It hit me the first day back of the new semester. We were all sitting around a table, sharing Chick-fil-a and catching up on all we had missed the past two weeks. It was a conversation full of laughs, roasts, and general hilarity. I was content. Content to know that I had finally found my tribe, my people, the friends that would come to define my college experience.

I had come into college with the idealistic expectation that everyone I met might be my new best friend. Would it be my roommate? I envisioned us having a year of sleepovers, gossiping like braced-faced kids and sharing our clothes so that our closets would double in size. We would do everything together and it would be just like in the movies. I imagined that maybe I would find my tribe in a sea of sorority sisters. I rushed in the beginning of fall semester, hoping to find a group in a circle of Lily Pulitzer and oversized t-shirts. I found that it wasn’t there, either.

I actually don’t remember the exact moment I found my best friends. I don’t remember the time when these three girls went from being casual acquaintances to being the people that I could tell everything to without hesitation. We all lived in different resident halls, had different majors, and enjoyed different things. But the more we hung out, the more we realized that we just worked.

I had a great group in high school, but I never really understood the term ‘squad’ until this year. ‘Squad’ is knowing the big things, but the little things too. I know everyone’s Starbucks orders, their likes and dislikes, their class schedules even. ‘Squad’ is never being alone, because these are the girls you can text at 1 AM to grab some fries when the craving hits and you start to think that you just might die if you don’t get some right now. ‘Squad’ is when one of us wants to stay in and watch Netflix on a Friday night, and we all grab some mugs and hot cocoa and have a movie marathon. It’s the way we can sit together, studying, totally absorbed in our own little worlds but at the same time also totally in tune with each other.

Sometimes I wonder what I would do if I never found them. It would have been so easy for things to turn out differently. What if I hadn’t given my phone number to the girl who walked with me that first day of rush. What if I hadn’t connected with that girl from my high school who lived close to my dorm. If none of these things had happened, perhaps we wouldn’t be where we are now, and my whole college experience would be totally different. When I posed this question to my friends, they laughed and stared at me with disbelief. They assured me that we would have found each other, one way or another. Because after all- we’re meant to be.