In a cruel high school prank, 17-year-old Lillian Skinner was led to believe that she had been nominated for the homecoming court at Grand Praire High School along with her friends Anahi Alvarez and Naomi Martinez.
However, it just wasn’t true.
Alvarez and Martinez heard about the prank and decided they wouldn’t let the mean girls win and wanted to make it up their friend since they just adore her.
“She’s so sweet,’ Alvarez, 17, told NBCDFW. “We need people in this world like Lilly.”
Lilly attributes her personality and moral compass to her mother.
“My mom tells me, and I remember to tell my friends, ‘Look inside [to see what] counts. Not the outside. Look inside your heart,” Skinner said. “If you judge people’s skin, that’s bad. But look inside their heart, to who they are.”
The seniors decided that if either of them won the title of homecoming queen they would pass their crown along to Skinner and campaigned extra hard to make sure they would win.
The school’s principal, Lorimer Arendse, found out about their plan just before halftime and decided he would get in on the fun.
“In all my time in school, this is probably the greatest moment I’ve ever experienced as a principal,” said Arendse.
Arendse asked Skinner to walk out onto the field to help take pictures of the homecoming court’s procession so that Skinner would be sat in the front row. Skinner was completely shocked by what happened after Alvarez was named as homecoming queen.
“When she won the queen, I took apicture and she told me to come over,” Skinner explained. “And I said, ‘It’s OK. It’s OK. It’s your crown, you know? My name is not on the list.”
It took a minute before Skinner realized what was going on.
“Seeing the look on her face and the way she reacted toward it, it was priceless,” Martinez said. “I knew it was the right decsion.”
Skinner was a little dumbfounded when the crown was placed on her head.
“I was like, ‘Wow, really? Like, wow! Like, is this a dream or something?'” Skinner said.
Even though Alvarez got the most votes, she said she would do it all over again in a heartbeat.
“Well, for me, I want to say, and I always say, ‘Lilly won. I just ran in her place, in her position,'” Alvarez told NBCDFW. “When they ask me, ‘Were you homecoming queen?’ I say, ‘No, Lilly is homecoming queen.'”
The girl’s act of kindness even landed them an appearance on The Ellen Show, where Ellen Degeneres called the girls, “a perfect example of what it means to be kind to one another.”
You can watch their appearance below in the video below where Degeneres deemed all three of them as the first “Ellen Homecoming Queens” and gave them $10,000 each towards their college education.
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