Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner Read Free Book Online Page B

handsomeness and his height make him stand out among the boys in our grade, but because he'd rather sing show tunes than kick a soccer ball, his good looks don't matter. Last October the boys on the lacrosse team wrote FAG on his locker, which meant that everyone in the school got stuck in an all-day seminar with a psychologist about the Importance of Tolerance and Understanding. It could have been worse, Todd said. It got us out of algebra.
    "Maybe she wants to copy my homework?" It wasn't a very good guess, but, in four periods' worth of thinking, it was the best I'd come up with--even though my grades had gotten so bad that Amber would have to be completely stupid to want to copy my work.
    Todd considered this. "Maybe," he said, after what was, in my opinion, a way-too-long pause. "But I'm the best in English, and Tamsin's best in math."
    "Actually, I'm best in everything," Tamsin said.
    "Well, maybe she wants to copy off someone who gets something wrong once in a while," I snapped.
    "You won't come back," said Tamsin. "Remember Amanda Reilly?"
    Of course I did. Every girl in our grade remembered Amanda Reilly. She'd been just a kind of girl--kind of smart, kind of cute, kind of a lot of things. Then--shazam!--Gregory Bowen asked her to go to his high school's homecoming with him. Suddenly, Amanda Reilly, or Manda, as she started calling herself, was installed at Amber Gross's table. Aside from the new nickname, she hadn't changed at all. No new haircut, no new clothes. Gregory Bowen's attention was the magic pixie dust that had let her fly from being a kind of girl to a popular girl. I tried to remember if Manda had sent me a cookie.
    "I am not Amanda Reilly," I said. I squared my shoulders and straightened the straps of my backpack as we entered the lunchroom. "I'll be back."
    First I walked past the table full of the kids who don't really fit in anywhere else, the place I'd sit if I didn't have Tamsin and Todd. Jack Corsey and his dandruff sit there, and so does Sally Cullin, who's fat, and Alice Blankenship, who got sent home from school for a week last year after her English project turned out to be a bunch of poems about suicide.
    Next to the misfits are the boy jocks, the soccer and lacrosse players, then the girl jocks, the ones who tie their colored rubber mouth guards to shoelaces and wear them like necklaces around their necks. Then there's a table of drama/music types who wear leg warmers and leotards and act like they're in High School Musical VI and try to dance in the lunch line. Todd and Tamsin and I normally sit at the end of that table: Todd's a legitimate drama type, and Tamsin and I don't really belong anywhere else.
    I held my breath as I passed the drama table, then walked by the hippie kids who smell like incense and play Hacky Sack and wear their hair in dreadlocks whether they're black or white. I passed the grinds, the ones who will probably leave the Philadelphia Academy in ninth grade and go to Masterman, the city's magnet high school, and on to the Ivy League.
    At the center of the room sit those certain girls, the girls who are jocks, or arty, or hippies, or smart, but first and foremost they are...easy, I guess. Not "easy" like "sex," but as in everything they do comes easily to them, whether it's wearing the right thing or saying the right thing or knowing the right thing to do. Amber Gross is their queen. She can even tease Mr. Shoup about his clothes. "Great tie," she said once. "Did your kid knit it for you?" Which sounded really mean, except Mr. Shoup laughed. I'd said "Great tie" to him once, when he'd been wearing the same tie, but he'd just looked puzzled.
    I carried my lunch over to their table, a row of girls in pastel button-downs and low-rise pants and boys in rugby shirts and jeans, holding my breath again, half believing that Amber would laugh and say, "You didn't think I was serious!"
    Instead, she smiled at me. "We saved you a seat!" she said, and squinched herself over to make