Fortuna has a good post on the crucial issue of high school dynamics, particularly the cool friend/less cool friend relationship, that ends saying:
Every time I see one of those movies I wonder if anyone who makes them thinks about what it's like from the other side. If you have a friend who is cooler than you, then you are constantly forced into the role of sidekick. Which can be a huge drag, I can tell you.
Not always. Like her, my closest friend walked on water and made flowers grow whenever he returned to land. Whether he was better looking than I was is up for debate, but there's no doubt that he was far more charismatic, shockingly better liked, and effortlessly able to float through all manner of social strata, while I clumsily doggy-paddled alongside him. So to start, I empathize.
Unlike Fortuna, however, my friend didn't just accelerate past me with well-timed body maturation and a sixth-sense for social relations. I'd spent my childhood with an extra fifty pounds, but then spent my sophomore year running it off. Grant arrived my junior year, while I hung out in that limbo between looking/acting popular (excuse the immodesty, but I was fucking hot at post-weight loss 16, a fact I now wish I'd taken better advantage of) and being generally disliked*. Didn't change. Which, in its way, was actually just fine. Too much enmity on all sides for a kumbaya. But that was the psychic advantage of the popular friend -- it proved that my general standing was an accident of history (and weight, and vocabulary, and 8th grade sweatpants, and...), not a fact of nature. And that, really, was enough.
