When did you first fall in love?""I think, I first fell in lovewhen I was in fifth gradewith this boy who kept his glass ruler in the sunlight and made rainbows on my desk with it.

Crushes are very strange things; they’re a warning sign in the word itself—crush: to deform, pulverize, or force inward by compressing forcefully. Whoever decided it was a good idea to equate deformity and compression to blooming affection was either very high or a genius—or maybe lost somewhere in between. But for good or bad, I could feel it: my heart pressing inward until the sound of it beating filled my ears again. I had a deformed, pulverized, compressed force on Chris, and there was nothing I could do about it.