Yours Truly

Part 1

Summary: Lauren and Camila know a lot about each other, except for, well, each other's names. They've been writing handwritten, anonymous letters to each other for an English assignment for a couple months now and during that time, Lauren's developed a genuine interest for a girl who's handwriting resembles a child's first attempt at holding a pencil. But she couldn't be more charmed by it. What happens when Lauren unexpectedly realizes that the shy girl in her class who she doesn't know a single thing about has the exact same handwriting as in the letters she anticipates reading every single day?

"Earth to Lauren," Normani hums as she knocks on the desk where the Latina sits at with her knuckle.

Lauren raises her green eyes from the paper in front of her to meet with her best friend's brown ones and she sees that Normani has an eyebrow kinked up knowingly. "What?" she asks obliviously. "Sorry, I was rereading the letter." Normani and Lauren are currently in history, waiting for the bell to ring to signal the official start of class as their fellow students begin to pile into the room.

"I asked you if you wanted to hang out with Dinah and me later tonight," Normani chuckles. "Or do you want to spend the night alone in your room dreaming about your secret little admirer who you've become borderline obsessed with throughout the past two months or so?"

Lauren feels her cheeks get warm in embarrassment. "I am not obsessed with her," she mumbles sheepishly as she flips the piece of paper over, hiding it from Normani's lurking eyes. "I do, however, kind of have a crush on her."

Normani smiles and reaches over to place a hand on Lauren's wrist, using her thumb to rub her skin softly. "I know you do and I think it's adorable," she says genuinely. "In the 8 plus years that I've unfortunately known you," she jokes, "I've never seen you this happy and captivated with anyone else before. And it's even more cute that you don't even know who the hell she is!"

It's true. Lauren may not know her name or what she looks like or the sound of her voice, but she does know her. She knows the girl's interests, hobbies, passions, dreams, pet peeves and she definitely knows her handwriting, seeing as that's the only way they can interact. The messy chicken scratch that at first annoyed Lauren because she couldn't make out the different strings of what she hoped to be letters of the alphabet now enamored her and made her heart flutter every single time she opened a new letter and her eyes took in the different strokes and curls of her pen and the crossed out words here and there (the girl never, ever wrote in pencil if she had the choice because she hated the way it fades with time).

What started out to be a random English assignment that Lauren thought was going to be uninteresting and a waste of time turned out to be the single most important thing that she looked forward every day. Her English teacher, Ms. Ashworth, devised an assignment that would extend to all four of her English classes to make things a little bit more interesting and the possible pool of people would be that much greater.

Ms. Ashworth has a total of approximately 100 students between all of her senior classes that she teaches and she made sure to pair everyone up with one other person at random but only she would know who's partnered up with whom. Partners could be in the same class or they could be in another class. It's impossible to tell, really. The assignment is that every night, everyone would handwrite a letter to their partner anonymously and she wasn't going to read it so they were free to write whatever their hearts desired. She would just check to see that they actually did the assignment. The point of the assignment is to be able to free write and to just be able to connect with someone without knowing their identity because she believes that sometimes people are too preoccupied with judging people based on their looks that sometimes that blindness prevents people from meeting others who they could potentially get along with really well. Lauren thought of it as like the singing show "The Voice", but with writing instead.