Before we knew it, a high school guy was coming up to us and asking us our names. Afraid to do anything else, I acted like a brat and blatantly refused. When he walked away, my friend and I breathed a sigh of relief and started giggling to ourselves. We stopped when a high school girl approached us with a smile. We shut up and suddenly felt shy. The girl told us her name and asked for ours. We told her our names with bashful smiles. She asked why I was wearing the earrings, and when I explained she simply said, "Aww, they’re so cute!," gave us one final smile and walked back to her friends. I still remember how pleased I was at the fact that high school students had given me the time of day.
Now, I am a high school senior. I have gone through grade school, when I had a stroller, a Sanrio pencil case, eight notebooks, played piko and cops and robbers during recess, brought a lunch box, and studied the water cycle in science. I have gone through high school, where I frequently lost my pens, bought my lunch, used on binders instead of notebooks and compared mitosis and meiosis. It is my last year in high school, finally, and I am a senior. Seniors are supposed to "rule the school" and I believe we deserve it.
Seniors have had the chance to experience and learn everything. We know all the horror stories that students keep telling each other because we’ve been through it all. I don’t mean just the academics. Cramming for big exams, late nights finishing a project or a paper, accidents with the uniform, bad canteen food, having the bus leave without us, versions of the five-minutes-na-lang plea, terror teachers…been there, done that. Of course, we keep our fondest memories of school with us as well. Who doesn’t love talking about sports fests, school fairs, stage plays, cute seatmates, school spirit, days when classes are suddenly suspended, romantic obstacles, dances, proms and all the things that make school great?
Finally, we have reached the final year of our high school lives. We survived it all  and without a cell phone for most of the years! One thing I still don’t understand, even after all these years. What exactly makes the seniors so magical? When I was younger, I looked up to seniors. I watched them as they passed in our hallways, secretly debated on the are-they-or-aren’t-they couples, looked at their pictures in the yearbook. I was even a little afraid of them. If I went to the bathroom and found it swarming with senior girls, I would freak out but try to act unaffected. As I got closer to being a senior, my fanaticism with the upperclassmen waned. Now that I’m a senior myself, I realize that there must be younger people looking up to my batch. When I try imagining them talking about us or freaking out when we’re in the bathroom, I start to laugh. I look at my fellow seniors and see the people I grew up with. These are the boys who played touchball then moved on to perfecting the art of courtship. These are the girls who exchanged stickers with me and now bring kikay kits instead of sticker books. In truth, we look a lot younger than the seniors in the 1985 yearbooks. Are we really seniors? Do the younger batches look up to us and stare? Do they wonder what our lives are like?
Well, the crowd may not part when we walk down the hallways, but I believe that the seniors truly have magic in them. When we are seniors, we look back at all the things we’ve lived through and remember all the lessons and values we’ve learned. At the same time, we look forward to the greater things that life is offering us. We are more confident and empowered. We are truly seniorsâ€â€older, wiser and a whole lot more fun.