In Defense of Popular Friends

Fortuna has a good post on the crucial issue of high school dynamics, particularly the cool friend/less cool friend relationship, that ends saying:

Every time I see one of those movies I wonder if anyone who makes them thinks about what it's like from the other side. If you have a friend who is cooler than you, then you are constantly forced into the role of sidekick. Which can be a huge drag, I can tell you.

Not always. Like her, my closest friend walked on water and made flowers grow whenever he returned to land. Whether he was better looking than I was is up for debate, but there's no doubt that he was far more charismatic, shockingly better liked, and effortlessly able to float through all manner of social strata, while I clumsily doggy-paddled alongside him. So to start, I empathize.

Unlike Fortuna, however, my friend didn't just accelerate past me with well-timed body maturation and a sixth-sense for social relations. I'd spent my childhood with an extra fifty pounds, but then spent my sophomore year running it off. Grant arrived my junior year, while I hung out in that limbo between looking/acting popular (excuse the immodesty, but I was fucking hot at post-weight loss 16, a fact I now wish I'd taken better advantage of) and being generally disliked*. Didn't change. Which, in its way, was actually just fine. Too much enmity on all sides for a kumbaya. But that was the psychic advantage of the popular friend -- it proved that my general standing was an accident of history (and weight, and vocabulary, and 8th grade sweatpants, and...), not a fact of nature. And that, really, was enough.

Funnily, the difference in social perception never bled into my friendship. Grant had that peculiar ability to be universally beloved without showing up. We mainly sat at an isolated table radiating intellectual contempt and haunted malls on the weekends**. I had no social engagements because few others liked me, he had none because not showing up somehow boosted his stock. And so we spent our weekends doing the endless Summer thing. Non-medicinal marijuana, malls, movies, etc. Being the sidekick, which I was widely assumed to be, isn't half bad, at least so long as the internal dynamics of the relationship offer equality. Mine did, allowing me to confidently navigate all those that didn't -- my best friend is more popular than you! -- and I'll always be thankful for it.

*My experience holds that high school social status is mutable up to your junior year, but essentially locked in after that.
**Hoping girls would hit on us. No, really. We'd sit at a table where we once -- once! -- got lucky, and happily waited for the passing gaggles shooting us looks to do, well, something. Shockingly, our fellow insecure teenagers did not make good.