Julie Watkins and Andre Magalhaes ’17

West Side Story: How would you describe your friendship?

Julie Watkins: Playful, ticklish.

Andre Magalhaes: Trusting and accepting.

JW: I would describe it as full of banter. Awkward at times.

AM: Spaced out because we were friends in like second grade and then we stopped being friends. Well we were friends from like second to fifth grade and then we stopped being friends and then we were friends in like seventh to eighth grade and then we stopped being friends. For various reasons. And then we became friends again last year.

WSS: When did you meet and how?

JW: We attended Roosevelt elementary school and he was the new kid in like first grade. We had these little getting to know the new kids signs and Andre had a nice little profile, but I didn’t read because I was in first grade and I didn’t know when I learned to read.

AM: I think you could read in first grade.

JW: Yeah, but you had on a Hawaiian shirt, that we discussed.

AM: Yeah we did actually. Apparently I looked very good in this Hawaiian T-shirt.

JW: And I said I want to be friends with that man. And so it began.

WSS: What is one thing about your friendship that is special?

AM: I don’t know. I mean I don’t really know what exactly is going on in other people’s heads and their friendships, but I feel like I can tell Julie anything and even if she might judge me, it’d be okay. It wouldn’t be like ‘Oh my god that sucks. You’re horrible.’

JW: You know when you said ‘I don’t know what’s going on in other people’s heads’ I thought you were going down a different path. Okay. An obvious thing is that we dated, but then we stopped and we’re still friends. That’s an obvious thing.

WSS: Do you think you will be friends for a long time? Why?

JW: Probably yeah. Because even though we stopped being friends for a while, we always go back to each other. It’s a beautiful thing.

AM: We get along well and we are fun people that like the presence of each other.

JW: And you know, he eats a lot of fruit snacks where as I eat fewer fruit snacks. If we had to eat [fruit snacks], I would let him eat most of them, and you know if we had some scotcheroos I bet he would let me have most of them. And that’s what I think friendship is about.

Allie Hambright and Ella Gibson ’18

WSS: How would you describe your friendship?

Ella Gibson: We have a lot of fun together.

Allie Hambright: And we can do anything together.

EG: We used to cheer a bunch together, but now we just hang out and do stuff for fun. Sometimes we’ll like go to the movies, or have campouts at our houses. 

WSS: When did you meet and how?

EG: Though cheerleading in like sixth grade.

AH: No, it was like fourth grade.

EG: It was fifth or sixth grade.

WSS: What is one thing about your friendship that is special?

EG: We cheer together at school and not all friends are in the same sport together.

AH: Being in the same sport makes us closer.

EG: Yeah, that’s how we met, and we connect over that.

WSS: Do you think you will be friends for a long time? Why?

EG: Yeah probably, because it’s just always been that way.

AH: Yeah.

Kaitlyn Rose and Maddie Rhinehart ’18

WSS: How would you describe your friendship?

Maddie Rhinehart: It’s definitely very weird.

Kaitlyn Rose: We’re kind of like sisters. It’s not like a friendship; you would think of [us] as more sisters than friends.

MR: We see each other everyday. Like this past summer we were literally together all summer.

KR: All summer. We do a lot of family events together too.

WSS: When did you meet and how?

KR: It was like ten years ago when we moved to the same neighborhood.

MR: In the same neighborhood. We live right across the street from each other. I think we just kind of became friends that way.

WSS: What is one thing about your friendship that’s special?

KR: She’s basically a family member so she knows my whole family and they consider her a family member.

WSS: Do you think you’re going to be friends for a long time and why?

MR: I would assume so.

KR: I would hope so, yeah!

MR: I’m sure we’ll still keep in touch even if we’re like on different sides of the countries.

KR: Yeah, our friendship isn’t something that just goes away because of how close we are.

We have a lot of inside jokes and everything that. If someone overheard some of them, that would be weird and awkward.

Grace Yarrow and Anjali Huynh ’19

WSS: How would you describe your friendship?

Grace Yarrow: Crazy.

Anjali Huynh: Yeah, we both have really stupid moments.

GY: Somehow it balances out. We are very different people, Anjali is more sassy than I am.

AH: She’s the nice one that everyone loves, I’m the one that makes everyone hate me.

GY: She stands up for herself more than I do and she’s also better at talking to people.

WSS: When did you meet and how?

AH: It was sixth grade and we did girls on the run together.

GY: We hated each other. I was trying to do a better job at the race. One day we ended up running together.

AH: The people she usually ran with her behind us, and we ended up trying to motivate each other.

GY: She liked pandas at the time so I just kept screaming pandas.

WSS: What is one thing about your friendship that is special?

AH: We are very aware of each other’s lives.

GY: We can communicate without saying anything.

AH: Yeah, we will look at each other and know what the other person’s thinking, just because we know each other so well.

GY: I think we both know each other better than we know ourselves.

WSS: Do you think you will be friends for a long time? Why?

GY: Oh yeah. We have a time capsule under my bed that we made a couple years ago that we are going to open when we graduate.

