Girls, and the Horrible Hierarchy of Schools

The Standard System

      In a Boys school, having a girlfriend seems to raise your name in the hierarchy that is a school year. In a state boy’s school in England, Popular Kids, much like in the USA, are usually at the top. Granted, you don’t necessarily have to be sporty to be popular, nor if you’re sporty will you be popular – but it’s more or less the same. Anyway below these demons lies what you may consider the normal kids, ones who aren’t especially smart, sport, rich, whatever. They’re average in every way imaginable, even their heights and weights are ‘normal’. Then there are the smart people - unlike the US they’re not ridiculed at the same level, thank God, but that doesn’t mean they’re not free from the flying fists. Strangely, there seems to be a completely separate group also – the weirdoes and quiet ones. There are people who are either very strange and everyone just avoids them because they scare the shit out of you, and the quiet people also who just never open their mouths for the whole year apart from when they say ‘yes Sir/Ms’ every morning. We all, accidently, tend to just forget their existence.

As expected, the popular kids, despite the fact being in a boy’s school, seem to have phone directory of girls names and numbers. They have the right contacts from their primary school, their contacts have the right contacts and those contacts have the right ones and so on. So, a year into puberty – when girls weren’t so diseased any more, every single popular child, at the age of 13, were at parties, meeting new people; everything a normal person expects to do at the age of 18, when its legal. Within months they had girls bathing in their shadows. OK, I exaggerate a bit, but it’s pretty close. Every other testosterone fuelled teenager was grouchy and aching for the touch of a women, but unfortunately they just weren’t popular enough to know any. Not the quiet kids, they weren’t bothered, they were simply content with their silence. The weird people were happy with chickens. Just to clarify, they’re not retarded, just odd.

Then, all of a sudden, rumours went around. A non-popular kid had a girlfriend. How this possible? Was the rumour a lie? Was she ugly? Was he a hermaphrodite that had snogged a mirror? No, it was all true. Someone, through facebook (I know, still a little nerdy) had met a girl. They’d gone out and well, the rest, as they say, is history. She wasn’t ugly (though to be fair she wasn’t exactly Cheryl Cole) and she wasn’t, surprisingly, a hermaphrodite. The person in question was literally jumping for joy, they’d kissed a girl before anyone else and he wasn’t even popular. Two weeks later it had ended. Granted he was upset, but he had experienced something that none of us normal people would ever experience. His status in the school had risen, albeit briefly, and although he hadn’t quite been at the level of the popular kids, he’d been able to look down his slightly crooked nose at us. The rest of us would be unwillingly patient, and wait years to get our lips on a woman.

As we went up the school years, things changed though, nerds were no longer at the bottom, the hierarchy was no longer a hierarchy – people just existed in separate groups from each other. Now even I know a few girls. Oh how times have changed, but that is a story for another day. Next year in college, there will be girls among us. Now that will be interesting.