My childhood consisted of moving from place to place, city to city, and stability to instability. Moving meant having to make new friends, but also, not being able to see my old ones, and that was the most difficult part. When we moved to Houston I was entering fourth grade, and honestly, I didn’t think we would stay for a long time, but regardless I had a blast at my third elementary school, and then came a little flyer in the mail from a small charter school called Harmony Science Academy.
At that point, the discussions about buying a house were already in the air, so what the heck, might as well move to a new school right? Right indeed. Harmony would be my fifth elementary school, my middle school, and high school, but the first day we went to tour the school I was determined not to go there.
You see, Harmony had bought an old church building next to a distributing factory and was in the process of turning it into a school. Looking back, it wasn’t exactly a bad place, sure it didn’t have windows in the classrooms, and was kind of small, but it didn’t look like a school.
I did what any stable minded nine-year-old would have done, I sat on the stairs of my new house a couple of weeks before school started and cried saying I didn’t want to go. I was really close to not going, but eventually, I ended up, clad in uniform, in a Spanish class in that “school.” Fifth grade was a breeze, and at the time, there was only one class, so I ended up making a good deal of friends, and we were all close-knit.
Then came sixth grade when suddenly the school seemed to multiply. There were three sixth grade sections, A, B, and C, and I was stuck in the “advanced” section, B. Now that wouldn’t have been a huge problem except for that my other friends were all either gone, or in different sections, so here we were, back to the drawing board.
Socially, sixth grade in the B class wasn’t easy, we might not have known it then, but essentially, we were in a class of blooming egomaniacs, and without an escape, we were stuck with each other for the next three years of our lives (some of us, even more).
Out of the ashes came some sunlight however in the form of three very rocky “friendships” I had begun to make. This is to say, we tolerated each other because we could barely tolerate the rest of our classmates, but that was to our advantage because by high school with the addition of one important person in eighth grade, we managed to form a tough bond.
High school at Harmony wasn’t that much better, but I had my best friends for a good portion of the time. We spent freshman year goofing off and making friends with the resident sweetheart. Sophomore year meant we lost one of our group members to the inviting hands of a public high school experience, but we lived. Sophomore year was a year of trials and tribulations, moral of the story: do not take a class with all of your friends at once. Junior year came around and suddenly our group had gone from five to two.
Everyone was leaving Harmony, but we hung on. It was also in Junior year that one of the people that went to a public school decided to create a group chat. Senior year only proved that the bond we had created was not going to diminish any time soon, and to this day, we are using that group chat.
We're almost done with undergrad now, and finally at the point where moving far away from each other becomes a very plausible reality. It seems daunting to know that suddenly we might not be a twenty minute to four-hour drive away from each other, but if there is one thing that I know for sure, it's that whether I want it or not (and I want), these are my people for life.
Harmony might not have been the greatest experience of my life, but it left me with friends I would literally hand my life off to, and I may not have known it while suffering through AP Psychology, but Harmony – indirectly -- was the stability I had needed.
