Remember your high school sweetheart? The one you wanted to see all of the time? For Liza Winthrop, that doesn’t happen until she is a senior in high school and, one day at a museum, she meets Annie Kenyon.

The story begins about a year after the girls originally meet. Liza is at MIT and Annie at Berkely. They haven’t spoken in a while and Liza hasn’t responded to any of Annie’s letters. Liza is writing a letter to Annie and remembering their relationship and all that happened.

The girls begin as friends and their romance unfolds slowly, as it would for high school girls. Of course, it’s also happening in secret as both girls don’t want to tell their families what is happening, even after they realize that they have fallen in love. They gradually get to a point where they would like to be more physically intimate but there really is no place to do so. Both girls, of course, still live with their parents, so that’s out. In New York City, there aren’t convenient places for teenage lesbians to have sex. (You know, like in a parked car, at the end of a dirt road in the country somewhere.)

Two of Liza’s teachers, Ms. Stevenson and Ms. Widemer, went away and asked Liza to take care of their cats. Well, actually, Liza volunteered to do it. In any event, Liza cares for the teachers’ cats and she and Annie play house. They aren’t ever able to spend the night together, but they are able to spend quite a bit of each day together. While they are there, they realize that the teachers are actually lesbians and a couple. They are pretty geeked about that.
For those of you who are lesbians, or gay men, do you remember how excited you got when you were newly out and you spotted another gay person out in the world? I do. It was thrilling.

All is well until Liza misses a meeting at school. One of her classmates, who knows she is cat-sitting, and the school secretary, come over to the teachers’ house to find Liza, where they discover Liza and Annie barely dressed and clearly just out of bed. The school secretary forces her way into the house and discovers the single bedroom and the lesbian books in the teachers’ bedroom bookcases.

Now, Liza has to have a hearing to find out if she is allowed to stay at her private school. The teachers’ have a hearing to find out if they are going to be allowed to continue teaching at that private school. Liza discovers things about her family and her friends that surprise her and, in some cases, quite happily surprise her.

Annie on My Mind was published in 1982, so a few things are dated. For example, Liza refers to Annie as her “lover,” which was still the thing lesbians called one another back in the early 80′s. When I came out in 1987, many lesbians still did but by the early 1990′s, we’d moved on to “partner.” Teen girls would have called each other “girlfriend” and not lover. Much of the rest, sadly, is still relevant. In most places, the teachers would have faced losing their jobs if it became known they were gay, though I don’t know about in NYC. At least at a snooty private school. Liza’s parents were great and,hopefully, more parents would be that way now than would have been in 1982.

The copy I have is a 25th anniversary edition with an interview with the author, Nancy Garden. If you get that edition, don’t skip the interview. It’s definitely worth reading.