Leaving Orcas

After 7 years of being an Orca, here I am. Walking down the halls, the whole school applauds us as I clutch my clarinet case nervously in my sweaty hand. I see my little friend Itsuka as I saunter down the steps to go downstairs. The first graders applaud us as we enter the gym, and I take my seat next to my best friend Preslie. We both play the clarinet and were waiting nervously for this day.

As Mr. Kane (our music teacher) introduces us, my heart races. Once he’s done, I ask, “Ready?” and as soon as she replies “No?!”, we start playing. The song we’re playing is ‘’Friends Forever’’ by Vitamin C and it’s a really good graduation song. I guess we weren’t the best band, but I thought we were pretty good. After we were done, we took our seats by everyone else on the bleachers. Then our principal gave a long speech about who knows what because I wasn’t really paying attention, and our names started to get called. I was really nervous when my name got called, but I made it. After the long ceremony, we watched a slideshow that my reading teacher, Mr. Futter made. I have a lot of memories with Mr.Futter. He runs our live school show called Orca Live. I was “laptop”, the easiest job ever, but I loved the feeling that I was needed. My job was to change the slides on Powerpoint for the green screen, which is technically just pressing a button every few seconds, but it was really fun. The slide show had a picture of everyone when they were little and a picture of us in the present, holding a whiteboard that says what we want to be when we grow up, and it was the sweetest thing ever. The girl next to me was crying really hard and I almost started to cry just by watching her. I tried to calm her down by saying things like “It’s alright” and “we’ll see each other next year”, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t help. After the slideshow was over, my friend Annalise started singing “Don’t Stop Believing” with the lyrics she made up for graduation in front of everyone and that also almost made me tear up especially since she’s a really good singer.

After the ceremony, we all ate really sweet cake and the punch was very enjoyable. After my mom took approximately a million pictures, we all got on the bus and said goodbye to Orenco. It was a very long day and it made me look back on the many memories I have made there with my friends and teachers. I hope that I can go back to Orenco when I’m older and say hi to all of my teachers.