This is the latest installment in my memoir project, written as a series of letters to my future daughter. Here are the previous entries: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five
My first crush was Peter Frampton.
Peter Frampton was a British musician from the 70s, when you’re grandmother was young and hip. She’s the one who passed along her humble vinyl collection to me, including a Peter Frampton record called “I’m In You.”
Now this album cover awakened something in me. Was it the fluffy blonde hair? Was it the tight purple pants? Was it the seductive pose? Was it the hilariously overtly sexual title? Maybe it was a combination of these things, plus my own burgeoning sexuality at the age of 12, that led me to feel weird tinglies I’m sure you don’t want to imagine your mother having. All I knew is I wanted to die and be reincarnated as this man’s talk box. Like, I’d never been so jealous of a plastic tube.
But shortly after Peter Frampton came Kyle Kelley. Kyle Kelley was not a British musician from the 70s, but a guy who was actually my age and lived in Michigan and was, you know, actually attainable. But he didn’t feel attainable to me at the time, because he was gorgeous and popular and I was still a tiny weirdo. He had floppy auburn hair with bangs that fell just above his sea-glass eyes. He was short, maybe an inch taller then me, but I could care less. To me, he was the most handsome specimen I’d ever laid eyes on.
We met at church youth group, something I’d been talked into while attending a wedding for one of my aunt’s family members. The youth pastor and his wife were in attendance, and with me being 13-ish and lonely, they figured inviting me to one of their events was the perfect antidote. And it was there that I’d find Jesus — and Kyle Kelley.
I was a little hesitant about the church thing at first, mostly because I wasn’t sure if there was anything supernatural out there at that point. But Kyle Kelley — he was supernatural, this otherworldly beautiful being to me. He looked like a literal angel. Not the terrifying Biblical five-billion-eyes-having angel, thankfully, but part of me was convinced that I’d still be madly in love with him even if he did have five billion eyes. He could be a disembodied foot for all I cared. I just wanted him — bad.
But alas, he was already spoken for. His girlfriend, Cati, was everything I wasn’t. She was a cheerleader (of course), tan and curvy, outgoing and likeable, and generally the antithesis of teenage me. I remember them joking about getting married someday, because doesn’t everyone marry their middle school sweetheart?
I had to do something to win him over, to make him notice me. Like, I did do a pretty mean performance at the youth group air guitar contest to Relient K’s “Sadie Hawkins Dance,” one of Kyle’s favorite songs, which got him to talk to me to congratulate me. It also won me a four-pack of Monster, which everyone joked I did not need after that. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted more.
We went on a couple of trips to the quintessential Midwest amusement parks, Cedar Point and it’s little sister, King’s Island. On the King’s Island trip, his parents were chaperoning, funnily enough, and Chelsea and I got to ride down with them. Kyle was too cool to hang out with his parents and us plebs, so he rode with the cool kids in the cool kid van.
When we finally got there, though, Chelsea and I found ourselves sucked into the cool kids group, somehow, as we all went to ride the biggest roller coaster in the park. Nothing of interest happened here, except that Cati insisted we pray before getting on the ride, and crazily enough, the ride malfunctioned the very next day and I think people died or something. I’d like to think Cati’s prayers spared us.
Cati was turning out to be a literal saint, somehow, which was not the plot twist I was expecting from the pretty, popular cheerleader. When we went to bed that night, she noticed I didn’t have a place to sleep, so she went out of her way to build me a comfy little nest out of couch cushions and blankets. And she made it a point to talk to me, the loser, whenever she saw me by myself (which was a lot). Suddenly, I felt a little guilty for daydreaming about ways to steal her man. She was so…good.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to steal her man, because they ended up breaking it off in eighth grade. I think Chelsea was the one who told me excitedly as soon as she got the news Kyle Kelley was back on the market. And I finally got my chance to show him how badass I was on our youth group trip to Cedar Point.
I don’t know exactly how it happened. He and his friends split, and I got separated from my friends, and somehow we ended up in line for the Millenium Force together. That warm late September night, we stood in the crowded line, so close our hands brushed several times, and he regaled me with stories of hockey and…well, whatever else he was into. This was middle school — not exactly a deep relationship, you know? He was Into sports, though, so I let him yammer on about that, hanging on his every word because he was Kyle Kelley and I was madly in love. When we finally got to the front of the line, he chose the front row seats. I mustered up all the courage in my body to sit down next to him in the front row. We tightened our seatbelts, the car began to move, and he leaned over and whispered to me.
“Keep your hands up.”
And I did. And in that moment, I’d never felt more alive. I was there, with who I believed to be the love of my life, racing through the night sky at breakneck speeds, hands in the air. When we finally landed back on solid ground, we traversed the park to meet up with the others, running through the arcade and laughing the whole time. It was like a movie, and if it had ended at that very moment, that would have been the “good” ending.
Unfortunately, happy endings are just stories that haven’t ended yet. (Isn’t that a Mayday Parade song?)
We didn’t get together immediately after that. It took a few more years of playful flirting and banter for him to finally ask me to be his girlfriend. And when he finally did, I guess it was a little more anticlimactic than I was expecting. Sure, we went through the motions of high school sweethearts, him picking me up for movie dates in his white Grand Prix and all that, but there something was missing. And we never kissed, not until one night at the end of youth group. It was our first kiss, and I had a gut feeling that it was also our last. His lips were like sandpaper. There were no sparks. We had nothing in common. Why was I even dating this guy?
I thought back to the countless nights I cried over at Chelsea’s because I was so scared I’d never end up with him. I remembered all the times I’d fantasized about that moment, our first kiss, and how badly my entire body ached to be close to him. And somehow, now that I had everything I wanted, I could see how shallow this puppy love really was. We were the gender-flipped Avril Lavigne “Sk8r Boi” couple, me the musically-inclined emo kid and him, well…his favorite back was Nickelback. I’d built my entire life around a dude whose favorite band was Nickelback.
My relationship with Kyle Kelley fizzled out with little fanfare, and to be honest, I wasn’t even hurt. Sometimes you need to get what you want to realize you never really wanted it. Sometimes, you just wanted the idea of it. I held onto this idealized version of him for so long, I couldn’t see what he really was — just some guy. And not even a guy I really connected with. In the end, he was just a guy.
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JESSA JOYCE 