AH: We have to stick together just for the time capsule.  

Safeya Siddig and Wala Siddig ’18

WSS: How would you describe your friendship?

Safeya Siddig: Since we’re cousins, we’ve known each other for basically our whole lives and the thing about being friends with your cousin is that family lasts forever; you will always forever be friends with them.

Wala Siddig: I think we are just closer that other friends because we have known each other our whole lives and we will know each other until we die, hopefully, and I think that makes our bond stronger.

WSS: What is one thing about your friendship that is special?

SS: I mean, we’re cousins. We always see each other at family gatherings and we spend Thanksgiving together.

WSS: What do you like to do together?

SS: In the summer, we like to go canoeing together. She’s always my canoeing partner.

WS: We like to do outdoor activities together.

SS: Yeah, we’re always partners in the family.

WS: We are always with each other.

WSS: What is one of your favorite memories together?

SS When you almost killed me with an umbrella. One time she popped an umbrella in my eye.

WS: That’s not a good memory.

SS: What about the day you gave me the can? For extra credit in chemistry, we needed to bring a can and I forgot to bring one. I was so sad . . . and then Wala’s like ‘Here you can have my can.’ I was like ‘You don’t have to do that,’ but she said ‘It’s okay.’ It was the nicest thing anyone has done for me.

WS: My favorite time with Safeya is just when we’re together and relaxing and you know we are very comfortable with each other. We don’t have to try to impress each other. We can just be ourselves.

SS: Yeah, we’re really similar. We like the same scents, there is this one scent at Victoria’s Secret and I thought it smelled like this type of meat and she thought it did too, but nobody else thinks it.

WS: We just connect on a different level.

SS: She is a down chick.

Jake Anderson and Carter Johnson ’18

WSS: How would you describe your friendship?

Jake Anderson: It’s unique and interesting. We like to laugh.

Carter Johnson: We’re both pretty outgoing people with people we know.

JA: We just mix well.

WSS: When did you meet and how?

CJ: [We met through] baseball. I knew of him back when we were younger, but when we were ten we were on the same baseball team and we got really close then.

WSS: What is one thing about your friendship that is special?

JA: We haven’t stayed on the same teams as we’ve grown up. We have gone to different sports, so there’s kind of been different interests that could separate us, but they haven’t. We just keep hanging out.

CJ: Yeah I think that’s pretty cool about us.

WSS: Do you think you will be friends for a long time? Why?

CJ: Definitely.

JA: Someone that you’ve grown up with and are close to, especially in high school, and someone that you’ve gone through a lot of things with, such as losing a friend last year, is not just something that you go away from. Just from what we’ve gone through, I don’t think that our friendship is going to change.

CJ: Yeah, I agree.

Katie Olson and Claire McDonnell ’16

WSS: How would you describe your friendship?

Katie Olson: Probably one of the weirdest friendships you would ever experience. I would say we’re very, very close.

Claire McDonnell: We literally tell each other everything, but from the outside people would probably think we’re straight up insane all the time.

KO: Yeah, someone tells us we are insane at least once a day.

WSS: When did you meet and how?

CM: Actually we met in elementary school. We used to be nemesis.

KO: We were like best friends like sixth grade. And then junior high to sophomore year we hated each other for so long. And we really don’t have a concrete reason. But then sophomore year in soccer season we became like best friends again and then it’s been like that for two years now.

WSS: What is one thing about your friendship that is special?

KO: We’re very outgoing, especially together. If one of us will do something, the other will one will just piggyback on top of it.

CM: We just find really weird stuff to do that no one else really does. We really do not like just sitting around at all. We usually like to show up at random people’s houses and kidnap them and take them to all these obscure places like the landfill and drop them off there, leave them there for a while, come back and get them.

KO: But also, we have like a weird lingo I would say. Like we have words that people don’t know, they ask us all the time what they mean, we don’t really have a definition, we just know what they mean.

CM: Like “foo.” And also we say the word “weasel” a lot. We use that as a noun, a verb and an adjective.

WSS: Do you think you will be friends for a long time? Why?

CM: Yes, we’re just so close we literally talk every day and we play soccer with each other, so we see each other everyday, and it would just be weird if we just stopped talking.

KO: And not many people have our sense of humor so that’s kind of something that helps.

Logan Stuart and Nathan Abramoff ’17

WSS: How would you describe your friendship?

Nathan Abramoff: Good. Really close.

Logan Stuart: Long.

WSS: When did you meet and how?

NA: We met in kindergarden, on the second day.

LS: We were swinging and Nathan fell off the swing.

NA: That’s not true. We were swinging and we saw each other.

WSS: What is one thing about your friendship that is special?

NA: I mean, we’ve known each other for a long time, so we know what we are going to say and stuff, and how we’ll react.

LS: And he’s very easy to predict.

WSS: Do you think you will be friends for a long time? Why?

NA: Yeah. We have a lot of similar interests, not much has changed since kindergarden. We play video games together; we’re kind of big nerds.

LS: And we do cross country together. I think that makes us closer.