I had no idea The Boy Next Door had already known my face and my name for years. While I was obliviously entangled in the drama of my teenage social life I had completely missed several things happening in the background.

It all started when one morning before heading off to High School, The Boy Next Door noticed a promotional brochure from my private school sitting on his kitchen table. It had come in the mail, and strangely enough there had been a picture of me in it, sitting under a tree, reading a book. He was captivated.

“Now there’s one cute girl,” he thought while munching on his Cocoa Puffs.

“She looks young, but she is gonna be one good lookin’ girl when she gets older.”

No one else in the family paid much attention to the brochure, not even enough attention to throw it away. For that reason it managed to somehow hang around the house for years like the Forest Gump feather blowing from one pile of useless papers to another. The Boy Next Door took the opportunity to glance inside it at my picture again and again.

When I was twelve or thirteen, my younger brother became very good friends with The Boy Next Door’s younger brother (The Professor). Apparently they walked to and from school together almost every day and spent many afternoons playing together at our house. The Professor remembers exactly what my eighth grade bedroom looks like and I don’t remember ever having even seen him during those days when everyone tells me he was at my house regularly. Nor do I ever remember hearing his last name…. And if I had heard it, I would have FREAKED OUT! to know that The Boy Next Door’s younger brother was in my home.

Oblivious… completely oblivious.

I guess I wasn’t very tuned in to my little brother and his friends at that stage. I was too consumed with own social life to pay any attention to them.

One day The Boy Next Door was even with his mom when she came to pick The Professor up from my house.

She says she came to the door, while The Boy Next Door waited in the van. Can you imagine the scene if he’d been the one to come the door and I would have been the one to open it? My jaw would have hit the front stoop!

Apparently (I have no personal recollection of any of this) I answered the door head tilted to one side glued to the telephone. I got the message that she was there to pick up one of my little brother’s friends and I turned to go get them.

Being the “always-on-the-lookout-for-a-good-match,” matchmaker that she is, The Boy Next Door’s mom said to him when she got back in the van,

“The Professor’s friend has a really cute sister.”

“Mom! Stop. She’s too young,” was the reply from The Boy Next Door.

“No she’s not,” said his mom.

No answer.

You know how anxious teenage boys always are to take advice and share their interest in girls with their mothers. The truth was that me being thirteen and in jr. high, and The Boy Next Door being a Sophmore in high school on the verge of getting his driver’s license, at the time, did seem to him like a huge age gap.

But as we grew up in the same little town he continued to notice me. At football games, movie theaters, school plays… he saw me. And all that time I was noticing him too. I knew his name, and he knew mine. But neither of us ever spoke to the other.

Some time after I had graduated high school, we were both attending the same local Junior College… still not speaking…. But noticing.

While on campus one day he was in the student lounge with a friend, when I came in, with a group of people. He remembers exactly what I was wearing, exactly how I looked, and exactly what he said to his friend while he was watching me from a distance.

“Now that’s the kind of girl I’m going to marry. That girl right there.”

And I thought I was the stalker in this story!

Some time after that, one of my friends from the college Bible study had met The Boy Next Door and a friend of his, and had invited them to come on Sunday night. They were considering coming but they asked,

“Who’s going to be there?”

She began to list people who regularly attended, to see if any of her friends were also friends of theirs.

“Josh, Mike, Nikki, Jay, Ben, Christin, Rachael….” She probably continued with the list, but once she said my name, The Boy Next Door says that was all he needed to hear.

He’d be there.

And now here he was.

Of course at that moment I knew none of this.

We made a little small talk and I noticed he didn’t have a Bible with him. Naturally being the good Christian I was, I would HAVE to sit next to him so he could share mine.

I guess, in his opinion, I wasn’t so young anymore. I’d grown up a bit and so had he.

A few months had passed since our first exchange of words on that Sunday night, and by then we had spoken often, seeing eachother regularly in group settings at friend’s get-togethers, Bible Study, and at school.

One weekday morning when his jeep was in the shop, his mom was dropping him off for class. They pulled up to campus in her van and she was carrying on and on talking to him about something. He was looking out the window and suddenly he couldn’t wait any longer to interrupt her.

“Mom! Mom! You see that girl over there?”

“The blonde?”

“Yeah. That’s Rachael.”

“Rachael as in The Professor’s friend’s sister? That Rachael? The Rachael that was too young?”

“Yeah. I gotta go Mom.”

“Go! Hurry! Go!”

To be continued…