The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [8]
Madison, Chelsea, and Kendra squealed and hugged Whitney and Giselle, as if they hadn’t seen each other three days earlier at a small exclusive party Whitney threw for her group. Bianca air-kissed them on both cheeks, as was her custom. The preps skeptically eyed Whitney’s outfit, which she had planned weeks ahead of time: a flowing seafoam empire-waist Anthropologie top and bell-bottom jeans. Rather than conform to the group this year, Whitney was determined to exert her independence by wearing her favorite styles.
“Dirty hippie!” Madison shouted.
“Wow, that’s a bit much, don’t you think?” Giselle told Whitney. You didn’t say that when we were alone, but now that you’re in front of the group, you do, Whitney thought. Giselle continued, “You look like a clown with too much makeup on!” Everyone laughed, including Whitney.
The group caught up briefly before resuming the assessment of the students swarming around them. “Oh my God. Who is that?!” Peyton sniffed, nodding her head toward a band girl.
“That’s Shay,” Chelsea answered.
“Dude, I didn’t even recognize her,” Peyton said. “Did she gain like fifteen pounds over the summer?! Why did her hair get so big and frizzy?” This led to a discussion about how there were too many skanks and trailer trash kids at Riverland.
The preps took stock of the new freshmen, as they did at the beginning of every year, to decide who was going to be cool and to whom they were going to be mean. They automatically deemed one girl cool because her older sister was dating a prep. The freshman cheerleaders were acceptable. If freshman girls didn’t already have something going for them when they got to Riverland—an older boyfriend, a popular sibling, a varsity sport, money, or a parent with connections—they were out of luck. “If we don’t know them already by some other affiliation,” Whitney said, “they aren’t worth getting to know”—and they were automatically labeled skanks.
The prep guys had an even clearer classification system. Only the ninth-grade football players who served as the seniors’ “bitches” were granted cool status. These were the boys whom the senior preps could order to throw out their lunch trays or buy them chips in the snack line. “Basically,” Whitney explained later, “those freshmen are, like, building up their popularity by sucking up to popular kids, so when they are our age, they’re popular and can do this to other freshmen.”
Students gathered together in the bleachers, group by group. The “badasses,” allegedly bullies who liked to destroy property, were tossing basketballs in the air. The FFAs, or members of the Future Farmers of America club—the preps called them hicks and rednecks—sat at the end of the bleachers. The wannabes, dressed like their role models but discernible by their whiff of uncertainty, stood at a far corner of the room. Those were the kids who fed the preps’ egos. Whitney would walk down the hall like royalty, while the wannabes would gush, “Whitney, you look so pretty today!” or “Whitney, you did such a good job cheering last night!” If a prep girl showed up at school with a shaved head, Whitney was sure the wannabes would visit the salon that night to do the same. It was the fact that they tried so hard that doomed them.
Whitney looked at the punks, who wore tight pants and band shirts. They could scream every word of the music they listened to. They were unafraid to strike up conversations with other groups, but they usually clashed with the preps. As Whitney saw it, the cliques were just too different. Whitney was certain that the punk girls thought the