I'd had a crush on her ever since the first day I saw her. Which was kind of strange considering that I was a girl. I never thought that I was a lesbian though. I thought it was just a stage I was going through. My mom was a shrink so she was always talking about how I was going to go through stages to find out what my true colors were. Little did she know they were going to be red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.

But the first time I saw Amie it was like someone had poked their bony finger in my chest. Hard. So hard that it dug deep into my skin, down into my flesh, and to my lungs, knocking all the air out of me. I actually gasped as I saw her on that soccer field, kicking the white and black ball around by herself. Luckily no one was around to see me standing there with my mouth wide open, practically hyperventilating at the sight of her. If they had, they probably would've been able to realize just what was going on.

I stood there on the other side of the field, admiring her soccer skills that obviously took her her whole 14 years of life to accumulate. She passed the ball from her right foot to her left, only to pass it to her right again. Her long, dark, curly hair was pulled into a ponytail that bounced around as she bounced the soccer ball off of her feet. I heard giggling chatter coming up behind me and turned around to see about half of my girls soccer team spill out of a large, dark green, family van. I cleared my throat and wiped the drool that was drying on the side of my face.

"Hey Leslie!" One of the oncoming girls said, recognizing the back of my head.

I turned to face the group again. "Hi," I said cheerfully.

"Coach here yet?" Dina,a girl with short, fiery red hair asked.

I shook my head. Dina propped her soccer ball up on her hip and frowned. "Dammit," She said. "I wanted her to introduce me to our new team member. I want to be the first to meet her." Another girl furrowed her brow.

"If the coach introduced you to her then you wouldn't be the first to meet her. Coach would," She said. Dina took the ball off of her hip and threw it at the girl.

"Shut up," She said jokingly. The girl picked up the soccer ball and threw it back. They threw the ball back and forth between each other before we heard a shrill whistle. Our coach, Ms. Piedman, walked up to us with the whistle in between her lips.

"What did I say?" She shouted. Dina dropped the ball to the ground. "When you're on my field, the ball never touches your hand unless you're a goalie. That's how you become the best player you can be," Ms. Piedman said.

"What about when we're putting the ball into the car to take to practice?" A girl on my team named Kayla asked. Ms. Piedman glared at her.

"Then you kick up and into the car," She said ina low growl. "Now get on the field! We're staring practice, now, now, now!" She shouted, waving us in the direction of the soccer field. We all ran onto the field and starting doing our daily warm up which was jogging around the field 10 times.

The girls chattered away about how much of a bitch Ms. Piedman was while we jogged, but I just watched her walk over to the far side of the field where Amie was. Ms. Piedman said something to Amie, and then held her hand out to introduce herself. Amie put her hand in Ms. Piedman's and smiled. God, she looked even more gorgeous when she did that. She had supple, red lips that were just begging to come in contact with mine. I suddenly felt like I was being pulled towards her. Some outside force was controlling me and making my body head straight for Amie's. Unfortunately, no outside force was pulling me towards Amie. However, my carelessness was pushing me into yet another girl on my soccer team who was named Olivia. We stumbled over each other and almost fell before I gathered my balance again. Everyone ran around Olivia and I as we saved ourselves from our almost untimely demise.

"God, watch where you're going Leslie!" Olivia complained, starting up her running again.

"Sorry," I whimpered but I was pretty sure she didn't hear me.

After warming up our muscles and stretching them out, Coach Piedman called my whole soccer team over to where her and Amie were standing. After we had all gathered in a group around our coach, Ms. Piedman began speaking.

"Girls, I'd like you all to meet our new teammate. She's taking the place of Cathy who, unfortunately had to move to California."

"I'm gonna miss Cathy," Dina said in a small voice. I felt a tiny ball of sympathy for Dina. Her and Cathy had been pretty great friends, even if Cathy was a venomous snake towards me.

"Well, there's no need to miss Cathy because we have Amie now," Coach Piedman said. Her insensitive comment resulted in Dina biting her lip and looking up towards the cloud-filled sky to keep herself from crying. But I had hardly noticed that because I now knew the name of the beautiful princess standing before me.

"Amie," I whispered, letting the single syllable slide off my lips like a droplet of water. I whispered it again. "Amie," This time, Amie heard me and looked up. Her green eyes pierced straight through my soul and she smiled. She smiled right at me. I was in heaven.

