I Travelled Cross-Country and Came Back With a Boyfriend

Ok, so I purposefully made the title sound more scandalous than it was…
In 8th grade, members of an academic honors club were invited to participate in a travel experience. History curriculum for the 8th grade included the beginnings of the United States up through the civil rights era, and the teachers organizing the trip chose to build upon this aspect of the curriculum by taking a group of 30-50 13-year-olds to Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and New York each year.

Visiting a Museum

The trip roster was largely populated by students I had several classes with and many of my closest friends. There were also a few students who were added on from another honors group, which made for some clique clashes and some new friends. Among the less-familiar group was a boy that caught my attention. He was quiet, but approachable, tall (especially unusual for middle-school), and most attractively not part of the same group I’d spent the last two years with. Bus rides between tour sites and attractions made for excellent get-to-know-you chats, but our conversations did not escape the notice of my classmates, my teacher, or his mother (a chaperone on the trip). While I’ve never been a fan of a lot of public attention, something about being away from home, being so close to the end of middle school, and being on the cusp of a new high school experience made me enjoy the novelty of company outside my comfort zone.

Lady Liberty in New York

We spent long days together visiting the museums, landmarks, and historical sites on our itinerary, and spent our “free-time” in the evenings cross-legged on the hotel hall floors (no boys in girls’ rooms, or vice versa, so hallways were hang-outs). I could wax-poetic about the experience and say our first date was the theater in New York, but that would be stretching it a little. We were definitely deemed “a couple” by the time we returned home, though we’d never left the company of our chaperones or had a first kiss (there may have been hand-holding – my memory is foggy on that one). We continued to date through the summer, and there was something about entering high school “in a relationship” that made me hold my head a little higher.