Popular Girls Don’t Go for Poor Boys
By Dan Humphrey
Staff Writer
Have you been reading these? I very much think so.
To a great friend and proofreader who takes delight in these attempts at storytelling and to my editors, who put up with my lengthy prose.
conflict brewed inside her. Brash, strong, and independent, it was today’s world that best suited her for success; yet, listening to her words, you could sense a nostalgia for a world that was far from her, both in time and place. So is the nature of the immigrant experience, creating people ridden with contradictions – internal and external. Prabhdeep wasn’t the only one around her who lived with this contradiction; she and Indira were tight-knit, with their similar origins making each other understand the difficulties present in developing in a landscape where cultural differences can be alienating. Paradoxically, had they remained in their countries of origin, they’d be part of opposite sides of the Sikh-Hindu ethnic conflict; nevertheless, those were not the circumstances, and they were remarkably similar. They shared countless traits, including an obsession with gossip and status, in addition to a remarkable commitment to pettiness. In the medium term, this made their close bond unsustainable: Prabhdeep had seen that it would now be beneficial for her to backstab Indira. Based on her wide-ranging recollections of their unsavoury conversations, she had material to completely tank Indira’s reputation; from jealousy directed at her gorgeous best friend, to the decidedly amoral manner of her breakup with this sweet kid, through her panning of the power brokers of the world they shared, she could bring her assured destruction. And so she did.
Following the aforementioned defenestration, she cleverly leveraged one of her summertime dalliances to extend her social web; it’d be particularly useful after she transitioned to CEGEP. After claiming her skull, she’d pulled off a remarkable change in her fortune; after being a loud background presence for as long as I’d known her, she now was centerstage. It’d seemed as if she had always been auditioning for this role; she demonstrated a remarkable capacity to use her power against other women who’d disrupt her agenda while offering a good enough deal to the guys who lent gravitas to her presence. As her presence started to have more eyes on it, a clearer story emerged. The contradiction was noticeable if you looked for it; her cognitive dissonance was in the spotlight. You get bizarre scenes as a frenetic defense of traditional gender roles and a desire to be provided for, expressed in a manner I have a hard time believing is accepted in some of the more regressive societies that are part of this planet’s cultural mosaic. Obsessions with money and status are seen as faux pas on this side of the cosmopolitan elite that these young, upper-middle-class students find aspirational. Yet, when these antibodies are not present but the particular freedom to encroach on any subject is, the inevitable result is for the discourses of the day to carry a shocking crudeness to them.
One day I found myself within earshot of her revealing monologue, which happened to center around two girls in different shades of blonde. The more complex branch was one of evident callousness. She manifested her surprise at the long-standing relationship of one of the girls, wholeheartedly affirming that “popular girls don’t go for poor boys”. Baffled at the turn of phrase, both my friend there and I felt the need to defend our friend, stating that he was quite wealthy, and this was no secret. She then added a modern turn on her phrase, saying what mattered is that he had “no clout”; the idea of a relationship based on anything other than a desire for status did not seem to enter her mind at the time. Complementing the sheer superficiality in her words, somebody else in her circle wondered, of the aforementioned girl and her once inseparable best friend: “Aren’t the popular girls supposed to be bad, though?.” “You’re oversimplifying it”, I replied, trying to gauge the scene’s openness to dissent. The facial expressions of those there signalled that there wasn’t any; yet, he felt the need to respond: “Ask around at any other school, their popular girls were bad bro, and at you guys’ school they weren’t”. It was, inadvertently, an ideal bridge between the first branch of the conversation and the subsequent one. It’d given her a topic she was pleased to add to: “You guys overrated Reagan so much at school—it was insane,” she directed to my friend and me. After his defense, she continued: “Just because she’s blonde…”. She’d given away the subtext, a thinly veiled resentment of those having traditionally attractive traits in a locale like this town. With concern about beauty standards already being a blood sport for women, it is no surprise that the broader intrasexual competition is even more brutal. From the evident envy in her words to the cynicism about what brings people together, it was not a place where I saw much room for contributing myself. There, I didn’t know what I was other than a disoriented interloper who did not understand that subsection of the milieu, one that only repelled me as I tried to make sense of it.
