True Shoes by Doug Wilhelm

Author:Doug Wilhelm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Long Stride Books
Published: 2011-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

Going Viral

25.

Brown Boots

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Of course you don’t!” Bethany said. “Boys never notice anything about girls that does not involve …” She leaned over our cluster of desks, and cupped her hands.

“Oh,” Turner said. “Those.”

“Not just those,” I said.

Bethany said, “Oh yeah? What else?”

“Hair. We notice hair.”

“If it’s blonde,” Emily said, then looked down bashfully. Her hair was brown. Her sneakers were green, today.

Bethany toyed with a length of her wavy blonde cascade. “I hate my hair,” she said, looking at it sadly.

“What? Why?”

“It’s horrible.”

“Okay, that’s just weird,” I said, because it was. Last year when she was the queen, Bethany’s hair was the hair. She would shake it off her shoulders in this smug, superior way. Now she looked at her same hair like it was breaking her heart.

“It’s kinky and horrifying,” she murmured. “You don’t understand.”

Turner and I looked at Emily, who said, very softly, “It’s not like hers.”

“Ah.”

Yes. Sometimes it seemed like every girl who hoped to be somebody in our grade had to find a way to look like Lauren Paine. The slender body, the particular clothes and shoes, and the long, very straight hair.

“But the point is,” Bethany said, snapping back to life, “every girl in that group showed up this morning wearing the same boots. You just look — high brown boots. They’ve all got ‘em. That means over the weekend, Lauren said so. Now in one day, maybe two, every girl in this school who wants to have any status at all will be wearing the same style. Especially the ones who want to be the next one in.”

She sat back, crossed her arms. “Two days at most. You watch.”

The other teams in Language Arts were buzzing around us, or were off in the computer lab. We were supposed to be working on our project, and in a way we were. Ms. Corbin had told us Social Pressures had been accepted as a topic, and social pressures were definitely what we were talking about.

I said, “What do you mean, the next one in?”

Bethany shrugged. “When they push someone out, someone new gets in.”

“The group is that tight?”

“Well, yeah,” she said, giving me the look that says, Everyone but you knows that. After the weekend I’d had, that just ticked me off.

“Hey — believe it or not,” I said, “everyone in the world is not obsessed with the top frickin’ clique of eighth-grade girls at Darkland Middle School. And who cares if they want to wear boots? Why do you care?”

Bethany blushed and said nothing. Then it hit me why.

For Lauren the image dictator, making sure all the top girls came to school today wearing the same new thing was a way of showing who was inner circle and who was not. Everyone — all the girls, anyway — would see, and know.

I looked under the desks. Bethany was wearing soft little dancer shoes. These used to be, I had the vague idea, what the cool girls wore.

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