In The Stars

I didn't think it could happen, falling in love at first sight. People say you can't fall in love at first sight, only lust at first sight. Well, they're wrong because it happened to me. I was sixteen years old and savoring each glorious moment of my sophomore year. We were just a few weeks into the quarter and everything was new: the teachers, the students, the classrooms, the stagnant smell of a school that opened in 1971, and the feeling of being at the bottom of the all-important high school hierarchy. Every boy was handsome, and every girl was gorgeous: tall, thin, stylish, popular. It was the senior males who naturally got my attention: they were quite a sight, big, with muscles rolling, bursting through their football jerseys and with egos parallel to the mass of the moon. But what was I? Like in a Shakespearean circus, I was the ill-fated tightrope walker, dramatically balancing between the light and dark of the adolescent tragedy.

English: Title page of the second quarto edition (...

Representing the famous balcony scene from romeo a...

Train + Graffiti & Love at First Sight 3

I had not seen him before. How that's possible, I'm not quite certain. Perhaps it was because my attentions were focused on someone else, the senior star athlete, the "jock" of all trades, who just happened to live right down the street from my new house. The star athlete was my neighbor. Yes! The most sought-after man on campus was my new, next-door neighbor! For one amusing flare of chance, I was the lucky girl. Subsequently, one rather temperate afternoon while sitting in Child Psychology, I was not anticipating anything wholly remarkable, anything out-of-the-ordinary, except that maybe I'd be called on to answer a question that I wouldn't be able to answer because I had not been paying attention, daydreaming instead of blowing kisses from the stands to my star-athlete-neighbor-boyfriend while he...