• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

A Stone Mill supernerd—the girl who would probably end up being class valedictorian—stood behind the counter. Danielle asked for an application. Normally she would have left immediately, but instead she attempted small talk. “When you work here, do you ever want to eat the food?” she asked.

The girl smiled. “Yeah, sometimes! Not usually, though.”

Danielle left, pleased with the nonessential exchange.

As Danielle grew bolder (on the Danielle scale) with potential friends she hardly knew, her current friends gave her a hard time. On St. Patrick’s Day, Danielle wore a green T-shirt; she loved the out-of-the-ordinary giddiness that holidays inspired. All day, Nikki and Paige rolled their eyes at her, muttering, “I can’t believe you wore green.” Even so, Danielle gave up her free period to go to lunch with the group. At Camille’s house, Nikki said to Camille, “Did Mona tell you about Saturday night!?” They whispered to each other. Danielle could tell that Paige knew what they were discussing.

On the walk back to school, Danielle stopped to wait for Nikki and Camille. “Go away, Danielle,” Nikki said. “Me and Camille are talking.”

As far back as Danielle could remember, even in elementary school, the group had never explicitly excluded anyone else but Danielle. Danielle remained friends with the girls because, she said, “I don’t really have anyone else to be friends with. Also, whenever they aren’t being bitches, they’re really fun to hang out with, so I guess I overlook the mean stuff. And with them, you can’t just quietly stop being friends. Because if you start to pull away, they find a reason to turn against you and it completely blows up in your face.”

She didn’t know why the group made fun of her, rather than, say, Mona. Maybe, she thought, they did it because they knew that she wouldn’t retaliate. “After all, if they don’t tell me something, what am I supposed to do? They don’t have to tell me if they don’t want to,” she explained. “I just want to find new friends that I can hang out with, at least until the end of high school, who don’t know Paige, Mona, Nikki, or Camille.”

That night, Danielle received a Facebook message from Camille’s friend Trish: “Want to go to lunch tomorrow?” Danielle was surprised. Trish was outgoing, friendly, and obsessed with Facebook and TV, none of which applied to Danielle. What would we have to talk about? she thought. This could be really awkward. Because she didn’t want to be rude by making up “a creepy excuse,” she hesitantly agreed. This would be the first time Danielle went out with someone she didn’t know well without the company of her usual friends.

The next day, Danielle drove Trish to McDonald’s. At first, it was strange to be alone with Trish; they had barely spoken without Camille. But she was happy to be hanging out with someone new. Also, knowing that it would piss off her friends that she went to lunch with Trish instead of with them gave her a different sort of satisfaction.

During the ride, Danielle filled the silence by venting about their math teacher and vocalizing her road rage (“Come on! You can’t move up a couple of feet?!”). Trish brought up a girl they both knew from math class.

They sat outside at a picnic table, eating ice-cream sundaes near the parking lot. Trish noticed someone in the car next to theirs. “That old man is watching us eat!”

Danielle craned her neck. “I think that’s an old lady,” she said.

“That’s so sad! She’s just sitting there alone.”

“Maybe she’s waiting for someone,” Danielle said.

“What if some old man stood her up?!” The girls concocted stories until it was time to leave.

After school, Danielle had her Dairy Queen job interview. She made sure not to say “uh” and attempted to make peppy small talk. Later, she couldn’t stop mentally replaying a particular question for which she hadn’t been prepared. She wasn’t sure if she had heard the manager correctly over the noise of the fan, but she had thought the question was something like, “If a customer