A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity Read Online Free Page B

motion, and the individual child can feel deeply hurt.”
    She paused, waiting for someone to speak. No one did. I’m a good sport at moments like this, always willing to jump in with a vague, conciliatory remark.
    So I said, “Is being eleven as awful as we remember it?”
    There was a sudden stirring in the room. At least half of the women were glaring resentfully at me.
    What was going on? Why were they looking at me this way? What had I done wrong? The whole point of vague, conciliatory remarks is that they are never wrong.
    It was those skirts, those four stupid, cotton-fleece drawstring skirts, four scraps of fabric declaring which girls were in and which were out.
    I wasn’t a too-smart-to-be-popular junior-high semi-misfit anymore. I was now the mother of a popular girl, and the other mothers were going to make me pay for that.
    I know how your daughter feels,
I wanted to hop up on my chair and shriek.
I used to be one of those girls who didn’t know where to stand, didn’t know whom to talk to.
    But no one cared about what I knew or understood. They only cared about their own daughters.
    “Children are very vulnerable at this age,” Fran Zimmerman, Chloe’s mom, said finally. Although Chloe played on Erin’s soccer team, they weren’t particularly close. In fact, I didn’t think that Erin had ever been to the Zimmermans’ house. Chloe had been to ours, of course, but that was because I was nutty enough to let Erin invite fifty million squealing piglets in for slumber parties. “Exclusionary behavior is never acceptable.”
    Fran Zimmerman was angry. Her shoulders were back, her jaw was forward. “Some children exclude other children just to show that they can do it.”
    She had better not be talking about
my
kid. Every time Erin had more than three or four girls to something, she included Chloe.
    “Cliques are very dangerous,” Ariel Sommers’s mother said. “They can be very destructive.”
    I felt Annelise and Blair shifting uneasily beside me. Were these other women calling our four girls a clique?
    It’s just a matter of seat belts,
I wanted to explain.
Blair and Annelise drive sedans with only five seat belts so we have to limit our car pools to four girls. The girls aren’t a clique; they are a car pool.
    Of course the car pool had a uniform—cotton-fleece drawstring skirts. That might sound a bit like a clique.
    I felt sick.
    The new headmaster, Chris Goddard, had come in after the meeting had started. He was standing, leaning against one of the counters, his arms folded. I could look at him by shifting my eyes slightly. He was a lean man with close-cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He had a thoughtful look about him, but the lines on his face were deeper than you would expect from a man in his forties. He straightened and spoke. “Exclusion is going to happen. Kids do have friends, and sometimes it is hard to distinguish between appropriate acts of friendships and inappropriate exclusion.”
    “No, it is not hard to make that distinction,” Fran Zimmerman insisted. “And it is very, very painful for a child to be left out of something, particularly when the other children insist on flaunting it.”
    “But some things are just unforgivable, whether they are repeated or not,” Alexis Fairling’s mom said. “This school year has gotten off to an awful start.”
    Now Linda Fairling had no business complaining about her child being left out of things. It wasn’t Alexis who got left out of things, it was Linda herself. She was forever trying to maneuver her way into one of our car pools, but she was always late, always, always, always. I’ll drive a car pool with Genghis Khan if he—or rather his wife—is going to show up on time. With Linda Fairling I won’t.
    “I have to agree,” Diane Sommers said. “Some of the girls have been devastated at the level of rejection.”
    Blair couldn’t help herself. Her black hair brushed against the yoke of her lemon-colored shirt as she