His name was Liam. He was a senior. He played violin and was first chair of the junior/senior section of orchestra class.

In retrospect, Liam was not very attractive. He looked rather like what he would later become: a computer scientist.
His hair was very long, past his shoulders, wound into tight copper coils he wrangled into a ponytail. He wore those rectangular wire-frame glasses which are not very popular anymore but seemed ubiquitous in the aughts. His nose and canine teeth were prominent.

Having read too many books, I decided that the best way to win over his heart was to smite him at his talent: playing the violin.
I had been playing the violin since I was very young and was first chair of the freshman/sophomore section of orchestra class, but I had never taken it very seriously until Liam. I began practicing for hours and hours a day, printing off countless sheet music, dreaming of attending conservatory, pushing myself to the musical brink.

I became obsessed with classical music, which, to me, was a vast array of extended metaphors and material ripe for inventing code words, code names, veiled allusions nobody could have possibly have deciphered, nor would they have wanted to, but I lived in my own head and everything had to be enigmatic and eccentric for a rabid audience consisting only of myself.

First it was classical music, the great composers and their lives and dramatic interactions. Then came Shelley and Byron and Keats and George Sand. Of all the languages of love, I chose the 19th century - the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor and Epipsychidion. Even this early, it had already begun.

And thus Liam became Capriol, after the Capriol Suite, a piece of music for string orchestra we were playing in class. For the finale of the Spring semester recital, both sections of the high school orchestra would be playing the suite together. I was to sit in second chair and he in first. It was the perfect blend of deeply obscure and yet so, so obvious.