When Amy Raudenfeld was in the second grade, her best friend, Karma Ashcroft, confessed to her that she had a crush on Anthony Wainwright, a fourth grader. Karma could talk for hours about Anthony, about the way his hair fell just right across his forehead, about the beautiful deep blue color of his eyes, about how cute he was when he played kickball at recess. Amy would listen politely, smiling and nodding when she felt it was appropriate. But she didn't really understand. What did Karma mean when said this boy was cute? She didn't think too much of it, though. She was only eight; she'd understand eventually.
As the years passed there were countless times when Amy was asked the question: "Do you think this guy's cute?" Or sometimes it was: "Which one of these guys do you think is hotter?" Each time she'd become flustered. She never knew how to answer. What exactly was it that made someone "hot"? There had to be something, she'd think to herself, some specific quality that boys had that determined whether they were hot or not. And whenever she was asked who she liked, she'd say she didn't like anyone. But usually the person asking the question refused to believe her, so she'd picked a boy in her class to use a default answer. Although, she was always stumped when they asked her what she liked about him.
At the same time, she'd begun hearing a lot about "gay people" at school. She didn't know what the word "gay" meant, but from the way the kids at school said it she knew it mustn't be good. After a while, the word began to make her uncomfortable. Whenever she heard it, she was thrown into an instant state of internal panic. Oh my god, what if I'm gay? she'd think. Then almost immediately her thoughts would turn to: No. You're not gay. You are not gay. Don't think about things like that. The thought of somehow being gay terrified her, and she still didn't really know what being gay was.
By the time she reached high school, Amy was beginning to worry that she'd never understand what other girls were talking about when they said a guy was hot. She tried to like boys. She tried to have crushes. She tried to convince herself that she did understand. She'd pick a guy and tell herself that she could see herself dating him but no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn't imagine ever being more than friends. Then she would wonder what was wrong with her. There were plenty of guys at school that she liked hanging out with. They were fun to be around, intelligent, friendly, and not exactly ugly. But they weren't the type of people whose faces would appear in her dreams. They weren't the type of people whose names would fill her insides with thousands of butterflies when spoken. They weren't the type of people she could imagine herself kissing, marrying, living the rest of her life with. And because of this she began to think she was broken.
The day she and Karma were mistaken for a lesbian couple was one of the scariest of her life. Here was this word that she'd fought with herself over for so many years, being applied to her as if it were no big deal. By then she had some general knowledge of what the word meant, but it still carried a bad connotation with her. But she played along because Karma wanted her to. She could pretend to be a lesbian without actually becoming one, right?
Then they kissed. And Amy was left to re-evaluate everything that had ever happened in her entire life. And she began to learn things about herself that she'd always wanted to know. Maybe all those years when she thought that she couldn't answer all those questions, she'd just been approaching them the wrong way. Because now she knew what the word "hot" meant when it wasn't just referring to temperature. She knew what it felt like to think someone was cute. And she thought she might have known all along if she hadn't been focusing on the wrong people. Because, in reality, she'd had crushes. She'd had a lot of crushes. None of them, however, were on boys. She kissed her best friend and her life, and her feelings, seemed to spiral out of control in a way that she didn't know how to handle, but she finally understood.