Lauraloveskatrina Now

Katrina smiled, tucking a strand of dark hair behind her ear. “You doodle my name a lot.”

katrinaloveslauratool.

And later, when they drove to the beach for the first time together, Katrina borrowed Laura’s pen and wrote on her own palm:

“What’s that?” Katrina asked once, pointing to the faint letters bleeding into the page.

By senior year, Laura had stopped writing it. The phrase felt too heavy, too raw. She’d accepted that some loves were meant to stay on the underside of desks—invisible, permanent, but never touched. Katrina had started dating a boy named Mike who played lacrosse and didn’t know how to spell “algebra.”

The first time Laura wrote it, she was eleven. She’d stolen a red marker from the teacher’s desk and pressed the words into the underside of her desk: lauraloveskatrina . It was a secret, so she hid it where only someone crawling on the floor for a lost eraser would find it. No one did.

So Laura did. She showed her the desk—still there, the red marker faded but legible. She showed her the mirror, the notebooks, the margins of her life. And then, standing in the shadow of the oak tree with the wind picking up the leaves around them, she showed her the only thing she’d never written down.

In high school, the phrase evolved. It appeared in the condensation on Laura’s bathroom mirror after a shower. It was scratched into the bark of the oak tree behind the football field where they’d sit after practice. lauraloveskatrina was written in the margins of Laura’s chemistry notebook, disguised among the formulas for molarity and atomic mass.