Belle was the sister I never had, but we weren't best friends. At school we lived our own lives. In elementary school I hung out with boys who liked to play soccer and two-hand touch football in the field.

I had no idea what Belle did during recess, nor did I have any inclination to find out.

I did know that Belle's best friend since second grade was Mariangel

Hernandez. Even if they got assigned to different classrooms, their bond remained and they would seek each other out during Lunch or recess. Belle was the confident, outgoing one while Mari was the shy wallflower. Mari would often come home with us to hang out after school, so I got to know her pretty well. She was very nice and could become quite talkative once she got to know you. But she was naturally shy and didn't like getting attention from boys. She dressed to hide her figure, started eating a lot, and got rather chubby (which caused her no shortage of self-esteem issues). And then came Sam.

Sam didn't become friends with me or Belle until high school when she adopted Mari. I don't know exactly what started their friendship. Sam was super outgoing, totally magnificent, and a complete attention-whore. Maybe girls like that just Like to have shy wallflower friends, y'know? Anyway, Sam had ALWAYS been popular, ever since her family moved to the Bay Area from Australia in seventh grade. She was gorgeous, and she knew it. She strutted around campus Like she owned the place, and in some ways she did. Getting from one side of school to the other in-between classes could sometimes be a challenge due to the crowding in the halls, and yet those crowds would magically part like the Red Sea when Sam came walking. Back then, she was still a brunette.

She didn't start dying her hair blonde until halfway through freshman year, but once she did, she got even MORE popular, if you can believe thy

As for me, I started playing Magic: The Gathering in junior high and hung out with a group of like-minded boys and one girl: Ailiseu Choi.

Her first name meant “iris" in Korean, but she was the total opposite of a pretty flower. Alice had no accent to speak of, was taller than most of the boys, very athletic, and not afraid to tackle someone on the field. She'd started playing soccer and two-hand touch football with the boys back in fourth grade, and while the two of us had never been friends outside of recess back then, we were friendly acquaintances.

Everything changed in junior high. Alice started becoming... well... a

GIRL, and all of a sudden guys started treating her differently. Now perhaps because I already spent so much time with Belle and Mari, I knew how to act around a female of the human species and didn't get all weird around her. Alice appreciated that and started spending more and more time with me. It got to the point when the school newspaper's gossip column speculated that we were a new couple. At first, both of us denied we were romantically involved, but after a while it seemed easier to just ignore the rumors and even go along with them a bit.

Boys certainly bothered Alice less when they believed she was my girlfriend, and once we realized that, we mutually agreed to just let the rumor mill do its thing.

Looking back, if any one thing was the genesis of the BTC, it was my family's backyard swimming pool. Now Silicon Valley isn't super cold, but it isn't a super-hot climate either. Houses with swimming pools weren't common, but ours had one, even though my parents had never really used it. My parents had always wanted “the best". I think they just liked the idea of entertaining guests in their expansively landscaped backyard with a swimming pool.

The pool was empty for most of the year, but during summer breaks I would ask my mom to have it filled up. Belle and I would swim laps for exercise in the afternoons a few times a week, and Mari joined us pretty often as well. Neither girl was into sun-tanning or anything like that, so the pool was really just a way to cool off on a hot day before we returned indoors. But then Sam and Mari got to being friends,

Mari told her I had a pool at the end of freshman year, and all of a sudden I found my shoulders caught in a death-grip by a gorgeous blonde who put her face inches away from mine and gasped, “You have a POOL?!?"

So that's how I found myself one June afternoon before my sophomore year standing in the kitchen overlooking the backyard trying NOT to gawk at the two beautiful teenagers reclined on Lounge chairs wearing skimpy bikinis twenty feet away from me. See, Sam was into sun-tanning, as was her best friend Zofi. Dark-haired and blue-eyed Zofia Zelazowska was a classic Eastern European beauty: tall and slender like a high-fashion model. I had long known she was Sam's best friend, but never really interacted with her much, other than to know she was soft-spoken and very sweet.

Sam had invited herself over to check out my pool, and I had been too dumbstruck to do anything but agree. I get the impression Sam gets away with that sort of thing a lot. A pretty blonde says what she wants and people just sort of Let her have it, and I was no different. I may have been accustomed to hanging out with girls like Belle, Mari, and Alice, but that didn't mean I was blind. I knew full well that my female friends were growing up, even Belle, and while I was careful to not openly gawk at them like so many other teenaged boys, I still paid attention.

I paid a lot of attention Sam. Zofi, too. She was gorgeous. And Mari, too, who was beautiful in her own way. And... Alice. Yeah, I paid attention to Alice. Even though she never wore makeup and made zero attempts to be "feminine", she was still obviously female.

But not Belle. No way. Nuh-uh. Yeah, I understood that we weren't related. But I'd literally grown up sharing cribs and playpens with the girl. Belle was my “sister”, and I simply didn't feel that way about her. I could let myself fantasize about my buddy Alice every now and again, but not Belle.

That's not to say she wasn't beautiful. She was quite pretty. Belle was a petite strawberry blonde with piercing green eyes, a delicate face, and became a stacked little hottie at age eighteen despite never getting taller than 5'1". She was eminently “fuckable" as the guys would say, but she was also my “sister”. I simply couldn't think of her that way. And Lest you get too far ahead of yourself in my story, I'll say it Loud and clear upfront right now:

NO, this story does NOT end with Belle and me falling in love, getting married, and Living happily ever after. It isn't that kind of story.

Thinking back, I'm not even sure why Sam got so excited about me having a pool. She and Zofi barely used it that day. If all they wanted to do was lay out in the sun, they could have done so from anyone's backyard.

But I suppose that's not really as much fun as laying out near a large body of water.

Mari, having been the one to tell Sam about my pool, had been the one to bring Sam and Zofi over to my house in the first place. That meant

Belle came over as well, the five of us spending all afternoon hanging out. Belle, Mari, and I did our laps. Sam flirted with me (she flirted with everyone). Zofi seemed surprised to find out I wasn't gay. I ordered pizza for everyone. We all had a REALLY good time, and long story short, Sam and Zofi started coming over to my house more often, especially once they realized my mother was never home.

That summer was also the first time Alice's family didn't go back to