I just typed an entry about something that happened to me in fifth grade. I vaguely remembered writing about this same thing in a different journal some time ago, so I decided to see how the entries varied. As it turns out, the details are almost identical. Bizarrely so. I even went off on the same tangents! But the style was very different. I think the 2004 version is more fun, so I've decided to post it here instead of what I wrote today.
Once upon a time, there was a 10-year old girl named Mindi. Mindi was in the 5th grade and went to a private school that was so small there were only two classrooms. One was for the kids in 1st through 4th grades and the other was kids in 5th through 8th. Classes were taught a little differently in that the curriculum was combined to two grades. For example, 5th and 6th graders took the same curriculum which alternated each year. The year Mindi started 5th grade, the 6th grade was being taught. This was how, after moving to a new school for 6th grade, Mindi ended up taking 6th grade curriculum again, and therefore never had 5th grade at all.
But that's another story.
In the Big Room, as the classroom with the older children was called, P.E. class was the period before lunch. (This becomes important later.)
One night, a few days after Halloween, Mindi had a strange and disturbing dream. In this dream, she was acting in a school play opposite a 7th grader named Allen. During a rehearsal, Allen suddenly kissed her passionately and told her that he was in love with her.
That was all it took for Mindi to fall in love with him in real life. Even though she'd never thought much of Allen before except as an older, taller boy whom she feared during dodgeball, he suddenly became all she could think about at all. He seemed cute, sweet, and charming -- like he could literally be the boy of her dreams.
Since Halloween had just passed, Mindi decided she would put some candy in his desk with a note saying that she was his secret admirer. She sneaked out of the gym during P.E. and, as planned, placed the candy in his desk. Then she rushed back to the gym. In her haste, she forgot to leave the note, which turned out to be just as well.
Mindi watched discreetly as Allen sat down to eat his lunch. He spotted the candy immediately, picked it up, and looked around the room quizzically. At the end of his lunch, he ate it. That was such fun for Mindi that she decided to do it again the next day. And the day after that. And the day-- Okay. It actually continued for probably about two or three weeks. By this time, she had run out of Halloween candy to give Allen, so she used her own money to buy him candy at the store. The best deal she could find was BloPops for 7 cents each, so that's what she gave him several days in a row.
Allen was no longer surprised to find the candy in his desk. He started coming in and looking in his desk immediately after P.E. to see what he got.
One bizarre day, after eating his lunch, Allen wandered around the classroom, asking people if they had any left-over food to give him. Mindi was so excited that he was actually talking to her that she said yes, and without thinking of the repercussions, pulled out one of the BloPops from the very back of her desk. Allen's jaw dropped and his eyes widened. Then he smiled. His best friend, Ben, scowled, and the two of them went out to the hall and started kicking each other.
"What's wrong with those two?" asked Janee, a seventh-grade girl.
"They're fighting over Mindi," said Larry, a seventh-grade boy.
Mindi was so excited she thought she was going to shriek aloud. Did this mean that Allen and Ben both loved her? Was she going to have to choose between them?
In the end, nothing happened with either boy, and Allen never said anything to Mindi about the secret admirer thing, either. It seemed that maybe he wasn't her dream boy after all. Since her cover was blown, she didn't think it would be much fun to keep spending her money on candy for Allen. She wasn't sure whether he even deserved it. So she stopped doing so, and used the money to buy candy for herself.
The End.