Brown Bag

The stereotype about cheerleaders being loud, obnoxious, and generally intolerable doesn’t quite apply to this girl. Well, she may be obnoxious, I don’t actually know—I don’t think we’ve ever actually spoken, in the seven and a half years we’ve gone to school together—but if she is obnoxious, she’s obnoxious in her own, sort of private way. She’s not a loud cheerleader. She doesn’t have the happy, chatterboxy personality they’re supposed to have. She doesn’t really speak at all.

In classes, she sits quietly at her desk, her legs primly crossed, with her brown designer bag on her desk, to cover up her hands so teachers won’t know she’s texting on her pink iPhone. (Two major clues that she’s a rich girl. If the iPhone doesn’t give it away, then the rich girl usually carries her school stuff in a huge designer purse—typically leathery—instead of a backpack.) Brown Bag’s wrists are decked in bracelets of various colors. Her nails are painted black, the color chipped in places; her eyebrows are trimmed thin, and end before they should; her eyeshadow is light brown, almost flesh-colored, but very thick. The mascara is even thicker.

Her hair is like that of an anime character—flat, with spiky layers, and a little puffy on the top. It’s dyed white blond, with very obvious dark roots. Which is weird, because I don’t think she’s ever had dark hair. In elementary school, it was naturally gold.

She doesn’t talk, doesn’t even look at the other kids in AP English, really. But it’s not because she’s an outcast. Maybe she’s an outcast in smart kid classes, but she’s not an outcast in the grand scheme of things. She's got that brown bag and the iPhone. She’s always texting somebody, and she is a cheerleader, so she can’t be entirely friendless. She just doesn’t talk in AP English because she doesn’t really have much interest in these people.

At lunch, she joins a friend or two, and they walk to the local burrito joint where everybody goes. There, she talks; her voice is quiet, but it exists.

Sometimes, though, even with her friends, she goes silent. They keep talking, and she stands off to the side, or behind. Looking in, but none of them looking out.

Brown Bag doesn’t "belong" in AP classes because she’s a cheerleader. But she doesn’t really "belong" with her cheer friends, either…why not?

Is it because she’s so smart? Because she is smart—She got a hundred percent on the Great Gatsby exam. I saw her test on the top of the pile, and I was surprised.

Do they know that she’s smarter than them, and that’s why they exclude her? Or does she know that she’s smarter than them, and that’s why she feels like she shouldn’t be there?

Does she just know that she should be somewhere else, and that’s why she steps out and looks wistfully in?

Does this girl have a place anywhere?