LITMIR.BIZ

       Do I look stoned in fifth grade?

      Looking back over the years, I’ve always gotten a lot of strength from being the underdog, or what felt at the time like the underdog. Maybe that started with Jason Sprott. He had a twin brother, David, but unfortunately for David they weren’t identical. All the girls had a crush on Jason.

      We were in the same class. Jason sat in front, as did his girlfriend, Michelle. I preferred to sit in the back and stare at my crush and his little hair spikes. I recently found the diary I kept in third grade, with pages of scribbles about Jason Sprott. I love Jason Sprott. I hate Jason Sprott. I love Jason Sprott. He smiled at me today. We were assigned our Greek gods and he was Eros, the god of love, and I was the unsexy Hera but he shot me with his arrow.

      One day, I was in the cafeteria and Jason was behind me in the lunch line. After buying my lunch, I spent the thirty-five cents I had left over on the ice milk dessert. Ice milk was imitation ice cream before frozen yogurt was a thing. I guess it was better for you, but to us third graders, it was all the same. At least, it was appealing enough to get Jason’s attention.

      “Man, I wish I could get an ice cream,” I heard him say behind me.

      “I’ll buy you one!” I offered eagerly.

      This transaction—my using my extra change to buy Jason Sprott ice cream, Jason Sprott letting me buy him ice cream—went on for a couple of weeks, until finally he said, “I’ll go out with you, but you’ve got to know that I’m also going out with Michelle.” He was a real class act: he told me about Michelle and was honest that he wanted us both. Sounds good, I thought. I’ll take what I can get!

      Michelle was supercool and popular and had a fountain in her house, which was a big deal. The next year, in fourth grade, I invited her over to my place, and she actually accepted and came to my home. That was a shock. My mom had just bought an inflatable boat from Costco. She blew it up, and Michelle and I put it on my bed and played white-water rafting adventure. We were laughing and really getting into it, riding the make-believe waves and capsizing onto the bed. I’d never seen that side of her. I thought we were having so much fun. A week later, the popular girls all made fun of me because I liked to play boat.

      But back in third grade, when my romance with Jason was blossoming, Michelle and I didn’t have much of a relationship. Shortly after I bought Jason that first ice cream, she came up to me and said, “I know you’re going out with Jason too, and I just want you to know I’m cool with it.” She walked away before I could even respond.

      Jason and I didn’t speak to each other during our courtship. I mostly saw him during recess, when everyone played tag, and of course he never got caught, since he was such a fast runner. It was the hottest thing about him. But even at recess we were G-rated. There was a big moment on the playground when Amy Gray and Sean Bryant were going to have their first kiss and everyone crowded around them and they exchanged the tiniest little peck. That was a pretty huge event—I remember it more than any actual education I got in third grade. The non-kiss was a monumental moment in my social education. But with Jason and me, there was no peck. There was just the lunchroom, where I continued to bribe him daily with ice milk. I knew, on some level, that I was buying this guy. I wasn’t getting his attention on my own merit. Even at eight years old, I was a realist. So while it was exciting that he went out with me, it felt like what I imagine it feels like when you win the lottery but you only win, like, $5,000.

      Still, I envisioned myself as the third-grade Seattle equivalent of a scrappy Boston fighter. All odds were against me—I shouldn’t say that, because I’m a blond white American person—but when it came to Anna versus Michelle, there was no comparison in the eyes of the elementary schoolers. I was the short girl who wore a sheepskin coat to her first day of school; Michelle had a fountain in her house. That pretty much said it all, and yet there I was, sharing Jason with her. For the first time, when it came to social status, I was A-list-adjacent.

      Jason dumped me a couple of weeks later. He confronted me at recess and said, “I don’t think we should go out anymore, I’m just going out with Michelle.” It was a stab to the heart. I was devastated. I had nothing to give him but my thirty-five cents and he didn’t even want that anymore. Maybe Michelle got in his head. She was supersassy and played her cards right. I, on the other hand, was a true sugar mama.

      So I did what any heartbroken eight-year-old would do: I went home, grabbed an orange from the fridge, wrote Jason’s name on the peel in black marker, and threw it off the deck into the forest outside my house. When I was a kid, I wanted to live in the Yukon, so I spent a lot of time in that backyard forest relishing my loneliness. I was dying to live a more dramatic life than Edmonds offered, even then. And this weird ritual, which I deemed “the orange ceremony,” seemed like a start. I don’t know where I came up with it. I certainly didn’t read a book that said to pick up an orange and write a boy’s name on it in order to get over him, but I ended up doing it with a few different love interests. I must have thought it was profoundly symbolic: that by casting this fruit into the abyss, I would somehow rid myself of the hold these emotions had on me. Even at that age, it’s so surprising the intensity of feelings you can have for somebody. I felt the need to be liked and the need to be popular, but I was tortured by that neediness, because I was also proud and wanted desperately to be confident and independent. I thought the ritual would help. I remember throwing the orange out there and thinking, Now I am complete! Now I am over Jason Sprott!

      It didn’t work; I was not released. The next day I went to school and saw Jason, and saw Michelle, and was just as devastated.

      That episode began my long and complicated journey with the idea of closure. Basically, I don’t believe in it. I believe in the concept; I get why people crave it, and I understand why I, even in third grade, sought it from the orange ceremony. It’s frustrating to feel so powerless against your own feelings. But as an adult, I’ve learned that closure is unobtainable. I think it happens at death, maybe. But remembering the pain is a good thing, because all those experiences that you can’t close the door on make you a more empathetic person, and that should be embraced.

      I have a pattern—it takes meeting a new guy to help me get over the old one. In the case of Jason Sprott, it was another Jason. He was the newspaper boy, supercute and a little bit brooding. I left him sodas outside my house every day so he could have a drink while he was delivering papers. I was totally into bribing these guys. What can I give him out of my fridge that will get his attention? I think there are five pages in my diary that read: I am so over Jason Sprott, I am totally into Jason Berry. He is soooooooooooooo hot and such a mystery! But one day he didn’t take the soda, and I think that was his way of saying, “No more, you sad girl.”

      Despite our tragic end, Jason Sprott will always be my first crush. We ended up going to different high schools, so I lost track of him after eighth grade. He has probably changed a lot in the past thirty years. But to me he’ll forever be Jason Sprott: lover of running, subsidized ice cream, and

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