When science teacher Bianca Alvarado had to be away from her seventh graders in 2016, Charlie Ledesma stepped in as her substitute. The two had instant chemistry.
But it took their student — then-13-year-old Layla Garcia — and a bit of “Clueless” magic, to bring them together.
Alvarado, who was working in a different classroom, made a point to stop by and introduce herself on Ledesma’s first morning at the San Antonio, Texas, middle school.
She wasn’t expecting to find a “very handsome” man at her desk.
“I walked in, we looked at each other and there was this immediate spark,” Alvarado tells TODAY.com. “It was like nothing I had ever experienced.”
There was just one problem: Alvarado had a boyfriend at the time, so she pushed her feelings down, and even pointed him out to another faculty member, suggesting they would make a good couple.
Ledesma, however, only had eyes for Alvarado.
Former student Garcia remembers catching Ledesma staring at Ms. Alvarado’s photo.
“She had some pictures on her desk and he was gazing at one,” Garcia says. “I was like, ‘Oh, what are you doing?’ And he goes, ‘She’s cute!’”
At that moment, Garcia decided she was going to play matchmaker.
“I was going to make it happen,” Garcia says.
In the 1995 movie “Clueless,” Alicia Silverstone’s character Cher orchestrates a romantic connection between her two teachers, Mr. Hall and Miss Geist. Garcia, like Cher, told a few white lies to get the ball rolling.
“I’d tell him, ‘Oh, (Ms. Alvarado) really wants to talk to you,’ even though she hadn’t mentioned anything like that to me,” Garcia, now 21, says. “I had no idea what she actually thought of him but I knew they needed to be together.”
Garcia was also in Alvarado’s ear.
“She was learning everything she could about him, and then she’d share all the things we had in common,” Alvarado says.
On Ledesma’s last day substituting, Alvarado asked him for his phone number under the guise that she would contact him about teaching opportunities. They began texting, but their conversations weren’t around work.
Alvarado says Ledesma confessed that the first thing he did when he saw her was look at her ring finger. It was bare at the time, but not anymore.
The Ledesmas, who have been together since 2016, tied the knot in 2020, and share three children, Mila, 6, Jonas, 3, and Micah, 1. They are still in touch with Garcia.
“We’re definitely grateful to Layla,” Bianca Ledesma says. “Things worked out the way they did because she pushed us along.”
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
