I resolve to ask him why he doesn’t like me during recess, after snack-time, right before the moment that we all recognize instinctively as the time to rush off back onboard the jungle gym, almost with a certain panic, as though we fear it might take off and leave us behind while we must sit with our food. He pauses, wide-eyed, and very simply looks back at her—his chosen playmate—before reluctantly twisting his head back to obligingly respond, as he already knows he must do. Even his body screams of disinterest, awkwardly turned halfway toward me and halfway toward her. It’s disinterest, not annoyance; we’re not quite there yet. You could say it’s confusion, the confusion of being between worlds. But I don’t think he is there yet either; no, he’s simply disinterested and hasn’t learned yet the many options of manipulation euphemitized as “subtleties” for letting someone down with kindness. I know he hasn’t learned that yet, because I haven’t learned that yet, and it’s with that same complete certainty that I have already prepared my rebuttal argument for the line I know he’s going to give me:
“Her birthday is close to mine,” he says.
“But my birthday is exactly the same as yours.”

I don’t remember exactly what happened after that, whether he had follow-up reasoning or I continued my attack. Heck, it could’ve come to pass, even, that he didn’t play along with me at all after that, and just turned fully away to return to her and the monkey bars. It was April, our birthday, and the sun was too bright to allow so much stillness without play, the wind too perfectly pleasant to permit words without the music of laughter, especially of children. It was the perfect month for worry-less play, for word-less play.

But I didn’t experience weather back then, so every day was too sunny to allow stillness, every day too perfectly windy to permit words without my laughter. Every month was for worry-less and word-less play. Every day my birthday. So, I almost forgot about Alec; I even had to ask my mom to remind me of his name. I only remembered this story because it’s a good contribution, to conversations with girls about boy-crushes; I remembered it because soon, too soon after Alec, I started experiencing weather.