The things I learned in middle school English class seem to be extrapolated over and over again. It’s all disillusionment and bildungsroman. I did, however, enjoy Holden Caulfield’s hypocritical hate of all the supposed phonies in the world in Catcher in the Rye, remembering how the “cool kids” always seemed to be so superior in their golden nest of twigs, although the book itself was nothing more than a mind-numbing rant.

I have noticed something about English class these days. The women are all over me! Just kidding. However, although I have been compared to a flower in terms of sex appeal, I can’t seem to find “that special person”. This year I’ve had the ability to taste the generic high school affair that usually lasts about a month. That’s quite an improvement. Back in the day I couldn’t so much as say one word before turning red as a cherry. This is also the first year that I have had a real, debilitating crush that was not related to James. It was the type of unrequited love that hurts… a lot. It was a difficult period, but I forced myself to smell the cheese sour.

Her name was Azul, blinded as if by the sun and blue sky. We conversed occasionally on the way to Daniel’s English class. Initially I thought she had a small crush on me, which I later found out to be true, or at least somewhat, but at the time I was with someone else and therefore dismissed it. The crush hit like a small rock one morning when my friends and I were preparing a love-o-gram to somebody else and Azul materialized out of thin air. I didn’t know why I couldn’t help feeling like a jackass. In any case I fell for her, but when I started talking to her she started getting all nervous and unsure. She had just denied another man, named Joseph, and the same thing happened to him. I enlisted the help of her friend Julia, who just so happened to be sitting next to me in Math. She was small girl with a tired personality who would volunteer for such a thing precisely because of the gossip-like nature of it. What she found out was hardly satisfactory or even specific. She said that somehow in a recent conversation Azul had revealed who she liked without the least bit of nudging, “[Azul] said that she liked a lot of people I didn’t, like, even know. Probably seniors. She mentioned you but I think its just one of those things, you know? She’s weird about these things.”