A Word With a Friend

The room felt empty even though I could see dozens of people walk by me. The commotion was unlike anything I had experienced before in my life. Despite all that surrounded me, it felt as calm as a river’s gentle flow. I didn’t have a care in the world. I was in the moment. On one side of the curtain was chaos. On my side, it was heaven. 

I couldn’t believe that it had come to this. The St. Jerome’s 16th Annual Spelling Bee was not something I thought that would bring me so much stress. After all, I was deemed as the second best speller in all of the school. Well, there’s only 248 students in the school and my eighth grade class has 31 of them. Not a really stiff competition since I’m really just competing against my own class. Getting here wasn’t shocking. But what surprised me the most was who I had to face off in the final round.

Devin. My best friend. 

We had known each other since we first met in kindergarten – and we were always with each other. He was a scrawny little kid when we first met. He had this dark curly hair that looked like a bed of cotton resting on his skull. I thought he had the coolest hair then and I still do now. Our moms both seemed to like each other too. I think I was always hanging out at Devin’s house every other Saturday. He lived about a mile from my house and both my mom and I would walk the 20 minutes or so to get there. She enjoyed her mom time with Mrs. Devin and I would just play video games with my friends while scarfing down the stuffed crust pizzas from Pizza Hut. Mrs. Devin always got that for us. That’s the best kind of pizza there is. I haven’t eaten that kind of pizza since the last time we hung out at his mom’s house. Those were some great memories.