Audrey& and Dalyn

Bride

Audrey Ketchem

Audrey played clarinet, was a grade below Dalyn, and sat in his math class anyway because she was a year ahead of where she should have been. She was quiet then and says she is quiet now. On free days in band she would sit with a book and a small private smile, which Dalyn says undid him completely. She brought jalapenos to school in her lunchbox and handed over her spicy chips, which he took as evidence of the right kind of different. She worries about what people think of her, anticipates what Dalyn needs before he has thought of it himself, and planned this wedding around her final year of school with her father and her Aunt Cherry doing most of the lifting. Without them, she says, she would have eloped.

Groom

Dalyn Helms

Port of call

Wicksburg, Alabama

Dalyn is from Wicksburg and describes himself, accurately, as a music nerd who likes to chat. He plays trumpet, runs a YouTube channel about history and philosophy and politics, follows college football on the grounds that the other sports are not comparable, and cannot tolerate lactose, a fact he rediscovers about twenty minutes too late every time. Audrey says he has never met a stranger: one passing interaction and he will start a conversation, and he will find the joke. The first thing he ever said to her was one, at fourteen or fifteen, having never approached a girl in his life. He cannot remember what it was. He is fairly sure she did not laugh.