(enter Nikole stage left)

Sophomore year. School's back in session. But rewind a bit to the end of my very first week as a freshman at Pepperdine. I'm sitting in the amphitheatre reading a book when my soon to be good friend Carl Flynn walks down the steps on his way to his car. Carl Flynn is an amazing person. A profound Christian whom I admire a lot. But for my purposes here he is amazing for a special role he played at Pepperdine the first week of each year. New Student Orientation- where 800+ freshman descend upon the campus amidst of range of feelings from excitement to fear and anxiety. As a Campus Ministry Intern, Carl Flynn wanted to meet and get to know every single incoming freshman, and at least know all their names by the end of orientation week. (That's right, that's approximately 800 names/faces in one week.) If memory serves me correctly he got about 700 names down my freshman year, but my sophomore year he met and knew the name of every incoming freshman within that first week. As testimony to his ability, the owner of the campus bookstore (located just down the hall from the Campus Ministry office) would bring new students who did not have their student IDs with them down the hall to Carl for 'proof' of their enrollment status. Yeah, crazy.

Anyways, at the end of that first week he comes across me (having already met me and knew my name) and invited me to the apartment of a couple of Christians on campus who were having a spaghetti dinner for friends and new students. One of them was a girl named Nikole DuTemple.

We seemed to hit it off pretty well. At sometime during the evening she said I could come over 'any time.' Now, I'm sure, looking back, she said that primarily as the 'polite thing to say.' But I have an inclination to take people seriously so I ended up just going to visit her- almost on a weekly basis. Of course it was just as friends at the time, because I was dating Michelle back home. But when I arrived again my sophomore year... well, Michelle was no longer part of the picture. And things started to turn romantic.

There was a euphoria there that I hadn't felt with Michelle. The emotional 'high' was completely new to me- and it just so happened that at that time Pet Shop Boys released an album called 'Very' and one of the tracks in particular, summed up in words and music, what I felt in the early days of our romance.