As the bottle spun I was terrified it would land on me, and the only reason I didn’t try to melt into the wood paneling that lined my Aunt’s basement was the friend my cousin Paul had invited to his first boy-girl birthday party. Irv had feathered blonde hair and teeth as white and straight as piano keys, and when his smile fixed on me I could barely remember my name. Good thing Paul introduced us, because in spite of my history of straight A’s, being in the same room with Irv made me stupid. I couldn’t think of anything to say, which didn’t really matter since Queen was playing so loud on the 8-track. When the bottle pointed out our match during Bohemian Rhapsody, I followed Irv into the back of the basement. I’d kissed a couple of boys before, but I’d never wanted to kiss any of them as much as I wanted to kiss Irv.

Later, just hearing Bohemian Rhapsody would send me into a trance-like swoon, and even my girlfriends got tired of hearing about him. At first they giggled at my descriptions, and helped me analyze every part of the kiss. How he’d tilted his head, where he put his hands, what he said afterward. We’d walk past Irv’s house a million times, hoping to bump into him, and when I found out Paul and Irv were in the local Park District gymnastics show I begged my friends to go with me. We nudged each other and laughed as the boys tumbled and rolled in a mock pirate fight. His-billowy-shirt-and-sash costume was fodder for my first erotic fantasy, and I spent days and nights thinking about more than kissing him.

Irv didn’t share my infatuation, and though I hung out with Paul one whole summer, thrilling to Irv’s proximity, he didn’t give me a second look. I filled pages of spiral notebooks, lamenting my one-sided relationship in rhymes. Bad rhymes. “I really love you, and you know that this is true; but why can’t you have the same feelings for me that I have for you?”

Those notebooks were tucked away in a cardboard box and moved from my Mother’s house, to my first apartment, then to the house my husband and I shared. After decades of being buried by Christmas decorations and baby furniture in the attic, I unearthed the box the summer I asked my husband for a divorce. The doodles on the covers of those spirals held traces of the girl I used to be, and I studied them for clues to who I’d been before I became a wife and mother. Reading the cheesy poems inside was excruciating.

During the same summer I reconnected with a childhood friend I’d grown distant from. We caught up at a family party, and as we chatted about our lives now, she told me her new boyfriend was picking her up. “I think you used to date him,” she told me, and when he walked in the door a minute later, it was Irv. “We didn’t really date…” I stammered. Dated? No, just kissed. Crushed on. Pined for. Fantasized about.

It would have been awkward enough to see him again if I hadn’t just relived my silly crush in those notebooks, but with those lines of bad poetry fresh in my mind, I was reduced to that tongue-tied girl. Irv was now middle-aged too, and with nowhere near enough hair to feather, but he still had that dazzling smile. All I could think of was the pirate shirt. My discomfort must have been evident, because my friend’s big-mouth brother looked at me and then at Irv and asked, “So did you ever kiss?” I blushed from head to toe. It’s a good thing he’s taken. I don’t think I could take another round of pining over Irv. Besides, I never did think of a rhyme for pirate.