YA Outside the Lines

  Was there chemistry involved in my first crush, you ask? Who knows. It was toward the end of 5 th grade when I first discovered that, hmm, we girls did crush on boys. Maybe I discovered that because I wasn’t the only one who had a crush on Ricky. I’ll never know what happened to him because, after that school year, we both moved. And it’s not like we could track anyone on social media back then. The crush on Ricky was the first of many unrequited journeys into that sphere. I could list vague reasons why none of those crushes panned out, or I could launch into one crush that broke me little by little. I had a crush on chemistry. Well, not just chemistry, but science in general. And math. As a person who loved puzzles and logic games, I was all over solving whatever mysteries science and math threw at me. Algebraic equations? Bring on the puzzles! Geometry proofs? The ultimate! Chemical reactions? Pure magic! And I was good at that. So good. Until I, inconceivably, lost inte...