High School

It's so weird. It's like I'm walking through a dream, a dream that I've been writing for myself for the past few years, except everything is so much different than I thought it would be. I can't really be here, can I? To be so far away from elementary school, to be able to walk through the halls without feeling like the lowly middle schooler in the lowly band. I can eat lunch wherever I want, sit in the back of the bus, and take classes with teachers I didn't know before yesterday. After three years of almost the same thing, how can that be possible?

But it's still true. You can bring your backpack to your classes, I actually have to go to P.E. and wear gym clothes for the first time ever, and I sit in front of juniors in Spanish class. I can actually belong in concert band now, and in journalism, my first class of the day, we sit on beanbag chairs and couches instead of at normal desks. And speaking of desks, I've never even had the desk where the chair is attached to the side. We just sat at tables in middle school.

In a way, high school is kind of like a big event going on, every day. I'm used to being in a school where you can always see people you know just by coming out of a classroom, and the lockers are just feet away from the classes and the bathrooms. Here, it's normal to go a day without seeing a certain person. There are two buildings (one across the street), and you have to really plan everything out perfectly to get to class on time. It's all calm for about an hour, and then there's this mad rush where everyone spills out into the hallway and crosses the road or whatever for about five minutes, and then it's quiet again. I don't even have to carry around a normal binder anymore, and my back doesn't break from the weight of the books I'm stashing in my backpack. Kids I knew as eighth graders back when I was in sixth grade are once again in classes with me, and even some kids who were in the old building, the tall upperclassmen, when I was in fifth grade are there, too, reappearing this time as seniors. I'm once again with the friends who left at the end of seventh grade, and finally get to talk to them again.

It's just so crazy.