Vday.

In fifth grade, my best friend and I, in preparation for Valentine’s Day, each filled teeny little paper bags with chocolate complete with notes inside saying: “From: Your Secret Admirer”. The plan was to sneakishly stay in during recess, plant the secret valentine’s gifts in the respective crushes desks, and… I’m not sure what our 10 year old brains thought would come of giving an anonymous gift, but when the recess bell rang and everyone flooded back into class – the boys drenched in sweat from playing soccer, the girls with stacks of sticker books (totally the bees knees back in the day) in tow – I was so nervous I couldn’t breathe. Minutes stretched out like hours and years and the teacher was saying something about the solar system and I started most desperately to regret the day I was born. Out of the corner of my terrified eyes I saw the crush reach into his desk (cold sweats), discover the foreign object (hyperventilating), pull it out (near-seizure), read the note (silent screams of agony)… then say out loud, in the middle of class, while the teacher was still talking:

“SUSAN?” (brain short-circuits)

At a complete loss of what to do and feeling his (and the rest of the class’) eyeballs staring directly at me, I all but slammed my head on my desk and pretended to be asleep.

To this day I have no idea how he knew it was me.
I was so mortified I never talked to him again.