I pretended I had outgrown him, too. One day I would be gone. I would be a famous concert pianist. I would travel the world, and I wouldn’t think about Samuel ever again. Someday, I would be the one to leave.

12. Interlude

August, 2000

A week before my junior year in high school, everything changed. Kasey Judd had lived in Levan all his life, just like me. His family had lived there for generations, just like mine. We’d been born a few days apart, in the same hospital, in the same year. We’d attended the same church, rode the same bus, and were in the same classes. Up until ninth grade, I was taller than him, and he wore braces and glasses. His curly hair was always unruly, his shoes always untied, and he constantly challenged me for first chair in the school band, which I found slightly annoying because I regularly trounced him. He had been a fixture on the periphery of my life all of my life, just like the comfortable couch in the living room, or the patterns on the walls. He was just another boy - until I fell in love with him.

Kasey’s dad was the football coach at Nephi High School, where every kid in the county, including Levan, was bussed to school. I played trumpet in the school band, so I attended my share of football games and cheered for my share of football players. Tara had a thing for football players, but I really wasn’t interested in hearing about every single player, their stats, the position they played, the way they looked in uniform. Tara knew everything about everyone, and I mostly listened with an uninterested ear. Her ability to talk non-stop without any encouragement from me made our relationship work. I never had much to say, and she couldn’t shut up, so it was a win/win all the way around. She was the only person I knew who had business cards touting her gossiping skills. The cards said “If You Want to Know How or Who, Ask Tara Ballow” (Ba LOO). I suppose her chatter filled a feminine need inside me. By this time all my brothers had graduated, married, or moved out, and I lived at home with my dad. He was almost as quiet as I was which meant girl talk, or any other kind of talk, was pretty scarce, and Tara happily filled the void.

My piano playing ability made band a nobrainer, and I was the first chair trumpet player in the high school band. We didn’t have orchestra at the school, so when I joined the band in seventh grade, I’d wanted to learn play a more classical instrument like the clarinet until Tara told me that trumpet players made the best kissers. I figured someone as awkward as I was needed all the help I could get, and I’d played the trumpet ever since. Tara played the flute - quite badly. But the competition wasn’t fierce in a small school, and she managed to keep her chair. She might have played better had she just stopped talking! The huge pink bubble she was always blowing didn’t help much either. Mr. Hackett, our band teacher, had forbidden gum in band, but Tara was constantly cleaning cherry Hubba Bubba out of her mouthpiece.

Tara had been telling me all about “that cute Kasey Judd” all summer long. She’d said his dad had had all the boys in the weight room getting them ready for football season. Tara had been up at the football field during several practices with binoculars to check out their new muscles.

We started band practice two weeks before the school year started to get ready for the upcoming football season. Practice was ridiculously early because it was “Hell Week” for the football team, which meant two-a-days. The band practiced early to allow members of the football team, who were also members of the band, to make it to morning football practice. At a small school it isn’t unusual for a jock to be in the band or sing in the chorus or to be in the school play. In my opinion, that is the best thing about going to a small school; less competition sometimes means more opportunity.

So I dragged into that first practice with my curly blonde hair in a sloppy ponytail, wearing an old pair of cut-off jeans, a ratty Survivor t-shirt and flip flops, only to discover my chair was occupied. I sighed. When would Kasey Judd ever learn? I looked, and then I stared. Kasey Judd had grown up. His shoulders were broad; his legs were long and stretched out in front of him. No more glasses, and no more braces. His hair was curly, like my own, but where mine was a light wheat blonde just like my dad’s (and his dad’s, and his dad’s), Kasey’s was dark brown and was now cut short to tame the once unruly mop.

I sat down next to him and shyly said “That’s my seat.” I hoped the freckles I always got across my nose in the summertime weren’t too noticeable, and I cursed myself for not at least applying mascara to my happily long, but sadly very blonde eyelashes. I’d started wearing my contacts on a more regular basis and was thankful that I’d taken the time to put them in that morning, saving myself from total ugliness. He looked at me with a little grin and a quirked eyebrow and said “We’ll see.”

His eyes were a hazel green, and his smile curled up at the ends. Dimples creased his suntanned cheeks. I almost fell right off my chair. I had never had a physical reaction to a smile before, but I felt Kasey’s grin deep down in my gut like a sucker punch, and I was a total goner. Over the moon, gone. He challenged me for first chair in the trumpet section that day and for the first time in umpteen years, he won - though I challenged him the following week and never let him have it back.

Two weeks later, we shared our first kiss under the stars at Burraston’s Pond - and despite our inexperience, it was not an awkward meeting of lips and teeth. That kiss was as natural as a prayer at bedtime - simple and sweet and sustaining. I fell so hard I saw stars, and the funny thing is I naively thought that that was just how falling in love was for everyone. We became inseparable from then on, to the point that our names became an extension of the other. Kaseynjosie. You couldn’t say one without the other. It was all so easy with him - easy to love him, easy to be loved.