I've made a couple of changes from the show, aside from the obvious ones. Jack has an older brother, Geoff, and a younger sister, Maureen. Kate's still an only child, but as I don't know how long her parents were together I'm having them divorce when Kate is thirteen.
He remembers the first time he met her. Christian and Margo Shepherd were holding their yearly summer barbeque, as they always did, every single year, without fail, in the backyard of their huge property. This was the first year Jack could remember clearly. The previous years were all a blur of hotdogs and spicy onion chutney, homemade by Mrs Russell down the road, and his older brother Geoff poking him and taunting him with his friends from the local school. Those years weren't the ones that would stick in his memory forever. The first year he cared about was the year he was five, the year his mother was pregnant with his little sister Maureen, the year his father got promoted to attending, although he didn't know that at the time. He was sat on the steps in the garden, playing with a long stem of grass, sprinkling the little seeds over the concrete.
He heard a sneeze, and looked up. Standing in front of him in a little pink skirt and top, already covered in grass-stains, and wearing a sunshiny smile stood a little girl, clutching a daisy in her hand. She had hair the colour of chocolate, he remembered, and her face was smeared with strawberry juice. He smiled at here.
"I'm Katie." She said, and squatted on the ground in front of him.
"I'm Jack." He said, smiling at her, and then returning to playing with his stem of grass. Following his lead, she picked one and started to pick the seeds off of it, one by one, in what struck him as a very girlish manner. He wished he could be as patient as that, instead of having to slide all the seeds off in one go.
He saw the looming shadow before he looked up. His brother, Geoff, eight years old, stood over the unlikely pair of them.
"Want to play, Jack?" he asked, frowning slightly. Jack would usually have jumped at a chance to play with the older boys, but this time he looked at the little girl, sat with her legs crossed, tongue between her teeth as she picked all the petals off a daisy, one by one.
"No." he said. Geoff frowned even more.
"But you always want to play." He said, sticking out his bottom lip, "And we need someone to be the baddy."
Jack looked from his brother to the girl again. "No thank you." He said politely, as his mother had always taught him.
Geoff looked at him strangely and then ambled off, searching for another candidate to be tormented under the guise of a game.
Jack returned to his piece of grass and the little girl, who had now started completely ignoring him, immersed in her task. Jack wasn't sure why it was so peaceful, sitting like this, even with everything going on around him.
It must have been about half an hour later when a man with whitish hair and wearing an army outfit came and lifted the little girl up. "Time to go home, Kate." He said, shifting her onto his back. "Time to go now."
She struggled a little but then settled on her father's back.
"Who's your friend, Katie?" the man said.
"I'm Jack." He piped up. "Are you a soldier, mister?"
The man smiled. "I certainly am, Jack." His eyes were kind, but he looked old.
"Wow." Jack said, and then he waved at the little girl. "Bye." He said simply.
But she had already fallen asleep.
He didn't see her again for a couple of months. Then his mother organised a play date with him and the boy down the road, Edward Russell. He liked going to Edward's, because Edward had a train set that moved round by itself, but he didn't really like Edward all that much. But Edward had a little sister, Nancy, and Nancy had a play date too. Little Katie Austin from next door. She didn't seem to remember him at first, but playing with Nancy and Edward they slipped into some sort of rhythm. Something maybe with a slight shadow of forethought.
Jack was five, Katie was four. When Jack started at the local school a whole year before her she kicked up her heels and pretended it didn't matter. But when she started the next year, when she was five and he was six, having Jack Shepherd in the playground, the boy in the grade above, that was enough to make her smile through every day, bored already by school and the boundaries it placed on her.
When she first got there, she worried because Jack had his friends. But she began to notice he was something of a loner himself, not like his ultra-popular brother (by Geoff's own admission), but more the solitary type. She and Jack, they were the most unlikely pair, and the teachers often chuckled at them as they had competitions, who could walk along the kerb the furthest before falling up, who could spin around in a circle the most times before they fell over with dizziness, who could run for the longest without getting tired. All their games seemed, strangely, to be tests of endurance, tests of strength. But as the years of early childhood progressed into the years of wild, imaginative adventure games and laughing, and just chatting, the teachers realised there never had been a better pair.
They adored each other, that everyone could see. Jack was ten and Kate was nine and they were inseparable. Margo Shepherd had got used to having Kate Austin from number seven around to dinner as much as Diane Austin had gotten used to having Jack Shepherd playing in her garden until the late hours. They were hardly seen apart, they became less their own person, and more 'Jack-and-Kate' to everyone in their small town.
The spinal surgeon's son and the lieutenant's daughter.
But could anything that wonderful last?