*+*+*+*

That night I fell asleep to the thought of Amie. I hadn't thought about her after I had come home from soccer practice because I had homework and chores to do. But now that my mind had settled from worrying about things like grades, I thought about the one thing I wanted to think about: Amie. These feelings I had about her were strange. I'd never felt them before, not even because of a boy. I felt like I was going to be sick but felt warm and fuzzy at the same time. I never had enough time to wonder why I'd never had a crush on a boy. I was always busy playing piano, or playing soccer, or getting straight A's. I had liked this other girl in my class named Allison before but I never felt like this. Amie was the only one to make me feel this way. And she hadn't even said anything to me. She just smiled.

I rolled over and grabbed my pillow. I crouched up in the fetal position and wrapped my legs around the pillow so that part of the pillow was between my legs. Then I rested my head on the other part of the pillow. I closed my eyes and saw her face. I honestly wanted that pillow to be her. I wanted that more than anything in the world.

*+*+*+*

I was annoyed when I went to soccer practice two days later on Friday and saw Dina chumming it up with Amie. I had finally talked myself into saying something to Amie in the hopes that we'd at least become friends and now Dina had stolen that chance from me. Throughout the whole practice I had the urge to kick the ball right into the back of Dina's lumpy head. I knew that I'd get caught if I did that so I decided against it. When practice was over, everyone calmed down and eventually went home. Everyone except Amie and me. My mother must have been running late or something, but whatever the reason was for why she didn't pick up me up didn't even matter to me. Now was my chance. I could at least make Amie my friend. I knew we wouldn't be girlfriends because she was too beautiful to want to go out with girls. She probably had billions of boys pounding her door down. But at least if we became friends, there'd be the possibility of hearing her comforting voice and seeing her lovely face everyday. I got up off of the bench I was patiently waiting on for my mom and walked over to where Amie was playing with her soccer ball.

"Hi," I squeaked. She looked up from her ball and smiled at me.

"Hi," She replied. Her voice rubbed me like an expensive sheet of velvet.

"So your name's Amie, right?" I asked, pretending as if it wasn't permanently burned into my brain. Her smile stretched to a grin, showing off a mouth of perfectly straight, pearly white teeth.

"Don't act like you don't know," She said sweetly, still grinning. "I saw you whispering it yesterday," All of the blood in my body rushed to my face and made me look like a beet.

"Well.uh.I.," I stammered. Amie stopped rolling the ball around with her feet and laughed.

"It's okay," She said. "Lots of people like my name. Especially since it's not spelled the conventional way.

I swallowed my embarrassment and said,"Really?" She nodded, still smiling.

"Yup. It's spelled A-M-I-E instead of A-M-Y," She said.

"Cool," I replied. I watched as she picked her soccer ball off of the ground and put it on her hip. She had beautiful hips. As a matter of fact, she had a beautiful body. It was curvy in all the right places and not a pound too much or too little on her.

"So what's your name?" She asked.

"Leslie," I answered. "It doesn't have a unique spelling or anything. It's just spelled the normal, boring way. L-E-S-L-I-E," I continued. She smiled.

"I still think it's beautiful," She said, sheepishly grinning at me. The blood came rushing to my face again. I cleared my throat.

"So, um.do you wanna play a small game? You know, just the 2 of us?" I asked looking down and playing with my nails.

"Sure," She said dropping her ball on the ground and kicking it towards me. I picked it up and went to one goal and dragged it closer to the inside of the field. Amie went over to the other goal and did the same thing. Then I bounced her ball on the tips of my feet and kicked it over to her. She caught the ball before it went into her goal and aimed it towards mine. I caught it with my foot and ran closer to her goal, trying to kick it in. We playfully fought over the ball a little with our feet until I finally got the ball past her.

"Goal!" I shouted throwing my hands up into the air. She smiled a genuine smile and went to go get the ball. Once she retrived it we started the game up again.

"So, do you like our team so far?" I asked as we wrestled with the ball.

"Yeah," She answered, sounding a little winded. Something pricked the back of my throat and

"Do you like Dina a lot?" came tumbling out of my mouth.

"Yeah. She's real cool," Amie answered kicking the ball into my goal. "Goal," She said, wiping some strands of curly hair out of her face. I felt a hard pinch of jealousy somewhere deep inside me.

"Oh yeah? What makes her so great?" I growled, sounding a lot meaner than I meant to. I kicked the ball and Amie came running for it.

