The Jackson 5. Maroon 5. Five Guys burgers. The Fab Five. While this last group might not mean much to most, it represents a strong childhood friend group for seniors Mylee Tichota, Nicole Wacker, Kylie Krajicek, Madison Wilson and Anna Rupp.
“That’s like our little friend group that we made in elementary school. It was just five of us. We all just randomly decided one day that we wanted to make a name for our friend group and made it that,” Wilson said.
The group started around fourth grade.
“Basically, it was literally just a name that we had for our friend group because we thought we were the cool kids. We wanted people to be like us and want to be friends with us. So I guess we thought we should start a group,” Krajicek said.
The name came from a set of famous characters.
“I think I came up with the idea, and I based it off of Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney, the Fab Five is what they’re called, Mickey, Minnie, all of them, and so I was like, ‘Oh, let’s just call ourselves the Fab Five’, and everyone just went along with it,” Krajicek said.
The designated meeting place for the group was the locust tree on the elementary playground.
“Every recess we would sprint down to the tree in the elementary field, and it was this big tree and it had these beans that came out of it,” Wacker said. “Every day, we put our hands on the tree and swore to the tree, and then we picked up beans and made a pile. That was our stash of special beans.”
The tree had multiple uses for the group.
“We would meet a lot during recess to talk about ‘important stuff’ as well as see if our drawing of all five of us was still buried under the house,” Rupp said. “That was also the spot where future members would be initiated.”
Senior Jenna Benjamin was the first one added to the group.
“I was scared because I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but I was excited to be a part of a group. It was my first week at a new school and it was daunting at first, but in the end I found my best friends,” Benjamin said.
After initiating Benjamin, the group then named themselves the Super Six.
“Every time a new member got added, the number went up, and we had her put her hand on the tree that we used to gather at and recite something with her other hand raised, like an oath,” Krajicek said.
Since the tree was a popular place for other students too, their meeting place later got changed.
“A year or two later we changed it and it was under one of the fake houses on the playground and we would go in there,” Wilson said.
The group wanted to leave their mark on the playground past their elementary years by creating something special.
“We made a time capsule type thing, and we put it in the playground in some of the mulch underneath one of the [houses],” Tichota said. “We were hoping it was going to be there forever.”
However, the drawing didn’t stay buried for long.
“I remember when Mylee and Kylie drew a picture of all of us and there’s stick figures. And then we all signed our names on it, and then we folded up the paper and put it in this slime container,” Wacker said. “And then we dug under the wood chips and we left it there over the summer, but then when we came back the next year, it was gone.”
The group’s bond was interrupted by Covid at the end of their sixth-grade year and by the change in environment to the high school building.
“I think during Covid no one saw each other anymore. So we didn’t keep going with it because I think we then kind of realized, high school is coming up, so things are going to change a bit,” Wacker said.
The girls themselves have changed over time and realized some of the flaws of their exclusive group.
“I definitely say we have grown as people after this. Looking back on it now, we laugh and we see what we definitely did wrong and probably shouldn’t have happened, but we definitely learned from it, and we are a lot better people now,” Krajicek said.
Even though their friend groups have expanded and changed over time, however, they can still look back and smile about it.
“We all laugh and joke about the Fab Five now because we realize how dumb it sounded, but we know that was where all our friendships really started,” Tichota said.
