Molly Schafer had a secret she’d been keeping all year. Every day at Waunakee High School in Wisconsin, she’d walk past classmates in the halls, people she’d known since elementary school, and they had no idea what she was doing in the corner of the school library after the final bell, or in the studio she’d set up at home. She was painting their portraits. All of them. “It was almost kind of like evil shenanigans that were going on,” she told the NW Indiana Times. “You have no idea what I’m doing. You have no clue what I’m making.” A high school basketball game. Photo credit: Canva Schafer had been outgoing in elementary and middle school, but social anxiety reshaped her high school years. She drifted from her peers, found a circle of older students, and watched that circle graduate and leave while she stayed behind. “I’ve never really known anyone in my senior class,” she told hngnews.com. “And I’ve just been so alone.” One moment captured the feeling precisely: she was photographing a basketball game for Warrior Media, the school’s sports streaming channel, when she slipped and fell. Every student in the gym turned to look. Nobody asked if she was okay. But the photography gave her something she hadn’t expected. A catalog. Thousands of shots of her classmates mid-game, mid-leap, mid-effort, faces alive with concentration and competition. When it came time for her AP Art final, she knew what she wanted to do with them. Starting in the fall of 2024, she began painting. She’d work at school, then go home and paint for another four or five hours in the studio she’d built in her garage. She originally planned 50 portraits, reduced it to 45, and finished with 44, each one based on her own sports photography, each one a classmate she’d known once and wanted to know again. By graduation, she’d spent approximately 600 hours across all of them, as reported by CBS News in a Steve Hartman “On the Road” segment that aired in June 2025. The paintings were portraits in the truest sense. Not posed, not generic, but specific people caught in specific moments, rendered with the kind of attention that takes months to accumulate. Each one was a gift. “I wanted to be seen,” she told Fox47. “I wanted to reconnect with these people who I haven’t talked to in years, and I wanted to show them that even though they’ve been such a small part of my life, they’ve stuck with me.” The reactions, when she handed them out, ranged from stunned to emotional. “It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen someone do, especially for someone you aren’t that close with,” one classmate told CBS News. Another admitted: “We did have that friendship, and I didn’t put forth the work to keep it.” A third said: “All of us probably feel a little regret for not paying more attention.” Senior Brady Barman, one of the recipients, said that it simply felt good “to feel appreciated by someone else.” Schafer’s art teacher, Beth Crook De Valdez, watched the whole project unfold. “Watching her go through that process and seeing her internal reflection about this project she came up with really fills your heart,” she said. After the CBS segment aired, commission requests started arriving. More than 100 of them from people who had seen what she could do and wanted her to do it for them. Schafer’s own takeaway was characteristically direct. “You can’t go through life thinking that you don’t have friends because they don’t like you, because that’s not the case,” she said. “People aren’t thinking that hard about you. It’s all in your head. You just have to try.” She spent 600 hours proving it. This article originally appeared earlier this year. The post A Wisconsin senior painted 44 portraits of classmates she’d drifted from. Their reactions when they received them say everything. appeared first on Upworthy.