Ellis and Alex first met riding on a bus back from a youth conference at Purdue University. Ellis asked Alex to sit next to him on the two day drive. Unfortunately for Ellis this drive was the same week that the seventh Harry Potter book came out! Naturally Alex ignored Ellis for the first six hours of the drive so that she could read the final installment in the Harry Potter series. Over the next ten years Alex and Ellis remained friends until the fall of 2015 when they both realized that their friendship was growing into something more.