A Sunday Love Story (part 2): Band Plumes and Compact Discs

(If you missed Part One, you might want to go there first.)

While Chris is lucky enough to remember the very first time he saw me, I have absolutely no idea when I first saw him. There were three Rust boys, and each of them had no shortage of girls clamoring for their attention in the hallways at church between the first service and Sunday school. I remember Chris as the tall one, the one who liked to wear a black leather jacket and was always surrounded by a circle of the older girls. He was already at the high school, and I was just started the 8th grade, so while we exchanged a few cursory words the first year we knew one another, it never occurred to me that a relationship with him was even a possibility. He was so old. He was entirely out of my league.

And so I finished my junior high school career: within a week I'd realized how out of place my bangs and rat tail were and made a quick trip to a hair stylist, and within two months I got my braces off. And so it was that I went from this:

(How scary is this?! And more importantly--why do I hate myself enough to put it on the internet?)

to this:

(Ah . . .1989 . We loved ya.)

I went through a series of at least ten crushes and landed my first official boyfriend and, subsequently, my first major heartbreak. That was a very serious relationship. I think we even held hands twice. I recovered from the heart ache, graduated from 8th grade, and began my first summer in Oregon. In the meantime, Chris has lightly befriended my older brother, which meant certain death for any chances Chris and I had romantically. When my grandparents moved up from California and the teenage boys from the church came over to help unload the moving truck, Chris was there, carrying bed frames and boxes and kitchen appliances while I helped my grandmother unload. This is the first time I remember feeling a pull towards him that was more than just admiring how cute he was. Whenever he passed me, though I did my best to look occupied and not make eye contact, I felt the tug of a young crush. Worse, it was the tug of what I thought must be a completely unrequited young crush. He and my brother made a plan to go to the movies as soon as they were finished, and although I secretly hoped they would invite me, too, they left without saying goodbye.

Three hours later, I was sitting in the living room of our house when our Doberman Sophie barked to signal a visitor. It was the boys, back for J. to grab a swimsuit because they'd decided to go down to the neighborhood pool. I looked back to my book just as Chris looked my direction and said, "You should come with us." My brother shot him a look that could kill. Dude, you just invited my little sister, it said. Not. Cool. At. All. And then they both stared at me, Chris with a look that seemed almost hopeful that I'd come, and J. with a warning glare.

I went swimming. To this day, J. jokingly accuses Chris of using him that day just to get to his sister. Chris doesn't deny it. Chris pushed me in the pool. My mom would later say boys do stupid things when they like a girl and I would roll my eyes because he so, like, doesn't like me that way, Mom.

Although there were little signs the rest of the summer that Chris was interested in me, I was still so convinced it wasn't possible that I came up with alternative excuses for every single one of them. At our weekly church dances (after I got in with my girlfriends by kneeling on the carpet to assure our skirts touched the back of our calves), he always asked me to dance on the very last song and whenever they played Brian Adams "Everything I do" from Robin Hood. I spent many long nights in fourteen year old angst playing and rewinding that song on my cassette player, wondering why this boy didn't realize how horribly he was stringing along this poor younger girl. When I missed church the day he played the first of his many original compositions, he climbed on his bike and rode it downhill to my house to drop of a tape; he'd made sure his brother recorded it for him. I decided I was in love. The knee buckling, heart pounding kind.

And then school started, and I knew I could likely turn my attentions to a guy who might fully return the affection. But suddenly Chris was everywhere: we had band together and were forced to march together on the field during football games, plumes on our heads and all. Yeah, that's right. Band. Mock it all you want, people. It was exactly as terrible as it sounds. Witness the plume (damn, I wish I had a picture of the two of us together during this phase of life):

(How sexy is this plume?!)

We had Japanese class together. We had the same lunch hour. And two weeks before the Homecoming dance, Chris walked up to me and handed me a CD with a folded note taped to the top. A CD! As in NOT A CASSETTE TAPE! Luckily, I had convinced my mom to buy a CD player just a few months earlier. We were steadily into 1990. In the note was an invitation to the Homecoming dance and a quick post script: Whenever I hear this song, I think about you. Oh, but the boy was sly. I told him yes as coolly as possible and was absolutely dying inside. It would took some cajoling on the part of my parents--Mormons aren't supposed to date until 16, and while Chris was a month away from his 16th birthday, I was still 14. We made up a great story about a big group date that just "happened" to fizzle at the last minute into a double date with a good friend who had a car.

I still have that note, the first of hundreds we folded into intricate little shapes and passed to each other before school and in the halls between campus. I do fear that note-passing is a dying (if not dead) art, thanks to the ease of cell-phone texting. Hey, you teens of today? Twenty years from now, I promise you won't have faded copies of those text messages to bring the memories of young love flooding back.

And what was the song, you might ask, the one that made that fifteen year old boy think of this fourteen year old girl? Oh, are you in for a treat:



Next Sunday: E. becomes a hippie girl and C. a more clean-cut Mormon boy. They fall harder, break up, fall harder, break up again, and might even ride horses with Wilford Brimley, the Quaker Oats Man! Television producers feel free to contact my agent to option the movie rights to this riveting story of intrigue and teenage romance. :)