The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [172]
Inside, Whitney immediately went backstage to set up the slideshow, knowing that Bobby and Chip wouldn’t help even if she asked. By the time she finished, most of the seats in the auditorium were taken, and the preps hadn’t saved one for her. Whitney sat in the front row next to some of the unpopular guys she had gotten to know during the last few weeks of school.
During the final speech of the night, Whitney slipped backstage. When the class advisor flashed her a thumbs-up, Whitney pressed PLAY and stood on the catwalk to watch the audience’s reactions. As the first notes of Vitamin C’s “Graduation Song” filled the auditorium, Whitney skimmed her classmates’ faces, tilted upward and bathed in the soft glow from the screen. She watched them laughing at the pictures of themselves, or exchanging tender looks with their parents. There was a girl whose graduation party Whitney had convinced Giselle to accompany her to, even though the preps made fun of them for going. There were the band kids she’d gotten to know so well over the last couple of months. There was Fern, smiling. Fern had written in Whitney’s yearbook, “You definitely made my senior year a lot easier. Thanks for making me feel comfortable even when I thought I never would be.” When Whitney had shown her mother, she told Whitney that she was proud of her. “You made such a difference in someone’s life!” added her mother’s secretary, peering over her shoulder.
Whitney hadn’t considered it that way. But she was even more surprised to realize that Fern, who would patiently listen to Whitney complain—usually about Bianca—had become a real friend.
There were the emos, with whom Whitney had started eating lunch in the hallway on occasion. The badasses looked like any other students; Whitney had learned while hanging out with them during seventh period that they weren’t the thugs that classmates assumed them to be. Even the preps, knotted together in the middle of the room, grinned as they gazed at the screen. Bianca, too cool to submit pictures of herself, had told Whitney to copy some from her Facebook page. Knowing this would be the last thing she ever did for Bianca, Whitney selected elementary school photos of Bianca with non-preps, back before the class had shuffled into a hierarchy of cliques.
Whitney imagined that all of the seniors finally felt included. She was proud that she had created this moment for her classmates. She grew nostalgic too, as the occasional photo of her popped up on the screen: Whitney in elementary school, Whitney as the sixth grade queen bee, Whitney in high school. . . . As she watched, she mused that she had occupied various roles with these classmates. “I was a hated loser when I got kicked out of the popular group, I was the queen of the school, I was a loyal follower, and, most recently, I was independent,” she said. “In each of those positions I, like, learned something new and something I’ll use later in life. Being in each position led to something better.”
Whitney wasn’t naïve enough to think that she had smoothed over relationships with all of the students she had burned in the past. She was certain that the FFAs continued to think of her as, in her words, the Antichrist. And Bianca hated her. But now Whitney knew the difference between being a popular and being popular.
As a prep, she realized, she had been a member of a clique that was considered “the populars” even though they comprised