“I’ll see you after school then?” Spencer asked hopefully.

“Yeah, I’ll be there.” Ashley slipped her hands into Spencer’s and drew her near. “Thanks Spence… for everything. I… I…”

“What?” Spencer asked softly.

“I… I love the way your hair looks in the morning.” Ashley looked down, not wanting to see the disappointment in Spencer’s face. Dammit! What a coward I am!

“Thanks. I do too. I hope one day, my hair’s not the only thing you’ll love.”

Ashley returned her eyes to Spencer. Before she knew what was happening, Spencer leant forward and gave Ashley a quick peck on the lips.

“Bye Ashley!” Spencer walked away, leaving Ashley grinning.

It was the last period of the day and Spencer’s eyes were glued to the clock in her Physics class. The minutes seemed to be passing with painstaking slowness and Spencer would have screamed if it could allow time to rush forward.

Mr. Somerset was talking about the distance between the earth and the nearest star but Spencer’s mind was light years away in a world of her own where only she and Ashley existed.

She still remembered the previous week, even though sometimes the tumultuous events turned it into a huge blur. She had never experienced so much angst and at the same time so much happiness in her entire life.

Spencer recalled liking girls for as long as she remembered. Her first crush was her neighbor’s daughter. The crush went away with the girl once she got married. Since then, Spencer had her share of infatuations, all females. But she knew her mother, a staunch Catholic who would never accept homosexuality. Spencer had always tried to be the nice daughter to her parents. She excelled academically and joined all the extracurricular activities her mother thought would be important for her. She obeyed them and never rebelled. She even got herself a boyfriend, a nice boy whose family attended Church as regularly as did hers. Her mother had been so happy when she was going out with Christopher. She did everything to make sure that Spencer spent more and more time going out with Christopher. It was Paula Carlin’s suffocating patronage, more than anything else, which compelled Spencer to break up with Christopher.