Love-Crossed Lives

Justin Peay and Alaina Lewis couldn’t stop bumping into each other.

- Julie Lavender, Contributing Writer

The first time was early in the morning on the first day of school at Statesboro High School in Georgia. Justin was a junior. Alaina was a freshman, heading to class with an armload of books. The two happened to cross paths in an empty hallway. Just as they moved past one another, Alaina tripped, landing splat on her face, her books flying. To add insult to injury, her skirt flew up around her waist.

Justin pretended not to notice. “I knew she would have been mortified that a boy saw her underwear,” he says. “I thought maybe she didn’t even know I’d seen her fall. So I said nothing and just kept going.”

The next time was at Alaina’s house. As it turned out, she was the little sister of Justin’s friend Alexis. He’d never really noticed her before. Then they both got involved in the school’s drama program. Justin ended up judging a school project Alaina worked on. At school they always seemed to be at the same place at the same time.

“We were never close,” Justin says. Alaina was just his friend’s kid sister, not even five feet tall. Alaina thought Justin was cute. But he was older. And soon he headed off to college.

A few years later, Justin was pedaling his bike across the campus of Georgia Southern University and noticed a short, attractive girl walking along the path toward him. He did a double take. Alaina?

Alaina had enrolled at East Georgia College, which shares campus space with Georgia Southern. Noticing that Justin was even cuter than he’d been in high school, Alaina offered to give him her phone number—one friend to another, of course.