After six months of quarantine, my school went back to in person learning, with a twist. To minimize contagion, students would stay in their homeroom classes the entire day with the same group of people. Homerooms in my middle school were usually just a collection of names, people you see one class period a day and then go on ignoring; I can’t even remember who was in my homeroom the other years. But last year one period became seven, and we ate together, learned together, and shared every moment of every day for a year. There’s a bond that forms when you spend so much time with people, even if under other circumstances I wouldn’t even have remembered their names. One day I was practicing figure drawing and asked my friend to pose for a picture. Another friend photobombed, then another, and soon the entire class was posing for my drawing exercise. I liked the initial sketch and decided to color in with oil pencil, and soon spent a month on what should have been a 30 minute drawing. I loved capturing everyone’s individual personality within the group dynamic, and portraying the unlikely friendships forged during one of the strangest periods of my life. I showed the piece to my art teacher, who helped me enter (and win) my second VASE competition and for graduation, my homeroom teacher surprised us with framed copies of the drawing. This remains my favorite piece, both because of the personalities shining through, and because it represents what somehow became one of the best years of my life, a time after leaving isolation and exploring the world after six months of absence. The virus that tore the world apart brought us together, and I don’t think something like that will ever happen again.