but he was no outcast. He had a force field of cool around him. People went silent when he got close, then stared and whispered after he passed.
I snapped a picture and sent it to Claudia with the text "DZ?"
"DZ!!!" she shot back.
DZ stood for DangerZone, the next tier on the Popularity Tower. DangerZones can pull off the "different" thing because they're so dark, troubled, and fascinating. It's tough to call DangerZones popular. They're above labels like that. They do whatever they want, and all the others—from the Happy Hopeless to the Supreme Populazzi—feel honored if a DangerZone wants to talk to them.
I turned away so the DangerZone wouldn't see me watching him ... and was almost blinded by the glow of the uppermost tier on the Tower: the Populazzi. I saw them through a large picture window. The Populazzi lazed among the branches of a sprawling oak tree, basking in the leaf-filtered sun. It had to be the best spot on campus, and I wasn't surprised they'd claimed it. They were the Golden Ones: beautiful, confident, and admired.
I snapped a picture of them and sent it to Claudia. At Pennsbrook, she and I had criticized the Populazzi a lot. They were too cliquey, too judge-y, and way too tyrannical about keeping the rest of us stuck in our spots on the Tower...
...and I'd be lying if I didn't admit we totally wanted to be them.
Okay, maybe not them exactly, but we wanted to be in their position. Who wouldn't? They sat around their tree, on display for the whole school to see, yet none of them looked the slightest bit self-conscious. In fact, they radiated ease and happiness. Going through life like that ... it would be like living a fairy tale.
Of course, the problem with all the Populazzi we'd ever known was that they'd been born into the fairy tale, so they didn't appreciate it. The people who'd make great Populazzi were people like Claudia and me. We knew the other side, so we'd recognize how good we had it and wouldn't be harsh to anyone on other tiers.
As I continued watching the Populazzi, I noticed one girl stood out more than the others. She sat on the lowest branch of the tree. Her shoulder-length chestnut hair had beautiful waves and highlights that I swear seemed to sparkle in the sun. Perfectly white teeth beamed out of her sun-bronzed face, and her cowl neck white sleeveless top and jeans looked both casually thrown together and catalog-model flawless.
I'd spent hours figuring out my own look for the first day of school and had felt really good about my mop of brown curls tucked behind a funky headband, my cute new jeans, my ballet flats, and a fun textured vest over a basic tank. But watching this girl, I felt ridiculous, like I was trying way too hard and looked dorky anyway.
I wasn't the only one looking at her. All the other Populazzi girls kept darting their eyes her way, as if checking in to make sure she approved of what they were saying, doing, and thinking. That settled it: the girl was the Supreme Populazzi. The others were Penultimates. And if she was the female Supreme Populazzi, it stood to reason that the guy next to her with his arm slung over her shoulders was her boyfriend, the male Supreme Populazzi. He wore preppy-cool clothes, and his hair was short, dark, and wavy, brushed back from his face, and ... Uh-oh...
He was looking right at me.
The guy's face scrunched up. He tapped his girlfriend on the shoulder and pointed to me. She turned and squinched her face like she smelled something nasty.
Why was I still staring at them???
I dropped to my knees so I was below their sight line and crawled away from the picture window. My phone chirped. Claudia had cropped my earlier picture so it showed just the male Supreme Populazzi. "Say hello 2 your prom date!!!" her text read.
"Yeah, right," I muttered, and kept crawling as the bell rang. I was almost clear of the window, when—
"Ow!"
I had crawled right into a pair of khaki-clad shins. And they were hard.
"Oh—sorry," a confused male voice said. I looked up. The khakis were attached to one of the Theater Geeks. I recognized him because he wore a gray 1920s Gatsby hat. He frowned and cocked his head as he studied me for a second, then asked, "I'm sorry, are you ... crawling to class?"
"No, I..." I went for