The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [37]
Joy hobbled to the bleachers and tried to stretch her leg. As her classmates finished their laps, they left her alone in the sun. After a while, an Indian girl with glasses, braces, and a thick, sloppy ponytail sat down beside her.
“Hey, are you done with the mile? Wow, you’re fast. I was watching you. You’re a really good runner!”
Joy smiled. “I’m not that good. Thanks, though! I hurt my groin, so I had to stop.”
“Don’t worry, it’ll get better. Hey, where are you from? You have a different accent.”
“I’m from Jamaica. I’m Joy, what’s your name?”
“Oh, you probably won’t remember it. It’s Nishantha, but call me Anisha.”
“That’s an interesting name! Don’t worry, I’ll try to remember.”
“Yeah, well, at least I won’t get mixed up with anyone else,” Anisha said.
The girls laughed. When the bell rang, Anisha helped Joy walk to the locker room.
Joy was relieved that finally someone genuine had reached out to her. Within a week, Anisha and Joy were practically inseparable at school.
Chapter 3
WHY ARE POPULAR PEOPLE MEAN?
WHITNEY, NEW YORK | THE POPULAR BITCH
Whitney had ignored a cold for about a week, hoping it would go away before Saturday. A guy she had dated from another school invited her to a party he was throwing with a friend and told her to bring other girls. Whitney loved the power trip of being the only popular who knew the guys. She looked forward to this party for days.
At lacrosse practice on Saturday, Whitney trailed behind her teammates, wheezing uncharacteristically as they ran wind sprints around the field. When the team was halfway done with the last lap, Whitney’s breath whistled and her throat closed. She fell to the ground, on the brink of a blackout. The other girls screamed for the coach. Whitney put her hands over her head and tried to take deep breaths, thinking, I wish Luke were here. Although she had treated him like dirt lately, she knew that if she called him, he’d come running. That was power too. But no one other than Luke would have guessed that she was engaged in a miserable inner struggle between the person she was and the person she wanted to be.
Whitney supposed she had started acting like a mean girl during the sixth grade, when she was the queen bee. She was cruel to her classmates, shooting them wicked looks, creating drama, acting phony, and feeding off of their adulation. She knew that students disliked her, but she didn’t care. She thought she was better than everyone else. She was on top of the world.
Then things changed. During one assembly, Whitney’s clique sat on the top row of the bleachers behind two “loser girls.” One of the girls said with a thick lisp to a popular girl, “I like your earringthss.” Whitney’s friends burst out laughing. They turned to each other and exclaimed, “I like your earringthss!” with obnoxiously exaggerated lisps. The girl wept. The preps looked at Whitney strangely for not joining in, but she just couldn’t. She wanted to give the girl a hug.
When Whitney realized how vicious she had become, she tried to be nicer to people and yelled at her friends when they were mean. The clique didn’t like this new behavior and cast Whitney out of the group. Depressed for the last two months of seventh grade, Whitney tried to cope with having no friends. Eventually she decided to conform to avoid ending up alone.
Once again, she strutted around school, acting superior, manipulating her peers. In short order, students became afraid to upset her. Common knowledge warned that if you angered Whitney, she would exert all of her energy to try to ruin your life. She would spread nasty false rumors about you, steal your boyfriend, and then turn all of your friends against you. Whitney continued to do these things until partway through freshman year.
“I hated how I wasted energy like that. I hate who I am. I hate that I feel I can’t trust my friends,” Whitney said now, as a senior. “I suck up to the queen bee so I’m on her good side. No one understands I do it