A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity Read Online Free Page A

Carolina, and people who don’t know better assume that she must be a debutante from a gracious old Southern family. She is the most conventionally attractive of the four of us—she has shoulder-length black hair and very fair skin—and she dresses almost as well as our daughters do, wearing clothes of a classic, conservative cut, but in colors that are boldly feminine—aqua, periwinkle, persimmon, and lime.
    If she were the old-line aristocrat that she looks like, she would still be in South Carolina, divorced and wondering why someone like me was living in her grandmother’s beautiful house.
    Blair’s father was a pharmacist, and her mother spent all her time working in his store, never going to white-glove luncheons with the other ladies. Blair had been like me, the smartest girl in the grade, the outsider. Being the outsider was what she knew, what she was comfortable with. When she went to college at Penn, she realized that what made her an outsider there was not being smart and ambitious—everyone was smart and ambitious—but being a Southerner. So she became more Southern.
    She is the most guarded of the four of us, the one who has been the hardest to get to know. But if Annelise and I are the most alike in personality and appearance, then Blair and I have the most abilities and interests in common. We had both been art history majors in college and we each have a good eye and a strong design sense. When I set out to waste time in a home-dec shop, I always call Blair to come with me.
    Of the nearly twenty-five people who had come to this parents’ coffee, I knew everyone there except for one woman. I nudged Annelise and Blair. They shook their heads. Neither of them knew her, either. She looked slender and fit, and her hair was chin-length and light. Wearing nicely fitting pleated khaki trousers, a sleeveless black silk shirt, and narrow black loafers, she was well-groomed in the understated way that the alumnae mothers have. I would have introduced myself to her, but it was clear that the women who had stopped in on their way to work were eager to get the meeting started so I stayed in my seat.
    Eight minutes after the coffee was supposed to begin—which wasn’t bad—the principal of the middle school, Martha Shot, began speaking. Mrs. Shot herself was a graduate of the school, and her manner and dress were a bit too prim for our tastes, but she was the principal and we listened to school principals.
    According to her, our darling children were going to start being significantly less darling. That they hated the way we dressed would be the least of it. “They will look you right in the eye and lie to you,” Mrs. Shot said. “If they call you from their cell phone and say they are at Susie’s house and Susie’s mother is there, tell them that you are going to call Susie’s landline and ask to speak to her mother. The story may suddenly change.”
    My child would never do that.
Every mother in the circle must have been thinking that. I certainly was, but we were probably all fooling ourselves.
    “You aren’t going to be seeing too much of this in the sixth grade,” she said. “What we face in sixth grade are social issues. Friendships realign, and some of the kids are going to feel excluded. What most of them want, at this age, is to be exactly like all the other kids.”
    I understood that. My mother had wanted my brother and me to be smart. We had the
Encyclopedia Britannica
and subscribed to the Sunday
New York Times,
even though it arrived in Indiana on the following Wednesday. If she had ever thought about it, Mother would have been proud that I didn’t dress like the other girls. Somehow that proved I was smart.
    What I had wanted was to be smart
and
exactly like everyone else.
    “The children,” Mrs. Shot continued, “especially the girls, become very cliquish. There is a clear hierarchy, and each child knows her own place even if her parents do not. Unfortunately the system is always in