My first day of high school was nerve-wracking. I walked down the halls, pushing past people I didn’t know. I entered the lunchroom and looked around, searching for someone I knew. It seemed like everyone was a stranger to me. I hadn’t gone to school with most of these kids. We didn’t have one large middle school before high school, instead, we had a group of smaller middle schools. In one day, I went from only having a class of 40 to being part of a class of 600. We had our small cliques in middle school, but you can only segregate so much with 40 people. The closest we’d come was sitting at different lunch tables. Now, as I looked around, I saw some familiar faces from my old elementary school I hadn’t seen in years. I then saw some classmates from my middle school. Then, I spotted my old lunch table from middle school and moved to sit with them.
After lunch was over, I slowly went to my next class, wondering how in the world I was going to find the courage to talk to someone. As I entered my Honors Advanced Algebra class with Mr. Smith, he assigned us each a seat. We all introduced ourselves. I listened as everyone took their turn. The girl next to me seemed interesting, so I gathered up my courage and started a conversation. We talked with each other for nearly the whole class.
In English 9, I was sitting listening to the teacher when I saw a familiar band name on the back of a t-shirt. I said I liked her t-shirt and asked her if she was a fan. She said she was. We started talking about our music tastes. By the time the bell rang and we left the classroom we were friends. I made other friends later in a similar way.
By the end of the day, I had made several other new friends. As I got off the bus and began the long walk up to my house, I could think back on the day. High school was intimidating, that was for sure, but I had gotten through the day. I could remember everything I heard in middle school and elementary school. About how confusing the social scene in high school was. I could see the different groups in the lunch room and classroom: the jocks, emos, nerds, overachievers, preps, student senate members, stoners, computer and video game geeks, and the other groups distributed among the lunch tables. Despite these groups, it hadn’t been that hard to make friends, people were willing to talk, especially if you made the first move. I made friends from different groups, after all, no one ever said that you had to pick one group and stick with it. Most of my teachers were great and I had made more friends. Later, when my mom came and asked me, “How was school?” I could smile and say, “It was okay.”