BY JUSTIN STALCUP, Gulf High

Ten years ago, walking across Mrs. Alvarez’s second-grade classroom at Fox Hollow Elementary, Brandon Chianese had one goal: get to his desk without drawing attention.

Fate had other plans. As Brandon reached the home stretch, desk in sight, he felt his awkward 8-year-old self collapse, tripping over his oversized, light-up Star Wars shoes and falling face first onto a rug printed with the planets of the solar system. The sound of high-pitched schoolmate laughter filled his ears. Tears of embarrassment filled his eyes.

From his place on the carpet where his universe was spinning, he looked up, expecting a teasing classmate or a teacher more concerned about controlling the uproar. Instead, Brandon met a pair of eyes that would change him forever. Eliza Smith had abandoned her coloring worksheet and her cruel friends to help the clumsy kid she recalls as a “big ball of curly hair.”

Holding out her hand to bring him back to his feet, little Eliza Smith lit up Brandon’s soul, not to mention his scrambling Star Wars soles. Brandon hadn’t merely fallen into temporary classroom humiliation, nor Neptune (which he met face-to-face). Brandon Chianese had taken a fateful dive into something most people spend a lifetime treading water to find: pure, innocent love.

“I was rather awkward,” admitted Brandon last week, sitting with Eliza in a booth at a Chili’s in New Port Richey.   
“He was very awkward,” added Eliza, reassuringly. After all, what elementary school romance isn’t awkward?

“He was shy at first, but after a while he would come up to me on the playground and ask if I wanted to play with his Bionicles (those otherworldly Lego creatures).”

“I wasn’t very good with other kids,” Brandon said. “I never really understood how to communicate with others.”   

“He was my little existentialist,” said Eliza, the outgoing complement to Brandon’s self-described loner tendency.  But optimism is a trait the two of them seem to have mastered together, a trait that would get them through some of life’s darkest moments.

“When my parents got divorced, I didn’t know what to do,” Eliza said. “The only thing I could think of was to call Brandon.” Brandon, who now lived cities away after a change of middle schools and his own parents’ divorce, was not going to let distance come between him and his best friend.

“We would talk on the phone when we weren’t able to meet up in person. I would call him, hear his voice, and automatically feel better,” Eliza said.   

“Why?” asked Eliza. “Because he is my constant . . . from the moment he got down on one knee when we were 8 and told me he loved me.”

Brandon, blushing, justified his side of the story. “I saw proposing as the greatest form of confessing one’s love to another. So that’s what I did.”

They have dreams of being together after graduating Gulf High. With their special connection, the only real argument they claim is the debate over which is the greatest band ever, the Beatles (Eliza) or Rush (Brandon). Over a plate of salmon,  bits of which sometimes had trouble making it past his thick beard, Brandon and Eliza talked of memories most teenagers can share: grasping long division, drinking juice boxes and watching lots of Pokemon.  
 
And that awkwardness. Brandon once broke Eliza’s older brother’s guitar by simply strumming it. “He started playing the guitar and next thing you know, the strings were dangling off of it,” she said.
“I couldn’t hold on to anything growing up without breaking it,” Brandon said, a bit bashfully.

On the table between his glass of water and Eliza’s iced tea, however, was evidence to the contrary.

Just as he has for 10 years, a light year in the teenage romance universe, Brandon was managing to hold on to something just fine. Eliza’s hand.