Popular

By Maya Van Wagenen

11 min read

Why does it matter? Because the social hierarchies that feel permanent and crushing are actually fragile performances waiting for one person to stop being afraid.

Here is a thirteen-year-old in Brownsville, Texas — a border town so poor it makes national lists — wearing Pilgrim shoes and a wool skirt to a school where the social hierarchy is enforced with the casual brutality of a caste system, armed with a 1951 etiquette guide that recommends girdles and Vaseline on the eyelids. The Vaseline melts onto her glasses. A PE coach assumes the antique shoes mean she's homeless and offers charity. Her best friend calls her an epic loser. And yet: by the end of the year, she's sitting at the most popular table in school, and the people there are genuinely sad she's leaving. The girdle had nothing to do with it. What this book actually contains is a field report on why social hierarchies — in middle school, in any room — are far more fragile than they look, and who gets to break them first.

The Popularity Scale Has a Negative-One Slot, and Maya Lives There

A sixth-grade boy swaggers up to Maya at the end of the school day, grinning at his friends, clearly working up to something. Maya's internal calculus runs fast: he might be about to ask for her number, which creates its own problem — refuse and crush him, accept and become the girl who gave her digits to what she calls an Oompa Loompa. She braces. He delivers his actual message: his friend wanted her to know that she's a Fat Ugly Nerd. Then he walks away. Maya had spent the entire month losing three pounds on a 1950s diet of hard-boiled eggs and whole-wheat bread, and this is the invoice she receives.

The backdrop to that moment is a social hierarchy so precisely mapped it runs into negative numbers. At Maya's middle school in Brownsville, Texas, the Volleyball Girls sit at a ten, the Football Faction at nine, and the scale descends through Band Geeks, Goth Art Chicks, and Pregnant Teens before bottoming out at Social Outcasts, rated negative-one. Teachers clock in at negative-two. Substitute teachers, the true untouchables, sit at negative-three. Maya lives at negative-one. The chart has the deadpan logic of a tax bracket, which is part of what makes it funny — and part of what makes it devastating, because Maya didn't invent these rankings to mock them. She drew them because she understands them.

The experiment she decides to run is this: her mother unearths a 1951 paperback called Betty Cornell's Teen-Age Popularity Guide, originally purchased at a thrift store for its value as vintage curiosity. Maya reads it expecting only laughable relics — Vaseline on the eyelids, girdles for everyone — and finds instead a passage where Cornell insists that every girl, no matter how fiercely she pretends otherwise, secretly wants to be liked. Maya stops laughing. She admits to herself, in writing, that she desperately wants what Cornell is selling. So she commits: one chapter of Cornell's advice per month, all year, in eighth grade, documented as honestly as she can manage. The premise sounds like a comedy bit. The desperation underneath it is real.

Betty Cornell Has Never Heard of a Cartel Lockdown

The experiment's main friction, you might assume, is social — Maya tries a hairstyle, gets mocked, retreats to a bathroom. That's true as far as it goes. But the real obstacle to Betty Cornell's program is the physical environment Cornell never imagined: a border town where the assistant principal runs through a slideshow explaining that mustaches promote gang violence, where lockdown drills outnumber fire drills, and where the smoke from burning Matamoros is occasionally visible from the backyard.

The lockdown scene makes this concrete in a way nothing else in the book does. During choir practice one afternoon, a calm announcement tells students to proceed to their lockdown areas in an orderly fashion. Then a second voice erupts through the intercom — not calm, not orderly — barking 'Now. Now. Now.' Maya knows immediately this isn't a drill. Twenty girls sprint to a storage closet in the band room and go silent in the dark. For over an hour they hear distant thumps. A classmate whimpers. The choir director stands at the door and whispers, again and again, don't move, don't make noise. Maya curls into herself and wonders whether she will see daylight again, whether she'll get to tell her family she loves them. Then the lights come back on. They file back to the risers and learn about five chords, as if nothing happened. Police had been chasing an armed robbery suspect through the neighborhood directly across the street. This is the context in which Maya is attempting to achieve the triumphant twinkle Betty Cornell promised from Vaseline on the eyelids — Vaseline that, by second period, had already melted onto her glasses and blinded her.

The PE Coach Thought Maya Was Homeless, and She Was Mortified to Be Moved

A PE coach with red braided hair steps directly in front of Maya as she tries to leave the school attendance office, blocking the door with the quiet urgency of someone who doesn't want to make a scene. She leans down and asks, in a careful whisper, what size shoes Maya wears. Maya is confused until she follows the woman's gaze to her own feet — square-heeled black leather buckle shoes, the kind a kindergartner might wear to a Thanksgiving pageant, purchased at a thrift store to match Betty Cornell's wardrobe instructions. The coach explains that she has extras left behind in the locker room. Maya can keep them. What size?

