How the Coolest Kids Met (A Love Story, Part 1)

As promised (and I’m sure I’ll return to my regular procrastinating ways and not blog for several days after this), here’s the story of how we met.

Once upon a time, this girl met this boy.

It was 1993 when we first met. We were both cool enough to be going to a Governor’s School for Math and Science. All the new Governor’s School students went on a trip to Wallop’s Island before school started to do science-y stuff and meet each other. I remember noticing that guy, who clearly didn’t like anyone there and didn’t really hide it (something he still does very well). I don’t remember us actually speaking on this trip, but it was when I became aware of his existence.

Fast forward a few months and again, because we were so cool in high school, we both advanced to the state science fair with our science projects. He was clearly more into it than I was because he had fancy cheese shaped science fair display boards for his project that was something about mice and circadian rhythms. But what we both did at the science fair was spend the whole day in the bleachers really talking to each other for the first time, and perhaps missing some of the judges who would have liked to talk to us about our projects. Neither of us won the science fair. But I don’t believe we cared.

As a side note, Lee was for some reason allowed by his mother to go on this trip outside of the chaperoned group that I was in. Don’t worry though – his 13-year-old brother Marcus was his chaperone. I’m not sure what Marcus did at a hotel alone all day, but I bet he was well-behaved. He was certainly interesting when I met him for the first time at Fuddruckers.

We returned from this trip and returned to not really talking to each other at school.

We had a couple other exciting experiences that school year. We were invited to the Virginia Junior Academy of Science (I think that’s what VJAS stood for) to present our projects. I have a few fun memories from this trip.

-         Watching MTV in some dorm common room with Lee. I distinctly remember some Aerosmith videos. I may have been jealous that he seemed to be hanging out with another girl there, so I stuck around. Or maybe I wasn’t.

-         Going to a dance for a few minutes where Bump ‘n Grind came on, and Toogie made some sort of dance move because he was so excited when the song came on.

-         On the bus ride back, we sat in a seat together and read Stephen King’s The Stand. Or as much of it as we could read on that bus ride. I never finished the book.

We also both attended the prom at his home high school, which he has already documented here.

The way I remember it, we both definitely recognized there were some feelings at that point, but Lee already knew he was going to graduate and move at the end of the school year.  So we resigned ourselves to never seeing each other again.

But that’s obviously not what happened, is it?

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