My First Day

          My car pulls up late down the street from Episcopal, so my mom and I have to get out and hurry to the church while Gavin goes off to do whatever. When we get to the church we can't find the entrance. We circle around it and find someone standing by the open door, so we walk in and are greeted by several people standing around a table. The woman sitting behind the table asks for my name and hands me a couple of papers. I thank her and mom and I go to find a pew as close to the front as possible, as instructed by the power point displayed on the projector in the front left corner of the church. Mom seats herself near the middle of the congregation and I follow after.
           Mr. Perkinson stands at the front of the aisle, in the middle of a speech I can't seem to hear or pay attention to so I start to look around. At first I feel a little bit overwhelmed by so many unfamiliar people, but  a smile spreads across my face as I'm reassured by the sight of Allison, my childhood friend, along with several other girls from my old school scattered across the church. I see glimpses of a few people I used to know and some that look familiar but I cannot seem to remember their names.
          I'm running out of people to observe so I move on to my setting. The church is beautiful, with several stained glass windows and brick walls. There is a circular one on the front wall, three tall ones on the back wall, and an uneven number of windows on the side walls, which bothers me. The stained glass windows are beautifully crafted and I marvel at how they fill the space that the dim lights inside can't reach. The brick walls make me feel uncomfortable with all that weight around me, but the pointed barrel vault roof is massive and reminds me of sixth grade social studies when we learned about roman arches.
           I spot a man staring at me, clearly annoyed, because I keep twisting around to look at the church so I decide to listen to Mr. Perkinson's speech some more. But soon that fades back into a droning background noise as I start flipping through the papers that were handed to me by the lady at the entrance. By the time I finish flipping though the packet, the speech is over and people are standing up to walk out. I get up excitedly  and rush to see my friends. We talk, laugh, and compare schedules as we head off on our first day of high school.