I have a terrible confession to make: I have a crush on a boy. Yes, that’s right. Emily Wong, the girl who once declared that if a boy so much as looked at her, she’d run away screaming, is currently obsessing over a homo sapien with XY chromosomes.

I’ve always thought of boys as a separate race, scratch that, an alien species from another planet. I’ve seen them as filthy, barbaric creatures wholly below the dignified, superior female race. All throughout elementary school I witnessed firsthand the shenanigans and crazy antics that boys engage in. There were those who fought pretend wars, running around, shooting finger guns while making obnoxious “pew pew” sounds and dramatically collapsing to the ground, moaning with supposed pain when “hit”. There were those who physically fought each other. They stared at each other with menacing expressions, fists clenched, knees bent, pretending they were boxers battling for a world championship. They threw punches and kicked each other, often with loud “hi-yah”’s, before falling to the ground and laughing their heads off as I watched in horror. Another subspecies of the male aliens were the “sporty boys”. These lunatics spent every recess running around kicking and throwing balls, getting hot and sweaty for no good reason. The basketball boys shoved and pushed, jostling into position to get a rebound or tugging, refusing to let go of a loose ball as if their life depended on it. The soccer boys risked the health of their ankles running all over the gopher hole-ridden field, kicking balls with tremendous force directly at the faces of their opponents. These rough and meaningless play behaviors were utterly incomprehensible and only reinforced my notion that boys were inferior, stupid, crazy heathens.

But somehow, some way, my indestructible notions and opinions of the male species slowly faded away. Maybe it was puberty. Maybe it was exposure to more males and exposure to new forms of male behavior. Whatever it was, by seventh grade, I no longer saw boys as barbaric heathens, but as fellow human beings.