HUTCH: I first saw Avery Dennis in a pink bikini at a pool party. I met her on the first day of freshman biology. And I was mildly annoyed when she turned to me and asked for a pencil because she’d forgotten hers. Which she would proceed to do, every single day, for the next four years. But I quickly learned that AD’s inability to hold on to a pencil—despite having more colored pens than any human reasonably should—was only a very small part of who she is. I probably started to fall in love with her the first day I saw her dissect a frog. Or maybe it was the day she wrote that song about enzyme catalysis and sang it in her horrible, wonderful, off-key voice. Maybe it was all of those days, and more. And she must have been falling in love with me, too, or she never would have broken her oath to stop dating.

AVERY: I met James “Hutch” Hutcherson on the first day of freshman biology when I asked him for a pencil. I spent the next four years looking forward to science class every single day, but somehow didn’t realize that was because of Hutch until the last week of school.

HUTCH: My friends have been asking me a lot about what happens next with me and AD. I know there’s this stereotype that guys don’t like to talk about relationships, but Michael and Liam have been bugging me nonstop about what our “label” is.

AVERY: How would I label us? I don’t know. Happy? I’m just happy I realized I liked Hutch before it was too late. Also, I’m happy that Coco found Ashley Jenkins on Facebook, and was able to confirm through mutual friends that she’d never dated Hutch. Not that it really matters, since I am the last person who has any right to be jealous about exes, but at least we solved that mystery. Although I should have known from the start that Hutch would never date someone who would incorrectly label a diagram. The mantle is like the easiest layer of the Earth to identify.

HUTCH: Michael kept wailing that we’d found each other “too late.” But I don’t think that’s true at all. Caltech and Pepperdine are only an hour apart, after all.

AVERY: So we’re seeing what happens. We’re taking it slow. And we’re still together. Although I don’t know how I’m going to get pencils in college.

HUTCH: I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in Avery’s oral history project. I don’t want to be her past. I want to be her present. And, hopefully, her future.

AVERY: But that’s the thing about history, right, Ms. Segerson? It’s still being written, all the time, even while we’re living it. Now it was time for me to close the book on my history of boys, open up my yearbook, collect signatures from absolutely everyone, and get ready to graduate. As I flipped through the pages that contained our final legacy as seniors at San Anselmo Prep, I had another epiphany about history. History may help us understand why certain events had happened. But maybe the most important thing wasn’t the why, but that we remember. That we have a record of the experiences that we loved and the people we loved having them with. Because I was happy that I had a better understanding of why my relationships had ended, but I was even happier that along the way, I’d made so many wonderful friends, had so many amazing experiences, and had so many ways to remember them by. So I guess you were right, Ms. Segerson. History is pretty worthwhile after all. But I think I’m done with writing history for a while. It’s time for me to make history instead.

Avery:

This was extremely unorthodox, and yet I must say I’m impressed by how thorough you were.

A+

Good luck at Pepperdine—don’t be a stranger.

—Ms. Segerson