9.5 Little Miss Smarty Pants

She has always been so intelligent. I've known her since we were in grade school and I've always thought she set the bar up so high that I couldn't reach it. But over the years, I tried to catch up. She was so smart. She said the smartest things. She liked the least conventional things. I wanted to be so much like her. She was different. More than a decade has passed and she's still that smart girl I've always known. She knew how to balance everything in her life. I wanted to be her good friend, not just some person she's known since grade school. I wanted to accept me. I thought that maybe if she acknowledged me, it would make me feel like I was smart too, and that I was just like her. I got over it in high school but it just goes to show that even if I'm not competing with her, I strived to be as amazing as she is. It helped me in a way that I didn't slack off and that I did my best in everything. She's still the person I look up to, until now even if we've stopped talking.