Back from camp and in the real world, it took Annaliese about a minute and a half to get her mother to agree to send her to Trip’s school. Apparently, she had been wondering if Annaliese would prefer the change before Annaliese mentioned it, but she had been uncertain if her daughter wanted to leave her friends at her old school.  

Once Annaliese had given her mother the green light, Annaliese’s life changed very quickly.

Each morning, Annaliese would wait at the bus stop, the bus would pick her up, and at the next stop, Trip would get on. Without a word and with his headphones on, he sat next to her. She’d leave a flap in her backpack open and set it on the floor. He’d slide the little book in through the gap.

They tried to take as many of the same classes as possible. They’d write each other post-it notes and leave them within the pages and switch textbooks.

A school dance came up to celebrate the harvest. When someone asked Trip to the dance, he went. Annaliese went stag with a few of her friends who were also proclaiming their independence and went alone. Annaliese didn’t feel alone. Her eyes met Trip’s three times that night, and she wouldn’t have gotten more out of the event if she’d had a date of her own. It didn’t matter who Trip was out with… he loved only Annaliese.

Later at school, in the girl’s bathroom, Annaliese heard Trip’s date talking about him with one of the other girls as they vaped. “You would not believe what he told me.”

“What?”

“He told me not to ask him out again. He says he has to spread himself around, so I shouldn’t ask him twice.”

Annaliese flushed the toilet and came out of the bathroom stall.  

“Hey, you’re that girl who’s always with Trip,” the girl said, deliberately exhaling her smoke away from Annaliese. “He was clearly blowing me off, but was what he said real? Does he only date a girl once?”

Annaliese nodded. “Yeah, that’s how he rolls.”

“Well, have you been out with him?”

Annaliese shook the water off her hands and grabbed a paper towel. “I won’t date him. I’ve known him since he was four and I would never bother.”

“But you didn’t ask anyone else to the dance,” Trip’s date noticed. 

“Yeah,” Annaliese shrugged. “I didn’t see anyone I thought was interesting. Maybe next year.”

She swept out and saw that Trip had been waiting for her to get out of the bathroom. Whether he heard any of that didn’t matter. She put his headphones over his ears and they went out to catch the bus.

***

It was months before Annaliese’s parents were out of the house for a few hours. Trip came over. He kissed her feverishly as soon as the door behind him was shut.  When it ended, they were too bashful to look at each other.  They went to her room and made a little bookshelf for all the tiny books he gave her. It was made out of gift boxes they’d bought together. Thus, on one of her bookshelves, she had a box that looked like nothing. No one would ever guess that it contained entire books that were nothing but Trip writing ‘I love you’ in different ways on repeat.

At Christmas, they started wearing couples' rings, though no one noticed. They wore them on their middle finger on their right hands and they didn’t match. His was a Celtic knot and hers was fake diamonds all around her finger.  

They read books to each other over the phone to pass the time.

Annaliese came to the library when Trip had permission to invite her to his Uncle’s house and they’d replace all the papers inside the chess pieces. The first time he filled his up entirely with the words, ‘I love you’, and he filled up hers entirely with ‘I miss you.’

No one noticed.  

If Uncle Clement saw or noticed, whether he approved or disapproved, he said nothing. 

Everyone else knew they were close friends. Everyone knew they were inseparable, but it seemed like no one knew they were a couple. Her parents would invite his whole family over for dinner sometimes and whenever any of his brothers teased that there was something going on, they’d both gag.

“Not if you paid me,” she’d say.

“I wouldn’t even date her once,” he refuted when his relatives wanted him to date everyone at least once.

“Then why do you hang out with her all the time?” his father once asked.

Trip looked at Annaliese like she was a bug while she looked at him like he was boring. “You know, not everything is about that.”

“Oh?” his father asked. For Trip’s father, everything was about love games… 

Which may have been why Trip was so good at playing them under his father’s nose unaware.  

“She’s my best friend. I’ve never had a friend like her, and I won’t be shy about it. She keeps the other girls away and saves me from a lot of nonsense.”

“You make a good argument for drowning her in a river,” Trip’s father laughed heartlessly as if women and unwanted kittens were the same thing.  

When Annaliese had to answer, she said, “He helps me with my schoolwork. I’d be failing if it wasn’t for him.”

Everyone chuckled, even Annaliese’s mother, but what she claimed was completely true. Between the two of them, Trip was much better in their classes than she was. She knew why that was true. It was because she was not her mother’s daughter. She was someone else’s daughter and her biological mother had not been a class act. All the same, Annaliese said her prayers, did her homework, and hoped that she’d be able to hobble along long enough to get through law school. It was her mother’s fondest wish.

***

When spring came, Annaliese and Trip put their heads together for where they were going to go to camp. They decided they could not go to the same camp they went to the summer before. Instead, they sought to find one that had loose rules. Something free-spirited and less structured so they might have more time together.  

It ended up being a wash. Annaliese’s grades had not been good enough to go to camp, so she was sent to summer school to help improve her grades. Trip stayed home to keep her company, got his driver’s license, got a job, and saw her when they could both manage it.

Then school started again.  

The harvest dance came up. No one invited either one of them. They were freaks. They liked it. No one paid attention to them. They went together, showed up late, danced quietly in the corner, and left early to make out in the car on a deserted street in an unfamiliar neighborhood. They topped it off by coming home early too so no one suspected anything except that they were boring and no one liked them.