FAKE

twenty-three.

(the one with the speech)

"And now, to proceed with the ceremony, Hadley's High School Class of 2015 Valedictorian has a few words to share with everyone." Dr. Jones spoke, to then look at me. "Gabrielle, please, come forward"

As the hundreds of hands in the sea of heads clapped for me, I approached the middle of the stage. Obviously, as flawed as I am, I have a huge anxiety to crowds, therefore, I am positively terrified of big masses. However, as cheesy as it sounded, as I stood there, I didn't get any time to feel scared, since Zayn's smile was all I saw.

He had come for graduation and I couldn't be happier. At that moment, I knew that he cared for me more than anything in the world and that was everything I wanted to know at that exact second. We had confessed our feelings and, most importantly, he was showing his feelings now.

"1,385 days. 1,385 days: that's the time that most of us have spent in these halls. Clearly, we should take away from that number the days we have missed class because we have been sick -for real or faking it-, out of town, or the moments that we have not been actually part of this school. However, these circa 1,385 days were full of wondering, wondering if we would make it to this day." I breathed hard and then looked at Zayn. He smiled cheerfully at me and, suddenly, that was all I needed to keep going. "Today is the day that many of us have been waiting, the one that marks the culmination of our 1,385 day journey: the day of our graduation.

"You see, like many other moments in life, graduation tends to be awkward. You don't know if you can be legitimately happy, since you will be missing a part of you: the place in which you've spent most of your life for the last four years, but it also bears the excitement of our future. Obviously, it is hard to focus on the long classes, the waking-up early and the strange food that the cafeteria sometimes serves when we've got such an expected path in front of us: one that we may have been hopeful for during our whole lives." At this moment, I looked back to my life. I had been expecting this moment for so long: Oxford had been my dream for as long as I remembered. However, now I didn't feel excited. I couldn't feel excited, because, even though I would be going where I had been wanting to go for so long, the price I had to pay for it was higher than I expected. "Because, sure, what is calculus for if you're hoping to become a lawyer? or why the hell was I forced to take three years of Spanish if I'm going to school in New Jersey? Those are very interesting questions, but, in my opinion, they lack of a correct focus.

"If we were to concentrate on the bad things about high school, we could stay here for hours, more or less depending on who you were during these four years" I took a deep breath thinking on all of my experiences in all of my high schools. "You could have been the football player, the one that attended every party for the entirety of high school, or perhaps the kid that hid in the library during break because he didn't want to go to the cafeteria. Either way, I'm afraid, the high school experience will have born something you will miss.

"High school can be a happy place. Indeed, if you're lucky you can find inspiration for your future and people that you know will stay with you for the rest of your life. It can be awful too: that is, when you forgot to do your homework and you've got class with Dr. Jones on the first period." With this, most of the class laughed. "We came into these halls with very different ideas, perceptions and premonitions of what these four years would bring to us, but even the most optimistic has to admit that high school gave us far more than what we bargained for.

"Today, the diploma that we receive represents success and achievement. However, this achievement isn't what we have to keep in mind most of the time, but rather the journey that led to it. This diploma is just the conclusion to this wonderful story that high school got stored for us.