Primal, an excerpt

People roll their eyes when I tell them I met him when I was 11.

Thee guy, I say.

Thee love, the first love, whatever you want to call it.

The one that you will talk about for the rest of your life.

You know that moment in a lot of movies where the guy sees a girl

& he just has to have her?

They say that beauty doesn’t matter, but it definitely gets a guy’s attention.

Igniting all primal instincts to get what they want.

Well, unfortunately, I had that experience for a boy.

From the very moment I saw him.

At age 11.

We just moved to Ohio.

New house, new school, new faces.

In my class, I made friends with my seatmate, Sam.

Who I learned was the unofficial class clown,

Which was also the best person you could befriend when in a new environment.

He was that for me.

Will was his best friend.

I met him at recess.

Will had the worst acne you could imagine.

His face nearly wet with sores.

He had brown hair, the tips bleached by sun.

And you know those fuzzy caterpillars that cross you on the sidewalk?

Well, he had two of those for eyebrows.
They were black, bushy, and just barely connected.

But his smile.

He had a permanent smirk out of one corner of his mouth, where his lip would raise to one side.

And at the same time that his lip would raise, the deepest brown eyes exposed a part of him that he didn’t even know I could see.

I’d never seen eyes like that.

Unlike the way it might go for boys, he wasn’t technically pretty.

He wasn't particularly attractive.

In fact, he was the epitome of puberty.

So I'm not sure that it was his looks that got me, or even his eyes.

I’m convinced that what drove me mad was that I was invisible to him.

He paid me no mind.

I wasn’t eye-grabbing for his set of eyes.

He was sweet, funny, & charismatic.

His eyes did the talking, filling in all the gaps.

He wasn't a bully, not a jock, or one of the popular kids.

He was mature, nice, & cracked a lot of inside jokes, but he wasn't a douche about it.

He was a good kid.

But even then, when it came to me, he didn’t care if I lived or died.