Everyone Had a Crush on Dan

When I was ten, a new boy named Dan showed up at our school. Life would never be the same.

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By the time I was ten, I knew where I stood socially: at the bottom of the totem pole. Several times, the popular girls in my grade (led, oddly enough, by two unrelated sets of evil identical twins) tried to help “make me over.” They put on their best romcom hats and tried to encourage me to wear makeup, stop dressing like an extra in the opening scene of Austin Powers and calling everything “groovy,” start watching more MTV and stop playing with (and constantly discussing the trials and tribulations of) my American Girl Dolls. But one by one (or should I say, two by two) they gave up on me. I was irredeemably uncool.

I was in an odd space as an awkward, unpopular ten-year-old, because I was weird, but not geeky. I didn’t have much in common with the hall monitors, AV nerds and late bloomers. In fact, I was boy-crazy, in a way that was a bit precocious for my age. I had already experienced one heartbreak—at the beginning of the school year, my boyfriend Jason, from fourth grade, had dumped me in the middle of our birdwatching field trip. In hindsight, I think he just completely forgot that we were dating, because we hadn’t spoken all summer.

I was devastated by Jason’s falcon-backdropped betrayal. To add insult to injury, one of the aforementioned duos of identical twins pulled an elaborate catfish prank where they told me he had cheated on me (not sure what this entailed at ten—a hug?) with a girl from another school named Teresa. To keep credibility, they somehow roped multiple other kids into this prank, including a friend of mine who eventually fessed up to the deception. I spent countless weekends worrying over what Teresa had that I didn’t—if she was prettier, had better clothes, or did a better Austin Powers impression. I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized she was imaginary, although I was a bit perturbed that upwards of ten kids in my class had collaborated on deceiving me.

But around then, something changed. A new kid moved to our town. His name was Dan.

I didn’t think much of Dan at first. He looked childish and was very short (at this age, the girls generally towered over the boys—think Hey Arnold proportions.) But he was also a bit exotic, because our town was almost exclusively Italian and/or Jewish. Dan came from Scandinavian or German stock, I still don’t remember. Where the rest of us had espresso hair, unibrows and “awkward phase” noses—many of which would disappear on sixteenth birthdays—Dan had a little button nose, a sandy mushroom cut, and his skin was salmon-colored and perpetually sunburned. I was so unfamiliar with such a phenotype that when he arrived at our school, I mistook his peeling, sunburnt nose with some kind of skin disorder and surmised that Dan was slowly decaying.

Eventually, our fifth grade Girl World decided on something groundbreaking: Dan was hot.