There was a little group of us: the only other girl who was also, at the time, my best friend, a guitarist and a violinist; a flutist I had basically grown up with; a contrabassist who had only recently moved in town; a non musician who was always in tow when it wasn't about music and mostly forgotten the rest of the time; him, the clarinetist; and me. All of them but me were in the same class, we attended the same junior high then high school, and most of all we would spend every single Wednesday afternoon (which in France is time off for extra-scholar activities) at the music school together. We were among the few students who had stuck to their instrument through all these years, were taking music theory and composition classes together, had sometimes made a huge mess of the mandatory choir class instructor's nerves; we studied science as an afterthought but we were good at it; and as far as classical music was concerned, we were the seniors students.

We were of all the events. Each and every one of the music school recitals had to feature at least a few of us; several times in different configurations if possible.

Every year, the best music theory professor of the school, who was clearly overqualified to teach in such a small institution, would write a work that the students would play; a concerto, maybe a piece for the string orchestra, or a couple new tunes for the brass band, In our (and his) most glorious year, he worked with a storyteller to set a tale in music; students from the drama classes would read parts of the text, the choir would sing the rest, and all would be accompanied by instruments: in one case, the string orchestra (including the guitarist and violinist girl as concertmaster, me as a principal violist, and our contrabassist friend as the only contrabass you could rely on to follow the tempo), and, for what remained, our little group. He had written the part for us: a very unique piece for violin, viola, contrabass, clarinet and flute. I loved it (even though the tale ‒ which subject I have long forgotten ‒ was incredibly boring).

This same year, a teacher decided to organize late Friday afternoon concerts given by the music school students in the elementary schools of the town. His son, the clarinetist, was in fact in charge of recruiting and organizing the performers, who would be pupils (and former pupils) from the interested school and, more often than not, some of us seniors to conclude the recital on a more elaborated note.

I am found of these memories of the time when school was dealt with quickly and neatly and when every opportunity to take my Mirecourt out of his case was taken. I remember the endless giggles in the corridors, the notes I exchanged with my violinist girlfriend, the whispered gossips, the now heartbreaking sound of instruments being tuned up that made me run towards the room where it was all happening, the way we walked into the hall of the music school like if we owned the place (and in a way, we did), the dreadful lunches we shared almost every day of the week in the high school cafeteria, the winks and blown kisses and high fives and hugs, the easiness of it all.

And I remember my crush on the clarinetist. I never told anybody about it : neither the violinist (she new him better than I did! Maybe she had a crush on him too! ‒ I now think her crush was on the contrabassist, who probably also had a crush on her. It would be so typical of teenage insecurities) nor, obviously, him (he was ‒ still is ‒ a bit less than three years older than me which, at this age, mattered).

We are now scattered all over the country and the world. The violinist is a brilliant mechanical engineer in Paris. The flutist went to med school (I don't know what happened to him). The contrabassist is a civil engineer, somewhere, I suspect, where there are mountains (last time I heard of him he was, indeed, in the Alps). The guy who was always around us when we weren't playing has tried different career paths before becoming a highly praised social worker (I've heard that they didn't want to let him go from the place where he did an internship taking care of disabled children; however, his heart was set on a different kind of hard realities and he is now working with the streetwalkers in the worst neighborhoods of Marseille). I am in California, completing a PhD in computer science.

And him, the clarinetist, who if the pictures must be trusted has grown up from timidly cute into dead sexy, has been the only one to pursue the dream that the rest of us had never seriously considered, and is now a clarinet teacher.