The pop of a hot pink bubble of gum — vibrant, joyful, impossible to miss even if you try — captures the spirit senior Jacquelyn Addo carries as she moves through Exeter’s campus. When asked what color represented her, Addo didn’t hesitate: it has always been hot pink, bubble gum pink — a color as energetic and full of life as she is herself. That same brightness defines the legacy she hopes to leave behind at PEA — not of titles or accolades, but of connection. “I hope people will say that I’m a person that they can come to. I hope people feel like, ‘Oh, I am so stressed. I can come to Jackie and laugh.’ Because that’s my biggest thing,” she said. From the very beginning, Addo’s dream was to be measured by the simple, powerful ability to lift others up.

Providing a backdrop to the harmony of singing Bancroftians, experienced hands strum the steel strings of an archaic guitar, its cracked corners and peeling paint reveal recent years of extensive usage. Girls sit crisscrossed in a circle around the Bancroft common room, swaying along with the music, breathing in the waft of zucchini bread freshly baked by the dorm faculty. Leading Dorm Evening Prayer, a tradition where songs are sung late at night in the common room, is Aveen Burney.

If you’ve ever wandered up to the second floor of Langdell and poked your head into the third room on the left, your eyes might’ve met the bookshelf before the person. It leans forward slightly as it sags under the pull of every new fascination. Resting against thick French novels are exceptionally tall physics textbooks with cracked spines and battered covers. Through the array stand corners of orchestra scores that peek out where they didn’t quite fit. Packed in between them, almost too tightly to pull out without a struggle, is a neat array of The Adventures of Tintin.

Wealth and wisdom—grace and glamor—bravery and beauty. Yet man, bar the bells and whistles, is only mortal. No matter how famous or rich, timid or poor, “the young and the old, and the low and the high, / Shall molder to dust, and together shall lie.” So when death is imminent, and our lives are insignificant—“Oh, why should the spirit of man be proud?”

She pulls out a bag of FiberFill Stuffing and molds it into a perfect circle around a small black lamp and then adds small, sparkly blue snowflakes and a dash of glitter. “There. That’s what my vision was,” she tells a group of underclassmen volunteers. Not every senior would volunteer to spend hours of their Friday night prepping and cleaning up after a dance, not to mention the weeks of prior planning the task entails, but Anna Holtz is not just any senior.

To my fellow Exonians, make use of your time wisely, maintain your childlike sense of wonder and whimsy, and take every opportunity—even if you are “busy”—because you will remember what you learned, and not from the homework you needed to do that night.

Le monde entier est un cactus, il est impossible de s’asseoir.

The tension thickens the air as runners steady themselves at the white line etched in the grass. They fidget with their watches and whisper final words of encouragement to teammates. The field, vast and empty, waits in anticipation. With the sharp crack of the starting gun, the race begins. Leading the Big Red cross country girls are seniors and captains Melani Dowling and Leta Griffith.

From the around-the-clock comebacks to overtime nail-biters, the Exeter girls’ varsity field hockey team spent its fall season building more than a successful record—a legacy. Led by experience with a steady crop of youth, the team withstood one loss and then another, emerging each time with added strength as they solidified that momentum one play, one pass, and one goal at a time.

Every run in the scorching spring heat, every tackle taken with a surge of adrenaline, every bruise sustained in silence, every huddle under the darkening skies — all of it has led to this moment. To this field, beneath these lights, and with the crowd’s roar reaching a deafening crescendo. The build of tension is thick enough to be tasted. The line is drawn at midfield, the ball perched on the tee. The referee is readying the coin to flip. Players on opposite sides lock eyes beneath the visors of their helmets.

The boys’ varsity water polo team had an incredible season, with an amazing record of 12 wins and three losses, and ended up placing second at the NEPSAC tournament at the end of fall term. The team worked extremely hard for the entire fall term for this outcome, and were very proud of what their season ended up beholding for them.