I am not the sappy, romantic type. I absolutely hate those scenes in movies where the girl is like, “But I love you!” and then the couple kisses in the rain. I can’t stand to see people displaying affection in public, but even I have succumbed to the plague: the feelings of joy and foolishness, and then utter anguish.

What am I talking about? A crush. A middle school crush, to be exact.

It’s absolutely terrible.

Having a crush feels like Valentine’s Day has thrown up all over you. You feel like a sparkly fairy princess, and whenever your crush is nearby, you always say the stupidest stuff. It’s like your brain has popped out of your skull and walked away. “Hey, do you like those new puffy Cheetos at the cafeteria? Oh, you’re lactose intolerant? Yeah, me too. Um … I mean, no, I’m not. Wait, no, that’s not what I – well, I, uh, I mean, I don’t really like Cheetos that much.”

After obsessing over your crush for months, you feel like maybe, just maybe, he might like you too. After all, he smiles at you during P.E. occasionally, right?

Wrong. So very wrong. Your heart has been crushed into a million pieces. He doesn’t like you. He likes someone else. And of course, that someone is that girl. You know, the one who sits in front of you in Algebra. She’s waaaaay prettier than you’ll ever be, but she’s so nice that no matter how hard you try to hate her, you can’t. You just can’t.

Or maybe your crush does like you back. In that case, hooray for you! You must not have sounded that stupid after all. You tell your friends, and you all have a squealing fit. But because you’re in middle school, this just leads to two weeks of awkwardly smiling at each other in the hallways until your crush decides that you are not of as high a caliber as the other girl that he also likes. He forgets about you and actually asks this girl on a real “date,” or as close to a date as two 12-year-olds can have. He probably just took her to see the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie because that’s the only one his parents would let him see with a girl.

In all seriousness, maybe it’s good that I’ve never been asked out. I mean, in a study done by York University in Toronto, researchers found that kids who started dating at 10 or 12 reported more lying and cheating in relationships than those who started at 15 or 16. The late bloomers were also the students with high academic goals. Besides, next to no one ends up marrying the person they went out with in sixth grade.

But even so, I feel kind of out of the loop. The end-of-year formal is coming up, and I’m going to either awkwardly go by myself or awkwardly go with my awkward (but awesome) friends dressed up as Pokémon or something of the sort.

Until then, I will focus on what’s important: being a kid, doing well in school, and–

Wait, who’s that? Is he new?

He’s kinda cute.

Oh no. Here we go again.