But I'm Not Bitter Or Anything

The day after Columbine, which hit geographically close enough to home that lessons were canceled for the day in favor of having everyone sit in homeroom and watch the red-faced teacher publicly buttonhole the goth kids to ask them why they were being so weird and whether they had plans to blow us all up, an unusual thing happened to me.  It was at lunch, in the cafeteria, where because I had transferred to the school in the third of the three years one spends at middle school, and because I had zero social skills or charisma and was so unfashionable that dogs bark at me as I halt by them, I usually sat in a far corner with two Jehovah's Witnesses, Kevin, a sad roly-poly bullying victim I could never politely get rid of, and Erica, a girl who would alternately hit me and try to touch me up.  It was this day, sitting there, when one of the popular girls approached the table. 

I've seen Mean Girls and I'm still not quite sure I have a handle on what "popular" means.  It doesn't seem to mean that many people like you; I guess it's meant to have something to do with occupying a coveted spot in the hierarchy.  There were some girls I liked and wished I was their friend and considered popular, though whether they were or not I will never know.  There was Michelle, who was chubby and had cropped dyed-black hair but wore lots of eyeliner and jewelry and had an amazing singing voice.  She was supposedly "easy" but then as now that designation didn't make a lot of sense to me and simply served to lend her a mystique.  And there was Jennifer, who was a plain-faced sport billy and student council member who was unfailingly nice to everyone.  This was neither of those girls, but some other person who, because I've never committed her name to memory, I'll call Claire Bennet. 

I had a class with Claire, in which she mostly distinguished herself with a sneering air towards the idea of knowing anything, and a Palinesque smugness when presenting her class projects that I assume came from how secure she was in the knowledge that nothing she did academically would affect the real parts of her life.  She was also quite mean to both teachers and students.  To my knowledge, before she approached my table, I had never personally interacted with her and had no indication that she was aware of my existence.  I was basically aware of our different positions in the hierarchy, hers being "popular" and the most common appellation I'd heard for myself being "dirty", as in "why would you want to hang out with the dirty kids".  So when she approached me I already disliked her and doubted her intentions. 

It transpired that, following the massacre, Claire was having some kind of crisis of conscience that was prompting her to try and stop the next school shooting by reaching out to the down-and-outs and inviting them over to her table and presumably at some point re-enacting the makeover scene from films.  It had clearly not occurred to her that I would consider spending time in her company as anything but a longed-for privilege, and she reacted with a sudden shower of invective, cursing me and my sort, when I gave her the kind of brush-off she would have given Kevin if he'd asked her out.  She flounced off back to her table, and while I'd like to think she took with her the idea that maybe not everyone wanted to be her, it was probably more along the lines of confirmation that the unpopular deserve every bit of it. 

This is all to say that the scene in The Breakfast Club where Molly Ringwald calmly tells Anthony Michael Hall that the reason he would not diss her to his friends is that "you look up to us" and Hall responds by laughing, crying, and telling her "You're so conceited" seems to be erring a bit on the side of saying that the popular kids are comfortable and settled in their self-images, while it's the nerds who are insecure and over-emotional.  I suppose if Hall had maintained an autistic affectlessness while Ringwald called him diseased and told him she hoped he'd shoot himself in the face with that flare gun, the ending where the outcasts are starting to become just a little more popular wouldn't have seemed like a happy one.