Cara and ME

It had been Cara’s first day of freshman year in high school. She had her outfit planned and no one was going to tell her otherwise.  It had been an olive green crop top with loose boyfriend jeans. Cara had been nervous. I know this because it was the first thing she had told me that day.  She had told her best friend at the time that she was ready for the world. She wanted to be involved and get her act together. Cara wanted to make her parents proud. A trait that we both shared.  The statement alone had exuded Cara’s extroverted attitude toward life.  She’s the type of person who rolls with the punches no matter how hard it could get and boy did it get tough sometimes. That first day Cara had gone home disappointed. She hated her schedule and her classes were not challenging. Going to her counselor the next day, Cara had requested to be a part of a program names AVID that's main goal was to focus on college admittance. The course would be taken four years and the same people would advance with one another year until graduation. She dragged her best friend into it as well, thinking that it could benefit them both if one made an effort to join. It had been an awkward class at first. While some knew one another from their middle school Cara and her best friend only knew each other and there was no way her best friend would give another person the time of day. Cara’s best friend had been a mean girl who simply wanted for the class to end to get back to her friends, while Cara was just happy to be there. AVID had been a program that allowed first-generation students opportunities for them to attend college. I had been sitting right next to her when we first met. I could see it, she was ready for the world and you could see it when she would talk to you. I had first witnessed this when we introduced ourselves to our groups of two. We answered icebreaker questions on the board to get comfortable with each other. She had gone first and by the end of the class, our AVID teacher could not get us to stop talking. We both had played the same instrument and had almost the same period schedule. It wasn't a surprise when I saw her four times after the class had ended. What brought us together though, had been sitting together in band class. It was an energy that could exclude people without us knowing.  Soon we started to hang out outside of practices and school to go and have fun. Every time we were together we wouldn’t ever stop laughing, it was too contagious. I remember freshman year ending, and her thanking me for our friendship. I know she had gone through a hard time with her old best friend after she slowly started to better herself and surround herself with those wanting a better future. After talking to our AVID teacher we decided to take AP classes together and enrolled ourselves in classes that were interesting to us. Our teacher had explained that it would be better to take on a challenging class with a friend in order to push one another when one of us was lost. The advice had created a  strong support system that allowed us to grow .Every year after that had been challenging but we never backed down. We sometimes cried from the strain of our classes and the stress but we knew it would eventually benefit us. We also found others in AVID that shared our dream of wanting to go to college. It was eight of us against the world by the end of both our freshman and senior year of high school.  Cara had struggled to keep the toxic friendship with her old group of friends until she decided to stop talking to them altogether. Her old best friend had been in the AVID class and would have a petty attitude. We made the best of it and ignored her attempts to degrade Cara’s potential. Sophomore year she had disappeared from the class, and come junior year we found out that she had dropped out of school altogether. Junior year had been our hardest year yet. We would spend days at each other's houses trying to study and do homework for our classes. It had also been the year my grandmother had passed. Cara had been there for me in more ways than I could explain. I took it day by day and soon I was back to my old self. Our senior year had meant that it was time to apply to colleges. This was a scary time for both of us, we had never been apart from one another and it would be difficult to imagine that we would not get accepted to our school of choice. Cara had applied to eight schools while I had applied to nine. All had been away from home, but that would not stop us from putting our hard work to the test. We spent months of anticipation, and soon acceptances had been sent. I had gotten accepted to eight of the schools that I had applied to and Cray had gotten accepted to seven. Every time we had gotten accepted to a college we would call each other first and then congratulate one another for their accomplishment. But nothing could beat the call where we both had gotten accepted to the school that accommodated our goals the best personally.  I laughed while Cara cried with tears of joy. I would continue to see her grow after high school and for that, I will forever be relieved. We had grown close to one another the second we sat next to one another in class the first day of freshman year. Now as we were on our way to move-in day at the university of our dreams, I couldn’t help but be thankful. Had we not met I do not think I would have pushed myself as much as I needed to.