To Joey McIntrye, with Love, Jen Calonita

Confession: I didn’t have a boyfriend in high school. Okay, technically I had one senior year for half a second and then he dumped me at the senior prom (a blog post for another day). But in my mind, I was already involved with one of the biggest pop stars on the planet—Joey McIntrye of New Kids on the Block.
You just spit your coffee across the room and started laughing, didn’t you? That’s okay, my friends in high school laughed too. But while they were getting their hearts broken at their lockers, I was daydreaming about life on the road with my cherubic-looking crush. Curly, dirty blond hair, big, blue eyes that made me feel like goo, and the voice of an angel who loved Frank Sinatra tunes—I was hooked from the moment I saw Joe. I spent hours listening to NKOTB tunes, staring at my Joe posters, and imagining what life would be like when I had enough money for front row tickets to a concert. Joe would look down from the stage and see me, stop singing, and, of course, be completely smitten. The thought of life on the road with the guys was thrilling too. I’d get to travel to all the places in the United States I had never seen and get to visit Europe. Fantasy Joe was always charming, terribly thoughtful, and completely in love with me—like any good boyfriend should be.
So when a high school fall dance rolled around back in the “real world,” my heart plummeted. I couldn’t daydream my way out of this predicament. Everyone took dates to school dances back then, and I’d suffered one too many times having to do the asking to a dance only to have a guy agree to go with me “as friends.” If only I knew Joe and could ask him to go. Instead, I did the next best thing: I wrote him a letter. I’m not a poet, but I believe my letter actually rhymed and included NKOTB song lyrics. The edges of the giant posterboard I created were filled with photos of him from various copies of Bop and 16 magazines. At the bottom of the poster, I mustered up the courage to ask him to go to the dance. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. There was only snail mail when I was in high school—no Twitter, no social media begging— and eventually when I never heard back from the New Kids on the Block fan club, my friends set me up with a “friend” to go to the dance with. I survived. Life went on.
And then one day in April, the mail came.

The postcard was small and handwritten, but the New Kids on the Block logo stamped in the top right-hand corner made me scream at the top of my lungs. It was a personal note from Joe McIntyre’s mom, Kay! The note, which you can read here, thanked me for my gift, and explained that Joe was away on tour in Europe and would have to miss his own high school graduation. I think this was her way of saying Joe could not go to a dance that had already passed, but I didn’t care. JOEY MCINTYRE’S MOM HAD WRITTEN ME A LETTER! For a year, I could recite it verbatim. I carried it around on me like a driver’s license. Eventually, I grew up, headed to college in Boston (which, I swear, had nothing to do with the fact that Joe was actually from Beantown), and moved on from Joe.
Or so I thought.
My love of writing never waned. After college, I began working in magazine publishing and eventually landed at Teen People where my editor was sweet enough to somehow snag me an interview with my former crush. Needless to say, I found it overwhelming. The boy I had spent years dreaming about, fantasizing about a life with, and sleeping on sheets with his face on it, was now sitting right in front of me. Married or not, that giddy, 16-year-old crush came roaring back and I could barely form a sentence in Joe’s presence let alone get up the courage to take a picture with him (a former colleague swears we took one, but no one can find it). Was Joe everything I hoped he’d be? Yes and no. He was real and obviously different from the Joe I had created in my mind, but he was still my favorite crush of all time.

Today, when I speak at schools about my books, I love to tell kids to write what they know and love. Twenty-five after my crush on Joe, I’ve finally done just that with I’m With the Band, the first middle grade novel in the VIP series. In the book, Mackenzie Lowell gets to do what I never did—go on the road with her favorite boy band and keep a diary of her time with them. The book is inspired by my years at Teen People when I got to go on the road with music acts like ’Nsync, but it’s also very much about my crush on Joe and how a real person matches up with the image you’ve created of them in your mind.
And that letter I wrote Joe? Mac writes a letter of her own to the band before she meets them that is very much like the one I wrote Joe all those years ago. After all these years, I guess I still owe my crush a thank you. Joe McIntyre not only helped me survive high school, he inspired me to never stop dreaming of a life bigger than the one I lived.
I’m With the Band is in stores today. The sequel, Battle of the Bands, will be out in July.