"Well, you know.she's really nice. And she was the first person to approach me since I haven't started school yet," She said trying to steal the ball from me. "And, you know, she's feeling really down since her best friend moved all the way to California."

"I would've approached you first. And that best friend of hers was possessed," I said, getting a little distracted from our game. That's how Amie got a second ball past me.

"Goal again," She smiled wiping her brow with her hand. She was so gorgeous. There's no way I could be mad at her for liking Dina and feeling sorry for her. But I could be mad at Dina. I got the ball and kicked it real hard, imagining it was Dina's deformed head. Amie started to say something but the ball smacking her in her mouth cut it off. I gasped and ran over to where Amie was bending over on the field. She was crying a little and spitting bright red blood out of her mouth.

I gently lifted her up and looked in her face. It was wet with tears but she wasn't really crying. The tears had leaked from her eyes because of the pain but Amie wasn't actually sobbing and whimpering.

"Oh, my God. I am so sorry Amie! I'm really sorry! Honest!" I squealed. She looked up at me and her eyes twinkled.

"I know I was beating you but, damn, did you have to hit me in the face?"

I was shocked. She hated me. We couldn't even be friends now because I'd hit her in the face with the soccer ball. I let my stupid jealousy of her and Dina's friendship consume me and now I was going to have to pay the ultimate price.

Amie smiled. "I'm kidding." She said.The word "Ow,"came out of her mouth after that and she immediately stopped smiling.

I let out a weak laugh and said, "Good. So you know I'd never purposely hurt you?" She nodded and then winced. I lifted my thumb up and wiped some of her blood from around her mouth. Then, out of the blue, I did something totally crazy. I leaned forward and kissed her. It tasted coppery and I felt some of her blood slide into my mouth but for some reason I didn't find it disgusting. I stopped kissing her for a second and turned my head to the left and spit her blood out of my mouth and onto the ground. Then I turned and faced her. I shouldn't have because as soon as I did my stomach started flip-flopping like crazy. Amie just stood there, looking at me. I was pretty sure I made a mistake. She must've been totally grossed out and now she wanted to slap me but was too shocked to do it. Then she said something. It was barely above a whisper.

"Kiss me again."

I just stood there with my stomach getting in tighter and tighter knots by the second. Then she said it again, except this time her voice was shaking.

"Kiss the pain away."

I moved closer to her and put my lips on hers. I softly ran my tongue over her lips trying to lick away all the blood, all the pain I had caused her. I turned and spit out her blood again and turned back to her. I kissed her again and turned away for a 3rd and final time, spitting out the rest of her blood. She turned her head the same way I had and spit out any little bit of blood that was still in her mouth from her busted lip. Then we faced each other and kissed. We really kissed. It wasn't a kiss to get the blood out of her mouth, but a kiss just because we wanted to kiss each other.

She placed her hands on my waist and moved them all the way up my back to my shoulders. I responded by just letting my hands rest on her waist. I felt like a thick blanket was being wrapped around us, secluding us from the rest of the world and warming up our bodies in the process. I wanted to keep kissing her, to keep holding on to her, and I never wanted to let go. But we eventually had to break apart. I opened my eyes and watched as she stood there, opening hers.

"Much better." She whispered, sliding her hand off my shoulder and down my arm to my hand. She took my hand in hers and squeezed it tight. I squeezed back.

*+*+*+*

My mom finally picked me up that day. An hour and a half late.

"I'm so sorry! I forgot that I had a parent-teacher conference at Jasmine's school today!" My mother said, referring to my little sister. "I didn't realize until I was coming to pick you up. I turned around and headed in the opposite direction. I should've called and asked Olivia's mom to take you home," She said,making sure I had my seatbelt on before she started the car up again.

"Oh, it's okay," I smiled. Jasmine looked at me suspiciously.

"Why are you so happy?" She asked narrowing her eyes. "And why are you all flushed?" She continued.

"I don't know," I giggled, but I knew exactly why. My mom looked at me in the rear view mirror and smiled.

"Yeah, you do seem kinda giddy," She said. Suddenly, a light bulb went off in Jasmine's head and a smile spread across her face.

"I know why you're so happy," She said. "Leslie's gotta boyfriend! Leslie's gotta boyfriend!" She sing-songed. I playfully shoved her.

"Shut up! I do not!" I giggled. Actually, I had a girlfriend.