“Who do you have a crush on?”

“No one.”

“Liar.”

I am not a liar. Mom says liars are bad people and I don’t want to be a bad person. They say everyone has a crush and if you say you don’t you’re a liar, and I don’t want to be a bad person and I don’t want to be a liar, so I needed a crush.

I weighed the others in my class, running the pros and cons of my small pool of possible loves. There was the boy like a hurricane in a pokemon sweater, loud voice and jagged angry edges. There was the girl like the first gale of fall, so fresh and clean that it left your lungs burning. There was the boy like sunshine peeking through the clouds, pearly white grin juxtaposing eyes as dark as the new moon. 

But there was no one there that left me with butterflies in my chest and a burning in my cheeks like they were supposed to. 

I didn’t want to be a liar though, so I picked my own crush. 

He was one of the tallest of our class, and he had a sort of sharpness against his baby fat that made him seem a bit less soft than the rest of us. He had kind eyes and hair soft and fluffy as a cloud and a particular sort of cool comfort spilled from his every pore. He was pretty and he smelled like spearmint and he never asked stupid questions in class that had annoyance curling up bitter in my throat. 

I wasn’t in love with him or particularly attracted to him, but he was certainly the ideal option for my crush, and so that’s what he became. 

I tried to stand next to him when we lined up for lunch and when I was bored at recess I watched him play soccer and I tried to picture myself kissing him before I gagged and decided that my parents were right and I was far too young for that sort of thing. 

I had never planned on doing anything with my feelings, as dating was for older kids who didn’t feel ill at the notion of things like kissing their classmates. I simply held them close to my chest and shared when asked, letting my choice of my ideal crush become known to my friends so I would no longer be a liar. 

We never grew close, and after a while, I forgot I was supposed to make a dorky smile at him and feel anxiety and euphoria threatening to overwhelm me whenever he deigned to give me his attention and dream about feeling his lips on mine like a kiss from a fairy tale. 

And then we grew up, and my friends grew up as well, and we all seemed to realize crushes were silly little myths made up to make TV shows more dramatic, and I turned my focus to books and my family and my friends, and only considered kissing the other kids my age for a little bit at a time as it still made me queasy, and never really gave much thought to my crush unless I saw him in the hallway and laughed a bit at myself for ever acting so foolishly. 

And then it happened again. 

“So, do you have a crush on him?” 

“Definitely not.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

And they didn’t call me a liar this time, even though I could tell they thought I was.

They were wrong though. I wasn’t a liar, and I had never had a crush.