Bryan+W.

http://animoto.com/play/vCmA0amdnusmPQlnoVXXjw

These four years have been the best and the worst times of my life. So much has happened, it's hard to remember it all.

High school is crazy. There aren't many other ways to describe it. My Freshman year, I came into Green Hope with the full intention of remaining out of the public eye for four years. I was really awkward, but I had a good group of friends. Sophomore year was much more eventful. I began taking a lot harder classes, and really became interested in French. That March, I got a car for my surprise 16th birthday. It's definitely not the nicest car in the Green Hope parking lot, but I love my little Volvo. The following month, I got my license, and my friends and I were pretty much unstoppable, or so we thought. It was during that year that I met my best friend, Lauren. We've gotten into tons of fights, many more than I'd like to recall, but we've stuck it out through these three years together. That summer, we made countless day trips to the beach, and then in August, I participated in the National Young Leaders Conference in Washington, D.C. This was a huge risk for me, and made me really nervous. I had never really been away from home for that long, and I was really shy meeting new people. But, I decided to make the best of the situation and ended up making lifelong friends that I'll never forget. Upon returning from NYLC, I got a job at A Cleaner World, which is the dinky little dry cleaners next to Goodberry's. I knew that it would be a challenge having a job and taking AP classes my Junior year, but I was determined to do it. Junior year is literally awful. People tell you horror stories about it, but you don't really know for sure until you experience it. I remember that I went for three days getting only six hours of sleep total. That was not okay. Anyways, that year, I met more people, and the shell that I had been in during Freshman and Sophomore year was definitely gone by now. My classes kind of became pseudo-families for me. It was in one of those classes that I met my other best friend, a girl named Emily Bruner. Emily, Lauren and I were literally inseparable. We did everything together, and being the only one who had a license and a car, I was pretty much a chauffeur. I also participated in a quintessential high school experience, when I asked Emily to be my date to the Junior prom. That summer, I was invited to participate in the Global Young Leaders Conference in China. I was really unsure whether or not I wanted to do it, but I figured that it was either now or never. So at the end of June, I took my first trip out of the US, and even west of the Mississippi River, and flew to China. This was one of the biggest risks that I've taken in my life, but it totally paid off. I had the time of my life in China and, again, made lifelong friends. When I got back to America, life continued as usual, and I resumed my duties at A Cleaner World. I was "promoted" to Night Manager in August of 2009, which didn't really mean anything except that it would look good on college applications. Senior year started that August as well, and I was was so ready. I was really stressed out during the first semester, like every other senior, with college application deadlines and crazy classes that I definitely shouldn't have signed up for, like Calculus. It all paid off though, in January, when I got into UNC. I was thrilled, as it had been my dream school for years. I also took a trip to London to visit my brother, who was studying abroad there, over Thanksgiving. Let's just say, there are a lot of things that a 17 year old can do there that they can't do here. It was beginning to look like senior year would end on a good note, when on February 4th, my world was turned upside-down. My friend Emily, who I had become best friends with and was like a sister to me, had dropped out of Green Hope and moved to Montana, without telling me or anyone else. I was literally in shock for days, and I became pretty messed up. I've never really told anybody how much it affected me, but losing her was one of the saddest moments of my life, and was like losing a family member. It took me weeks to recover from that blow, but I did. By that time, I found out that I had been awarded the North Carolina Teaching Fellows Scholarship, and was set on going to Chapel Hill. Then, it was time to go on Senior Spring Break with my five best friends. Craziest. Week. Ever. We had so much fun, and it was definitely a great way to start the end of our last year of high school. So, to sum this all up, I would say that high school is great, and high school sucks, but all in all, you have to enjoy every minute of it, because before you know it, it's over. Congrats class of 2010, we finally made it.