I didn't really wish fire on Pali High

By Exjani Rojas –

My friends and I used to joke around at Pali High: “Imagine if the school just burned down. No class for a week!”

Then the school burned down.

Pacific Palisades High School didn’t escape the scourge of the Palisades Fire in January last year. It wasn’t a joke anymore.

The smoke filled the sky, people started evacuating and it felt like the whole city was holding its breath. My school shut down completely. It was damaged, unsafe, and just like that, I had to switch schools.

It felt unreal at first. One minute I was comfortable in my routine, the next I was packing up and leaving it all behind. I didn’t want to go. I was angry. Confused. But now, I honestly think God had a reason.

I ended up at Samo (Santa Monica High School). Weirdly enough, that’s where a bunch of my old friends were already going. At first, I didn’t know how it would go, but reconnecting with them made the transition easier. It felt like maybe God wasn’t just taking things away from me. He was giving me a second chance to keep friends.

But second chances came with distractions.

What kind of distractions? Parties. A lot of them. At first, it was just me trying to enjoy high school. But it became too much. I’d sneak out, lie to my mom, stay out late thinking it was all just “normal teenage stuff.” But one night, the cops showed up at a party I was at. Sirens. People running. Pure chaos. I got caught. And yeah, my mom found out. That was the last straw for her.

She wanted something better for me. Somewhere I could focus, reset and just stay out of trouble. She enrolled me at Lighthouse, here in Santa Monica. At first, I thought I was being punished. But honestly, it doesn’t feel like that anymore.

I just started at Lighthouse, not much has happened yet, but I’ve already made a few friends, and the environment feels different in a good way. It’s smaller, more real and I feel like maybe this is exactly what I needed, even if I didn’t want to admit it at first.

So… after everything, how do you feel now? +I still think about how weird it is that a joke we made turned into real life. One fire changed my whole path. But sometimes, God uses chaos to wake us up. I went from losing my school, to reconnecting at SAMO, to getting caught up in the wrong stuff, and now starting over again at Lighthouse.

It’s been a lot. But I’m not mad about it anymore. I think everything that happened brought me to where I’m supposed to be.

And honestly? I hope my sophomore year at Lighthouse goes great.

I’m ready for a fresh start.

About this writer: Exjani Rojas is in the journalism class at Lighthouse Christian Academy of Santa Monica.