Ira Glass

By adult standards, it was a peck.

I'd say by grade six standards, you got laid.

It turns out that Ken remembered exactly one story about me.

Now, I mean, when that happened, did I seem cool like a bad boy?

No.

More than anything, I wanted Karen to notice me.

But not in that way.

I think the problem with my theories was that I expected her to fall for me the same way I fell for her.

That she would see me from afar, reading to our classmates, sleeping like a little prince.

I thought that's what it took for someone to fall in love.

I wanted her to think that this was the real me.

I wanted to think it was the real me.

And the truth of it was that the real, real me was getting screamed at and having his desk spilled on the ground each day.

There's a way you can love a girl in grade six that you'll never have again.

There's something about kids, or at least the way I was as a kid, that is purely romantic, in the truest love-sonneteering sense of the word.

Only a year or two later, my theories on the ways of love had changed drastically.

By seventh grade, I had some spin-the-bottle sessions under my belt, and I had concluded that instead of dreaming about a true love I couldn't have, I should get a little bit more pragmatic about the whole thing.

One night,

After deciding I wanted to have a real girlfriend, I called up identical twin sisters I liked, Darlene and Elizabeth.

Darlene answered.