The algebra teacher is standing three feet away and hears every word.

This is the moment the clothing experiment stops being a stunt and becomes something else. Maya had been treating the vintage wardrobe as a controlled test — wear the skirt, observe the reactions, write them down. The social cost had been manageable: some giggles on the bus, a teacher who assumed she belonged to a fundamentalist religious sect, a classmate who said she looked like a substitute. Uncomfortable, yes, but survivable. The PE coach changes the scale. She isn't mocking Maya. She is genuinely, kindly worried about her. She thinks Maya can't afford shoes that fit. And her concern, expressed in a whisper in a public room, confirms something Maya hadn't fully processed: the clothes don't just look old-fashioned. To adult eyes, they read as poverty.

Maya writes that she was deeply moved by the coach's generosity and sincerely hopes anyone who actually needs help finds someone that kind. Then, in the same breath, she notes she was back to feeling mortified the second she remembered her algebra teacher had heard everything. That double register — gratitude and humiliation arriving simultaneously — is the actual texture of the experiment by January. The visibility Maya wanted has arrived, and it turns out visibility is not neutral. It means being read, and being misread, by everyone in the room. Which raises the question she hasn't quite answered yet: what, exactly, is she testing?

The Experiment's Real Breakthrough Had Nothing to Do with Posture

What was the experiment actually measuring? The obvious hypothesis — wear 1950s clothes, follow 1950s grooming rules, achieve 1950s popularity — looks reasonable in January. By February it is quietly falling apart, and the thing replacing it is harder to name.

Maya spends the month in ironed pants, polished shoes, and a beige panty girdle with embroidered flowers that leaves four distinct welts across her backside. She showers every day, applies lilac body spray, and learns to clean under her nails with an actual implement from an actual store. None of it moves the needle. Her classmate Kenzie sniffs her sweater at the end of the month and tells her she smells funny. The shoes were polished. It did not help.

The turn happens in San Antonio, at an ice rink, while Maya is sitting alone with a book because her bad knees kept her off the ice. A seventh-grader named Isabella goes down hard near the boards. Workers arrive with a wheelchair. Isabella emerges from the medical room some time later, limping, holding an ice pack, trying very hard not to cry. Maya has never spoken to her. The grade-year divide in middle school carries real social weight — an eighth-grader initiating with a seventh-grader is a small risk, not a large one, but it is still a choice. Maya gets up anyway and sits down beside her. She gives Isabella her own Ace bandage, the one her mother had made her bring to protect her knee, and shows her how to wrap it.

That's the whole story. No dramatic speech. No grand gesture. Just someone sitting down next to a person who was hurting.

By Valentine's Day, Maya receives six valentines — up from a previous high of three, and some years zero. Every single one comes from someone she had been kind to earlier in the year: a sixth-grader she greeted at the library, a girl she sat beside in art class when no one else would, Isabella, who brings a butterfly card and a stuffed dog. The girdle didn't produce this. The polished shoes didn't. The pattern is clear enough to function as data: each valentine traces back to a moment of attention paid to someone who needed it. Maya writes it down and recognizes that she has been running a different experiment all along — one where the beauty tips were the cover story and the real question was whether she would show up for people.

No Popularity Exists When Tragedy Strikes

The announcement comes over the intercom mid-morning, in the flat official register that schools reserve for bad news. Mr. Lawrence, one of the seventh-grade English teachers, has passed away. A moment of silence, please. Maya sits in first period unable to process the word 'passed' as a verb that applies to the man who told her she would be a famous author someday, who kept a framed copy of her poem on his wall.

When Kenzie finds her in the hallway afterward, Maya is already sobbing. They stand together for a long time — Kenzie, who has just learned that Maya is moving away in the summer, crying alongside her anyway. Then the stranger part happens. Girls Maya has never spoken to reach out and pat her back. Someone runs fingers through her hair. Tissues arrive from hands she doesn't recognize. The Football Faction kids who had spent all year policing the hierarchy are suddenly just people in a hallway with wet faces, absorbing the same impossible fact.

Maya writes down what she notices in that moment: no popularity exists when tragedy strikes. All that's left are human hearts and love and ache. It reads like a discovery, because it is one — but it also quietly explains everything she has been stumbling toward since September. The entire machinery of Cornell's program, the posture corrections and the girdle and the strategically distributed eye contact, was designed to move Maya up a social ladder. What grief reveals, instantly, is that the ladder was never structural. It was load-bearing only as long as everyone agreed to keep climbing.

