By MEG KELLY
The first thing you notice about Christina LaFauci is her smile. No matter where she is or what she is doing, she never fails to have an ear-to-ear grin plastered on her face.
The second thing you notice is that she either has her backpack on or a stack of heavy, often complicated textbooks in her arms. She pauses in the hallway with them in hand to catch up with you quickly in between classes before she’s off again, heading off to another part of Malden High School.
But rushing from class to class doesn’t means she has little time for a social life, as you can find her with one of her many friends from the MHS band, such as fellow senior Janice Yiu, in the band room, where “she’d always be willing to help me with anything.” And as her time at MHS draws to a close, LaFuaci’s dedication to not only her studies, but also her friends, has earned her the rank as one of the top ten students of the class of 2013, as well as of an “amazing friend” by many.
LaFauci admits that her journey to senior year was never an academic joyride. “Not every subject has come easy to me, but I always worked hard to understand the concepts.” A key proponent to LaFauci’s success at MHS was her willingness to seek assistance from both her teachers and friends. This, combined with her relentless effort at getting the best results possible from her work, has managed to earn her the spot of number 8 in the rankings of the Class of 2013’s graduating class. As a member of the top ten, LaFauci comments that while her grades were a major part of school “it was the little things that were important,” sharing that it was the times with her friends that made more of an impact on her rather than stressing over grades and test scores.
One of her best “little moments” that have happened at MHS LaFauci shares is the infamous lunch with ‘Brenda,’ otherwise known as 2013 classmate Jessica Breen. During sophomore year Breen and LaFauci were together in English 10 honors class, where Breen had been known as ‘Brenda’ by her teacher. One day during long block Breen and LaFauci were talking when LaFauci saw her classmate ‘Brenda’ be referred to as Jessica, “I looked around confused as a girl named Brenda waved at the girl calling for Jessica. I looked at her and said, ‘Isn’t your name Brenda?’ “We died laughing,” explains Breen.
Three years later, Breen describes LaFauci “as still the same happy, goofy girl I knew back then,” and as she has advanced in her studies she “has opened up a lot more to more people and seems to be happier and enjoy [her] life more.”
As LaFauci moves on to attend University of Massachusetts at Amherst this fall, she advises that to get the best “little moments” out of high school that you need “get involved in order to make the four years [of high school] memorable. They fly by.”
