He was one of the stars of the football team. I was a "band geek". He was funny and always surrounded by people. I was usually alone with my books. He was the most photographed senior boy in our final annual with one hundred and thirty six pictures. I counted. You know how many pictures there were of me? Not counting the individual pictures they put in of everyone, there were two. Both of them, I was part of his background. In one, I was reading. In the other I was looking at him.
Looking back, it seems that I was always reading or playing my music or looking at him. I wasn't alone in that last. Every girl was looking at him. But, he was the only guy who never tried to get in any girls pants. I mean, I wasn't one of the lucky ones. I never had the chance to go out with him. Who wants to go out with a girl with lenses so thick she looks like an owl or teeth that could eat an apple through a picket fence? Not anyone else, but more importantly, not him.
But, girls talk, you know? And all I ever heard were complaints that he didn't try anything. They would talk about the others trying something, and how they sometimes let them succeed. But, never him. Not him.
That was then, though, and this was now. Everything I had eaten for the last month was haunting me in my guts. Would he notice me? Would he see me? Would he care about the changes I had gone through? The changes I had gone through for him?
"I know that look. It's too late to chicken out now."
"I'm not chickening out." I whispered, not daring to look up at Claudia. "I'm just..."
"Girl, look at me." I didn't want to. But, when she bent over in front of me almost touching the top of my head with her forehead, I had no choice. I wished, once again, that I had her eyes. "Look. I don't care about this thing one way or another except for this. It's eating you up inside like a cancer. You have got to face him and then either live your dream or get over him and move on."
"I know." I whispered. My eyes were burning and she seemed to shimmer in my sight.
"Besides, you know these jocks let themselves go after high school. He's probably already bald and has a beer belly. Probably married the head cheerleader and they have some kiddo in the homecoming court already."
"I doubt that." I laughed and wiped at my eyes. "You don't know him like I do. He's different."
"Then I bet he brought his boyfriend."
"Stop that." I laughed and swatted at her with my towel. "He is not gay."
"Honey, I call them like I see them." Claudia's laughter had died and she looked completely serious now. "If he never touched a single girl he went out with, like you say, and he isn't hooked up already. Then he's most likely gay. I just want you to promise me that, however this goes, this is it. It's over. You'll give one of the guys back at Juliart a chance."
"I don't know if I can-"
"Just a chance." Claudia's fingers touched my mouth as she spoke. "Not marry the first one when we get off the plane. But go out on a date with one or two. Give real life a try instead of this fantasy you are living in."
She didn't understand. No one did. If he could just see me, he would know I was the one for him. I knew he would. He couldn't help but know it.
When I spotted him at the game, I knew she was wrong. I would never be able to move on past him. And I didn't have a snowballs chance in hell of getting past that social barracuda on his arm. It wasn't one of the old cheerleaders. They were gathered close around him, and more than one was literally green.
I sat with the band and talked with the only person other than him I cared anything about seeing, my old band director. Once, when the band struck up a song, he turned and our eyes seemed to meet. That moment seemed to stretch forever. He smiled and waved. I lifted my hand to wave back, but he had already turned away again.
God, how could I have been so stupid? I wondered as I excused myself and started down the bleacher steps. I didn't care about the half time show with the latest blond bimbette waiting for her tiara. I had never cared about the game, except when he was playing. I was here for him. And I shouldn't have been. The last five years of making myself over into someone pretty enough to notice were all for nothing.
Memory guided my steps and I ended up passing through the band hall to the auditorium beyond. I had not been in this building since I was handed my diploma and went off to college. But, before that I had spent hours here alone with this old piano.
A tear slid down my nose and fell on one of the keys. It was almost hard to believe that the weight of it hadn't sounded the note. Without a conscious thought on my part, my finger reached out to stroke the wet key. As always, the note reached into the very core of my being and pulled my heart out.
My other hand reached out and stroked another key. I closed my eyes and gave myself over to the music. Let it leech out my sadness the way tears had never been able to. The chords hammered at the pieces of my heart, breaking them smaller and smaller and mending them at the same time.
When that song was through, there was more in there. I could not stop. I didn't want to stop. This time, though, it wasn't sadness but the love that had stolen my breath away the first time I had seen him smile at me. I was caught up in the storm of emotion tearing at me as the love and the sadness that it was unrequited tossed my heaving heart adrift in the ivory and ebony.
When there was nothing left to come out, my hands stilled and I let the pedal off the floor. The final note drifted away into silence. And then I heard a jarring note shatter the musical spell.
"I thought that might be you, but I wasn't sure until now."
Oh, God! It was him! He was here. He had heard my music. He was looking at me even now.
Aware that the careful make-up job Claudia had done on me was now a smeared mess, I turned away from him and started to rise.
"Laura, wait. Please."
Wait for what? So he could see how hideous I looked now? Now that all of my careful preparations had been destroyed? I was three steps away from the bench and headed for the door when his next words made me trip.
"Of all the things from high school, I miss your music the most."