For Saachi Dhillon, navigating high school came with new changes and challenges, especially with friendships.
I stepped foot onto the large campus with butterflies fluttering in my stomach. It was my first day of high school. Meaning, almost everything is brand new to me. I slowly walked into the lunch area, trying to avoid getting in the way of kids that I don’t know. I looked around, trying to catch a glimpse of my friends from middle school. I then heard someone shouting my name.
“Saachi!” I turned around to see my best friends smiling and beckoning me to come over. I rushed over and we immediately began to joke around with each other just like in our middle school days. And as I sat there, face glowing with laughter, I thought to myself, “Our group of friends is never going to break apart from one another.”
But, little did I know, I was going to be proven wrong quite soon. Throughout my friendship with these girls, we have always been loyal, supportive and had each other’s backs. However, by the time September comes around, I noticed that two of my closest friends from middle school began to drift away.
And slowly but surely, our tight-knit group of five unraveled and became a group of three. They left us so abruptly, that it left my other friends and I feeling as if someone had let us fall from the edge of a cliff. A part of me had a ray of hope that our whole group could be rekindled, but that hope soon vanished.