The first time Jamie Baxter noticed Sarah Cohen was in the lunch line, October 1994. She was wearing a faded R.E.M. T-shirt under a plaid flannel, the sleeves pushed up like she didn’t care if anyone saw the marker stains on her arms. Her boots were clearly secondhand—one of them had a tear near the toe—but she walked like they were designer. Jamie, who had spent most of sophomore year trying not to be noticed, found himself staring. She looked like a song that hadn’t been written yet.

They met officially two days later in Mr. Wexler’s fourth-period creative writing class, when Sarah read a poem out loud about being invisible in a world that only looked at people who smiled too much. It wasn’t dramatic. It was honest. “I’m not broken,” she read, “just not interested in pretending I’m whole.” The classroom was quiet for a full thirty seconds. Then Wexler just nodded and said, “That’s the good stuff.” Jamie wrote his next story about a girl in thrift store shoes who stole hearts and never gave them back.

They started talking more. It started with mixed tapes, slipped into each other’s lockers. Hers came with hand-drawn cover art and titles like Songs to Listen to While Not Fitting In. His were more straightforward—just tracks by Smashing Pumpkins, Counting Crows, Mazzy Star. Music was their language. They sat on the curb after school with a shared Discman and a splitter, talking about everything and nothing while buses roared past them like it was all part of the score.

Then came winter, and with it, a thousand little cracks. Sarah’s mom got laid off from the bookstore, and Sarah stopped showing up on Tuesdays. Jamie found out her family was thinking about moving—somewhere in Indiana, maybe, or New Jersey. He didn’t ask for details. Instead, he started writing letters and giving them to her in the halls: tiny things, poems, ideas for songs, quotes scribbled from beat-up library books. She never wrote back. But she kept them all.

The last time he saw her, it was a Friday in March. She met him by the bike racks, handed him one final tape, and said, “I don’t want a goodbye. Just remember me when you hear track six.” Then she hugged him—tight, fast, like ripping off a bandage—and walked away before he could say anything. He didn’t play the tape until weeks later, when the news of her transfer reached the office bulletin board. Track six was Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You.”

Years passed. Jamie graduated. The school tore down the old lockers and replaced them with gray ones that didn’t creak. But the tape stayed in his drawer, and sometimes, when the world got too loud, he’d pull it out, pop it into the old deck, and sit with it. Not for the lyrics. Not even for the memories. Just to remember what it felt like, once, to matter to someone who didn’t smile for anyone else.