Private school. Me. Next year. It seemed like only yesterday that I got the news. Back when winter still held my world in it’s suffocating grasp, coating everything with a layer of cold, slippery, unforgiving ice. At first I felt absolute shock; all my thoughts, which usually ricocheted around in my skull like a thousand bouncy balls in a glass box, froze instantly, my mouth empty of any words I might say. Once it dawned on me, my thoughts were back in motion at light speed as I began to realize the implications. I remembered the pamphlets in the lobby, all proudly bearing Scranton Preparatory School in gold letters on a royal purple background. 100% of all Prep graduates got into college, 98% got into top-ranking ones like Stanford and Harvard and Yale.

My pride at having passed the test to receive such a prestigious honor soared, and seemed to break winter’s hold with the faint whisperings of spring that grew inside me. For the first time in my life all my wildest dreams materialized before my eyes, now suddenly real, attainable. However, there was also the three to four hours of homework I would have to muddle through each day, but it all seamed worth it. I felt like the mental equivalent of superman. I could have my first novel finished by the end of my high school career! Now, what had seemed for so long so far off was close enough to touch.

But then my thoughts took a nasty turn, and I thought about my friends. The friends I have known forever, like Kayla and Aaron and Ryan, and the friends I had known for scarcely more than a year or two like Nazia, Sam, and Brittney. What would I ever do without them? Especially Sam, who I had known for the shortest time, and yet it seemed at times that we shared a brain (Actually, we share two brains), and Kayla, who had been my best friend since we were both itty bitty first graders. And what about…Oh, I love them all the same! I had to remind myself that they all lived relatively close to me, and after all, I was not moving, just changing schools.

Later, after all the snow and ice had melted away, I sat on the late bus next to Ryan, just like I always do. (People got the impression that we were going out because of this). We were talking about electives. He wanted to take German, because then he could speak that and let the Spanish people know how he felt when they spoke a language he didn’t understand. But then I countered that all the Spanish people were probably taking German because they already spoke Spanish. Or they’ll take Spanish for an easy grade, Ryan retorted.

“What language are you taking?” He asked.

“I don’t know what they have at Prep,” I said, feeling a bit excluded because I would not be filling out my schedule and picking out electives with everyone else.

“Oh, I almost forgot about that,” something flickered in his eyes, as if he were mourning me before I was gone, but it disappeared as soon as it had manifested. "When you leave, I'll have to buy a bus seat, and a bus window, and when we talk on the phone I'll put it on speaker and sit next to it so I can pretend you're there."

A feirce aching weighed down on my heart, as I realized that this was the sweetest thing that anyone has ever said to me, and soon I would be leaving him. That was how he would remeber me, all those times sitting together on the late bus, lost in wild conversations that made no sense to anyone but ourselves. It sometimes seemed that we were the only two people on the bus. Friendship, that's the sweetest thing to me.