“Hey! Come sit with us.”
“Yeah, what’s your name?”
They beckoned to me with coy smiles, their perfect hair glistening as vaguely predatory glances crossed their eyes. They were looking for fresh blood. Whether I’d become one of them or a new victim, I, the new girl, had to be evaluated.
I’ve always been curious about human behavior, hence why I became an anthropologist, and I definitely couldn’t pass up this chance to see what the mean girls clique would do.
I’d never been popular. In elementary school, I was a Yankee whom the Southern kids were quick to mock for the “funny way” I talked and my bookish ways. I also had the misfortune of having braces and glasses, along with an awful haircut by a shitty hairdresser that my mom kept dragging me to. I had a slight speed impediment and a tendency to over-blink. Although the bullying never reached dangerous levels, my friends tended to be people I chose rather than people who chose me, and my girl friends were quick to dump me when boys or richer girls told them to. In middle school, I became the target of a successful gossip campaign by a local preacher’s boy. I was a pariah, blessed only with the friendship of a kind girl named Jasmine. But that’s another story.
Even after that passed and people forgot about me as they got wrapped up in the next…
