Brian' Story.
(I must tell you that I did not know him as well as I would have liked so I do not know everything.)
Brian came to Centennial High School during his junior year(97-98) . He came from a troubled home and was living with a group of peers in a house in Circle Pines, MN. He was an excellent student who excelled in many areas of study including video production and mathematics. . Whenever you saw Brian, he was never without his backpack filled with college level text books. He always had somewhere to go. It was hard for him to stop and talk because he needed to be in several places at once all the time. He had a job first at the local pizza hut, later at the local animal hospital.
How I met Brian.
I was having a party one night for members of the speech team. Sarah, my dear friend was dating a man named Joe, a roommate of Brian. Sarah called me and asked if I minded if she brought some friends along. I thought the more the merrier so she brought a carload.
At fist, Brian just sat in the corner of my room as we watched movies. He see to want to participate in the various conversations going on among the 15 people crammed into my bedroom. As the night wore on, he began to open up, looking through my CDs and asking if we could play some songs. I will never forget when he found a Celine Dion CD. He put it to a track and began to belt out the song with a few of us. I remember thinking "what a cool guy-he is not at all uncomfortable." He was even "working his magic" on Jenny. He gave her a back rub and asked her if he could call her sometime.
He was wearing his Pizza Hut uniform because he had been working before Sarah brought him over to the house. At the end of the night, after everyone left, I noticed that there was a Pizza Hut hat left sitting in my room. Over the next couple of weeks, I would pass Brian in the halls and try to remember his name so I could tell him that I had his hat. After a few awkward conversations in the hall, i asked if he had lost a hat.
As the year progressed, Brian ended up in my fourth quarter anatomy class. He sat near to my desk so I would have conversations with him and Jenny D about the cats we were dissecting. I discovered that he had a gift for computers when he bypassed the security system on the lab computers to check his e-mail. I also had an interest in computers so we clicked (pardon the pun).
Summer came and went. I would see Brian around town on his bicycle every now and then, but I was working full time at my job and I didn't have allot of time to spend with many of my friends (as you all can attest to....I'm sorry). Registration for our senior year came around in August and I talked to him then. It was the day for all those with last names beginning A through H to register for fall classes. I was sitting in the counselors office fixing a computer when he walked in. He was all excited to show me his new laptop computer that he purchased. He had started up a web page writing service. His plan was to sell websites for people/businesses around town. In his excitement, he told me about the fliers he had put up around town to advertise the new service that he was to provide.