Filed under: new kid | Tags: "right" clothes, converse, making friends, materialism, military kid, Navy kid, new kid, pecking order, social status
Brian Greene
Age 12 at the time
My family moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia when I was 12 years old and in the sixth grade. My father was in the Navy, and we were transferred to Virginia from Charleston, South Carolina, where we had been living the previous three years. In South Carolina we lived on the naval base but in Virginia Beach we lived in town, amongst the civilians. I was to find that life for a pre-adolescent was much different at a regular neighborhood and at a public school than how things were on the base, and at the Navy school.
On the base in South Carolina, there really weren’t any established cliques amongst the kids who lived and went to school there. Of course you made friends with certain other kids and hung out with them more than others, but there were no exclusive groups everyone was either part of or refused admittance to. Maybe this because the society around a military base is so transitory, and so diverse; with the sailors getting transfers so often, families came and went on a daily basis, and the ones who came in arrived from all over the country, and sometimes different parts of the world. We were all too transient, and too different from one another, for there to be much of a social status pecking order in place amongst us kids.
It was much different in Virginia Beach. On joining the new school, I learned very quickly that my class was split into two distinct groups. There was a pack of about 10 kids, probably half boys and half girls, who were clearly the elite here. They made the best grades, the boys were the most athletic and the girls were the prettiest. They sat amongst themselves in the cafeteria and if you weren’t invited to sit at their part of the table, you wouldn’t dare go over there. All the rest of us kids were simply “the others,” the commoners who simply took up space and were the ones the elite crowd could look down upon.
I had no great desire to get in with the popular kids, but what did bother me was that, even within the group of “average” boys and girls, I didn’t seem to be making any friends, even after I’d been in the town, and at the school, for a few months. The other nondescript kids were generally friendly with one another, and many of them seemed nice enough. How come none of them were trying to befriend me, when I was one of them?
Finally, I decided I would try and find out why none of them were making friends with me. I asked a boy named Mark, who had done more than any of my other classmates to be nice to me. We were outside on the playground at recess, and Mark and I were kind of standing off by ourselves.
I said, “Do you know why Marvin or Stacy or none of the other kids ever talks to me? I saw Stacy at the park near my house the other day, and when I went up to say hi to her, she walked away. People are always doing that to me. I’m not talking about Greg and Melissa and those kind of kids, I mean the regular ones, like us.”
Mark looked like he was carefully considering how to answer my question. Then he came to a decision in his mind and he said to me, “I’ll tell you the truth. It’s your shoes.”
“My shoes?”
“Yeah, they’re Weo’s.”
“Weo’s?”
“Yeah. You know how at the A&P grocery store they have some things that are like a sale brand? They call those things Weo’s. So to us anything that’s cheap like that, we call it a Weo. You should get your parents to get you some Nikes or Pumas, or at least Converse.”
“And that’s really why kids won’t talk to me?”
“Yep. A lot of them think you’re a nice kid. They say if he would just get rid of those Weo’s, we would play with him.”
It seemed that even amongst the “regular” kids, there were certain status symbols. I felt both confused and ashamed to learn that I was being shunned by them because I wore cheap, non-name brand tennis shoes.
That night, before I went to bed, I told my mother about my conversation with Mark. I asked her if she could buy me some Converse, if we couldn’t afford Nikes or Pumas. I made a deal with my mom, that if I mowed some lawns and put together a little bit of cash, she would pay for half of a new pair of Converse if I could cover the other half. I remember having a kind of creepy feeling when I bought the shoes and wore them to school for the first time. It was like I was buying the chance to make friends. In South Carolina, you made friends with certain kids just because you liked them and they liked you. Here, I had to wear a certain kind of shoe before any of my peers would consider befriending me. It didn’t feel right.
But I forgot about all of that when, at recess that first day when I wore my new shoes, Stacy - the same girl who had snubbed me at the park in our neighborhood - came up and talked to me. I’d had a crush on her since the first day I was at that school, and now she was flirting with me. I asker her to “go” with me about three days after that, and she said “yes.” After we started going together she got her parents to buy her a pair of Converse that were the same color as mine.
