A Lifetime of Undying Devotion To a Life Tragically Cut Short

"He seemed like the perfect guy," she said.

They grew closer as sophomores, after Justin transferred to North Stafford. Courtney didn't consider herself very girly, but she fluttered when Justin would open doors for her, or when she would wear a new pair of jeans for the first time and he would intuitively say, "Oh, those are new."

But Courtney also could be herself around Justin, lounging in a sweaty T-shirt or with her hair messy from working out. Just as soon as Justin would wrap her in a warm embrace, he would playfully punch her in the shoulder. "They were like good buddies," said Dave Gonier, Courtney's trainer.

They cleaned up nicely, too. In a picture from their junior prom, the couple glistened, Courtney with long blond hair perfectly coiffed, her big smile bursting, and Justin with dynamic eyes and a slick black suit.

Justin had made that year's homecoming especially memorable by the way he asked her to it. While Courtney was at softball practice, he plucked the rose petals from 11 flowers and made a trail from her driveway, into the house, up the stairs, down the hallway and onto her bed.

When she came home he was standing behind her bedroom door with one last rose and a bag of M&M's, Courtney's favorite candy.

Courtney and Justin had been dating for 22 months in June 2006 when he began having trouble breathing and found it difficult to swallow food. He felt a mass the size of a gumball on his throat. After being rushed to the hospital, doctors found several enlarged lymph nodes around his heart and neck. On June 12, they diagnosed cancer.

Alone with Courtney in the hospital room, Justin's first words to her were, "I'm going to lose my hair." Courtney told him she didn't care about that; she just wanted him to get healthy.

Justin was confident he would. Shortly after the diagnosis, when a doctor noted while extracting bone marrow for a test that Justin had particularly strong bones, Justin deadpanned in the crowded hospital room, "I'm a man of steel." He was wearing blue-and-red Superman boxer shorts at the time.

Justin assured Courtney that he would beat the cancer, and told her that they both needed to be strong -- for friends, family members and people at school as much as for themselves.

"I always wanted to be there for him, but that made it even more like, 'I'll never leave you because you're sick or anything like that,' " said Courtney, whose grade-point average this year is 3.8 and never has dipped below 3.5. "I just couldn't see myself without him."

'Nothing Was Ever About Her'

That summer, Courtney brought Justin strawberry milkshakes and Coke-flavored Slurpees when chemotherapy treatments left him too weak to leave the house.