let’s try this again…
There must have been a first moment, a first day he’d laid eyes on Alice Martin in all her indifferent, teenaged glory, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember it. Instead, it seemed to him that she had just always been there—hovering on the periphery of his life with her guitar and her rumpled notebooks—until one day, the light changed, and suddenly she was all he could see.
That day, he remembered.
It was tenth grade, October, a Tuesday afternoon, and rehearsal had ended on a high note. That semester, he’d stolen the role of Puck out from under a handful of talented upper-classmen, and on that day, for the first time, he felt like he’d proven himself worthy of it. He’d made it halfway home—high on some brand of Elizabethan euphoria—before he realized he’d left his script in the auditorium. And that’s where he found her, alone, painting a backdrop in her overalls, strawberry blonde hair falling messily from her ponytail.
