May 16, 2002 | 8:58 AM

The first person I ever fell in love with wasn�t a boy.

Her name was Ella. She was Lebanese with dark curly shoulder length hair and huge green eyes. Her full pouty mouth seldom turned up at the corners and was perpetually highlighted in blood red lipstick. She wore purple Doc Martens and a black choker around her milky white neck.

Ella had the body of a dancer, the brain of a rocket scientist, and total disdain for high school aristocracy. She hung out with all the bad kids�the ones who smoked weed behind the school, but she got straight A�s and was fluent in several languages. I saw her once splayed out on the floor by her locker, reading Camus in the original French�not for a class, but for fun. Her father was a very important surgeon at a local hospital, and she and her family lived in a stunning mansion atop a hill, obscured by trees and hidden from the sun.

Ella lived outside of the social structure, and most everyone was in awe of her.

Including me.

I was so smitten. And I couldn�t tell a soul. I�d always liked boys and never had a thing for any other girl but her. It was confusing and astounding and strange. And I didn�t know what to make of it.

When I fell in love with her, we were fifteen years old. Ella sat in front of me in French class. One day she noticed a Siouxi and the Banshees CD on my desk.

She picked up the CD and tilted her head. Those scathing jade eyes sliced into me

You like this kind of music? Really?

I was afraid of her�her beauty and her intellect and her barbed wit. But I managed to make a snarky comment about goth music�one that proved I was �in the know.�

She snickered at the joke, and told me she liked The Creatures more than the Banshees.

I didn�t miss a beat.

I liked �Boomerangs�, but could never really get into �Feast�, and all in all I like just about everything the Banshees have done except �Superstition.�

From that day on we were fast friends.

When our class went on an exchange trip to Paris, I spent the entire time being lead about the city by Ella. She had been all over the world and this was at least her dozenth trip to France. Together we attended Easter service at Notre Dame. Stared at Chagal�s Le Tour Eiffel at La Musee D�Orsee. Stole menus from Les Deux Magots. Floated down the Seine in a little tug boat in the wee small hours as Edith Piaf blared from the speakers.

We shared a room in a cheap American hotel outside the city and spent our late nights discussing Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and Shelly and Keats, and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and Sartre and De Beauvoire.

And Douglas Coupland and Jay McInerny for good measure, too of course.

Outside Sacre Cour she told me she loved me. That I was the only one who understood her.

I told her I couldn�t imagine spending a moment away from her. That she enchanted me.

It was all frightfully anxty and arty and precocious and precious and all the words you use to describe two girls in love at fifteen in Paris.

When we got back to the states, Ella made me a mix tape of indie rock and shoegazer music. This was 1992, and the first song on the tape was Plants and Rags by PJ Harvey.

Plants and rags
Ease myself into a body bag

She titled the tape, Everything you see was meant to be misunderstood, a line from a sebadoh song I hadn�t yet heard.

After that, things went nowhere.

Whatever there was between us couldn�t thrive and bloom in the context of a suburban high school. We couldn�t even give our connection a name.

Between the summer of sophomore and junior years, Ella changed. She began hanging out with the party crew and didn�t wear docs or a choker anymore. She started playing soccer and was editor of the yearbook. She smiled a lot more and toned down the sarcasm. I�m sure she was happier and more fulfilled. But at the time, it reminded me of when an indie band you love puts out a really mainstream album and a bunch of people you don�t like buy it. I had forever lost Ella to the world at large. We stayed casual friends until graduation but the magic was gone.

She went on to an Ivy League college and later worked for a foreign newspaper. Now I hear she�s getting her masters in creative writing.

I wrote a song about her recently. If you come see the Sorry Jar show June 3rd at Jacques, you�ll hear it.