The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [65]
As Irene’s popular stock rose, the twins’ plummeted. They argued during lunch and skipped classes. Rumors spread that they slept around for coke.
One day, Bianca announced to the populars, “Yeah, so who is starting to get annoyed with the twins?” Everyone but Whitney firmly raised a hand. Aw crap, Whitney thought, and reluctantly added hers.
“They stand there like they’re out of it,” Chelsea said. “And they talk like they’re on serious drugs.”
“Oh my God, I’ve never hated someone more than I hate those two girls,” Irene declared. Whitney noticed that Irene now dressed exactly like the preps.
And so it was resolved, without Bianca having to say another word. The group gradually froze out the twins. They stopped inviting them to parties and ignored them in person. They edged them out of the lunch table and spent entire lunch periods talking about them behind their backs. Irene in particular went out of her way to be mean to the twins, calling them names and starting cruel rumors, especially when Bianca was within earshot. Consequently, the twins looked elsewhere for companionship, allegedly finding questionable people in unsavory places. Their new acquaintances further tarnished their image among the preps.
Except for Whitney. Whitney thought the twins were well-meaning girls who were stuck in an inescapable social cycle. She said, “They hung out with bad people because they had no one else to hang out with, and they had no one else to hang out with because they hung out with bad people.” The populars issued a decree that no one could talk to the twins. Whitney texted and talked to them in secret anyway.
In public, when the preps disparaged the twins, Whitney reluctantly joined in so as not to call attention to herself. On the nights that Whitney was left out of the party car, she hung out with the twins. When they asked her why everyone suddenly was ignoring them, she said she didn’t know.
Within weeks, Irene broke up with Bobby. The next time Whitney saw Irene, at the local diner, she struck up a conversation about it, curious what Irene would say.
“So, you and Bobby, huh,” Whitney prompted.
“Yeah, I wanted to end things before it got bad, you know?” Irene said.
“Yeah, I guess. You two did work at Giselle’s, I heard . . .”
“No, we just made out,” Irene replied. “We didn’t have sex.”
“That’s not what the rumors are.”
“Ugh, great. Honestly,” she said, sounding relieved to confide this, “I didn’t really want to be making out with him. I felt my body doing it, but in my head I was thinking, Ew, this is so weird.”
Whitney wondered if any of the other populars realized that Irene had used Bobby to get into their group.
Not long afterward, Whitney was at a school library computer when one of the twins sat down next to her. “I’m going to punch Irene in the face if she says one more thing to me,” she told Whitney.
Whitney looked up from the computer. “What happened this time?”
“My sister was wearing a shirt with a beer can on it, so she was given a sweatshirt from guidance to wear. Irene comes storming over, accusing her of stealing the sweatshirt from the school.”
“Eww,” Whitney said. “What is her deal?!”
“I don’t know. But it’s turning everyone against us. Preps, like, hate us now for some reason. We can’t even sit with them anymore. We just sit by ourselves.”
“That’s so weird,” Whitney said, acting clueless. She didn’t have the same lunch period as the twins.
“Yeah. I hate coming to school because I have to put up with all of this. We skip school all the time now because we hate coming here so much. You’re our only friend, because Giselle and Bianca and them made everyone hate us.”
A week and a half later, the twins moved to another district. Whitney was disappointed; she believed they had moved to town