The Vintage Reader

"The studes were the spectacled grinds with high grades. The mop-squeezers were the girls who served on committees, who worked on the paper, who did the grubby, behind-the-scenes jobs. They were the ones who worked extra in Domestic Science to bake cookies for Senior Mother's Day. They drove out to the country the afternoon before the Hallowe'en party and brought back corn fodder and pumpkins to decorate the gym. They were the ones who got prices on doughnuts and cider, and at the party they stayed late to see that all the glasses got back to the lunchroom with no casualties.

"The queens were the ones who, on Senior Mother's Day, dawdled through the halls with their mothers and munched the cookies. The queens danced every dance at the Hallowe'en party and didn't worry about leaving a glass on some shadowed window sill. The queens read, with an indulgent smile, the wisecracks in the school paper about themselves, which some hard-working mop-squeezer had thought up, working till twelve at night in the stuffy journalism room."