TIFU by thinking that a set of triplets was only two people for almost a year

In my junior year in high school I had to transfer schools, I actually ended up fitting in quite well with my fellow junior students and the people in the drama club, and sometimes I would hear people talking about “the triplets”.

Now, I had the excuse of being two years their senior and not being in any of the same clubs, but I had never seen these triplets I would usually see two identical girls walking around together (spoiler alert: yep those are two thirds of the triplets) but I never saw three identical people walking around together so I just figured that the triplets were fraternal and carried on with my life.

Two months after class started though my easily explainable circunstancial mistake morphed into the literal height of airheadedness and stupidity. My mom decided to join an after school yoga class for parents and she would constantly talk about a fellow mom that did the class with her that had had triplets and was “in such good shape!!”; after one of her classes she turned to me and asked me if I had ever seen the triplets or if I knew them, and my dumb ass said “nope never seen them, I do hear about them a lot though”, my mom found this odd since apparently they were identical and had very distinctive features for Brazil, she then DESCRIBED EXACTLY HOW THEY LOOKED to me and my answer was still “nop never seen them, but I’ve seen a set of twins that look like that around school”, you would think that that would make me connect the obvious dots but no, it took me till the end of term to realize how stupid I was.

My school was very well funded in the art department and since we were studying The Phantom of the Opera we got to go to São Paulo to see a production of it in the Renault theater, since the trip was quite long from our city all the way to the state capital we made a day out of the trip, all of the high school could go (around 200 people ended up going), we went to the biannual art expo during the afternoon and then stopped at a mall for dinner before the play, there I was with my friends, one of whom was a freshman in the same class as the triplets and he asked me if I could go with him search for them since they had borrowed money from him and he needed it back. I asked him what they looked like to help him search for them, he looked at me completely flabbergasted as if saying “how have you studied in the same building as them FOR A YEAR and not seen them??” But before he could say anything he spotted them and went towards their table.

And finally there, after a year of being absolutely moronic, I saw them, the two twins that I always saw around school plus another…. identical…. twin……. Yeah… After very awkwardly standing beside my friend as he talked to the triplets I explained to him the whole situation and he laughed his ass off at my stupidity. At least now I have a funny, if slightly embarrassing story to tell.

TLDR: moved to a new school where there where supposedly a set of identical triplets who I thought were only twins for a year because I never saw all three of them in the same place at the same time. Only realized my mistake after actually seeing all three of them together at a field trip.