The real connection Maya had been building all year — sitting beside Isabella at the ice rink, greeting the sixth-grader nobody else noticed — was never climbing. It was the opposite motion: stepping off the ladder and simply being present to whoever was in front of her. Tragedy didn't teach her this. It just stripped away the girdle, the posture, the careful eye contact, and let her see that she already knew it. She still has three months of school left. Which means she now has to figure out what it looks like to actually live there.

What Happens When You Sit at Every Table in the Cafeteria

Maya spends April testing Betty Cornell's advice on personality and shyness, translating it into something blunt: she will sit at a different lunch table every day, working her way up the Popularity Scale from her own Social Outcast corner all the way to the top. She starts sweating through her palms on day two, joining the adjacent Social Outcast table. By mid-month she has worked through the Choir Geeks, the Spanish Club, a table of boys who spend lunch guessing each other's burp flavors, and a group of kids her classmates call gangsters — who turn out, when actually approached, to be quiet and polite and simply not fluent in English.

That last detail is the one that matters. After Maya sits at the popular table and Carlos Sanchez, the school's social titan, announces her impending move to Georgia at a volume that rattles trays two rows over, a Football Faction member pulls her aside with a genuine warning: don't sit at the gangster table, those guys are scary. Maya has to tell him she already did. They were fine. A Football Faction member and a group of Spanish-speaking kids had been performing mutual fear at each other across thirty feet of cafeteria, neither side having tested whether the fear was warranted. The whole thing was running on nothing.

The choir girls watching Maya at the popular table, mouths open, are the confirmation. They see her there, speaking to people they consider terrifying, and within days a girl at another table plants her tray among the boys who told her to leave and simply sits down. She had watched Maya do it first. The hierarchy didn't collapse — Carlos Sanchez was still Carlos Sanchez — but one confident greeting turned out to be the first crack in the wall.

Real Popularity Is Being the First One Dancing

Kenzie is shuffling her feet, looking vaguely nauseated, as Maya drags her toward the Spanish Club's lunch table. The price of her participation: one spool of elastic beading floss. That is the going rate for changing the social geography of a middle school. She does her small, pained wave at the table of confused students, and Maya asks whether they'd like to come to the prom as part of her group — no dates, no hierarchy, just a mass of people who said yes. They look at each other. They say they'll think about it. Kenzie and Maya move to the next table, and the one after that, until Kenzie is pitching the plan herself, unprompted, without looking like she needs to lie down.

This was the answer Maya arrived at after everything else collapsed. The farewell party fell apart when a popular choir girl scheduled her birthday party on the same night and pulled the guest list out from under her. The choir solo ended with classmates mocking her from the row behind. Her crush Nicolas asked to be moved to a different algebra seat. Maya sat in her kitchen, drafted a list of boys to ask to prom, and crossed every name off before she understood what she was doing wrong. A party with a curated guest list and a date you had to earn are the same project: deciding who matters and who doesn't. The answer she'd been building toward all year was the opposite of that.

At prom, she walks onto an empty dance floor in a powder-blue thrift-store shift dress and white heels and starts moving anyway, pulling one stranger in, then another, until the room fills. She finds the shyest girl she'd invited standing alone at the edge of the light, takes her hands, and spins her into it. Kenzie shows up despite having sworn she wouldn't, and they shake their shoulders in front of the speakers until they can't hear themselves think. Maya leaves a note in a bathroom stall afterward — real popularity is reaching out, and never being afraid to be the first one dancing — and it reads less like a slogan than like a field report.

The epilogue is the proof of concept. August, a new school in Georgia, pearls at her throat, sitting up straight by force of habit. She spots a girl alone in the cafeteria, stirring her mashed potatoes, and walks over without hesitating. She doesn't know yet that this school will hand her new versions of Kenzie, of Nicolas, of the basketball player who wanted a book about gay pigeons — proof that the social dynamics she decoded in Brownsville were never local. She knows one thing. She says it: Hi, I'm Maya. Betty Cornell's guide was never really about posture or Vaseline or girdles. It was a manual for the specific courage it takes to be the one who speaks first.

What a 1951 Grooming Guide Actually Teaches You

Here is the strangeness worth sitting with: a thirteen-year-old in a border town survived a cartel lockdown, buried a mentor, wore a girdle that left four welts across her backside — and the thing she carried out of all of it was a sentence. Hi, I'm Maya. Not a beauty tip. Not a social strategy. Just the nerve to cross a cafeteria and sit down next to someone who looked alone. The pearls were scaffolding. The Vaseline was misdirection. What the whole year was quietly building, underneath every humiliation, was the specific courage to be first — first to speak, first to dance, first to show up for someone with no strategic reason to do so. That courage is available in any decade, at any lunch table, in any room where two people are performing mutual shyness and waiting for someone to stop. You already know who that someone could be.