities.
Allen concluded that the reason why was because he had, indeed, come on too strong in the letter, and cursed himself for sending it. He had no real recourse; he couldn't very well write ANOTHER letter, and he hadn't been able to call her on the phone when she had been platonically friendly to him. He didn't know what to do, so…he did nothing.
That year passed, and then senior year. Allen busied himself with other things, but he never lost his passion for Jill. Graduation came and went, and as always happens, friends and acquaintances went their separate ways. Allen was accepted at a major in-state university, while Jill moved halfway across the country to a small college in Missouri. And still he loved her, such that it never occurred to him to play the field where he was. Besides, he was still as painfully shy as he'd always been.
New Year's Eve of Allen's junior year he was home and got together with some friends to watch Dick Clark's ball descend (that's how Allen described it, anyway), when who should show up but Jill Miller. This is my chance, he thought; enough with this adolescent nonsense; I'm a man now, and she's a woman - I can talk to her. I CAN talk to her. Heck, he thought self-deprecatingly, maybe I can even talk her into joining in a game of strip-Trivial Pursuit.
So, just as he had seven years before, with his heart hammering in his throat, he stammeringly struck up some small talk with Jill. And also like seven years before, she was just as nice, and just as easily embarrassed. But this time Allen managed not to talk about "hookers" and "sucking," although the latter was still definitely on his mind, if still buried deep within it.
Jill told him, to his pleasant surprise, that she had transferred to an in-state school, which was on the other side of the state but still a lot closer than she had been. With this new relational beachhead now established, Allen began corresponding with her regularly, and she with him. And when the summer arrived, he felt emboldened enough to ask her out on a date, and was rewarded with an enthusiastic acceptance.
The two became inseparable, spending almost every day together. It didn't really matter what they did or where they were; their togetherness was all that seemed to matter. Allen had never been happier.
But he still had a problem: his pathological fear of talking to Jill had simply gone on a forced march ahead of him and had now transformed into a pathological fear of intimacy. He could talk with Jill about seemingly every subject under the sun except the personal. And forget about trying to kiss her. Even the thought of holding her hand made him break out in cold sweats, even as it also gave him a constant, running boner of granite proportions.
The dog days debuted, signaling summer's waning. Soon it would be time to return to their respective schools, he thought morosely, and he'd be reduced back to reading her letters and shooting putty at the ceiling.
With such happy thoughts dancing through his head like malignant sugar plumbs, or Dick Clark's undescended balls, Allen called Jill's house to see if she wanted to go see a movie.
