by Janet Walker
Chapter Thirty-Nine
A SMILE
Tracy was at her locker in the classroom building when Sheila Roundtree walked past and hesitated. The hesitation startled Tracy, for surely the foremost member of Beck’s elite was not about to talk to her.
“Hear you’re a pretty good ball player.”
Tracy gazed at the cheerleader and nodded. “Yeah” was all she could manage to say.
Sheila smiled. “Guess I’ll be writing a cheer about you, huh?”
Tracy nodded and returned the smile. “Yeah” was all she could manage to say.
Sheila walked away. Tracy, her face burning with bashfulness, closed the door to her locker and began heading for class. She could not believe Sheila Roundtree had privileged her with a conversation. The only interactions they’d had were two burning stares of misunderstanding and one of indifference. Other than that, Sheila moved in the realm of the real Beck girls, including her fair-skinned look-alike friends, Felecia and Alisa—who weren’t twins, who weren’t even related, though new students often thought they were—and acted as if Tracy and others in the lower student worlds didn’t exist. Tracy had learned that there were four basic types of Beck students. There were the diaper-to-diploma Beck Girls whose families lived in west Fulton County’s MacDonald Park and whose parents and grandparents were often Beck and Langston alumnae. Sheila Roundtree was one of them. There were the “Alpharetta girls,” which included not just Alpharetta but all high-income communities north of the city, including Buckhead and Roswell; most of these were the girls, Tracy realized, who said “bummer” and “gross” and whose parents were Hollywood celebrities or regular super-rich folks who didn’t mind sending their daughters to south Fulton if it meant branding them with the prestigious Beck name. Felicia and Alisa, Sheila’s sidekicks, were of this group. The third type of students were the girls from other parts of the country who came to Beck as boarding students or whose families had moved to Georgia and placed their daughters in the exclusive academy as a consequence of the move, or as the objective. Sandra Butler, Dana McGavin, Kathy Prentiss, Vanessa Willis, and even Wanda Carver were of this number. And finally there were girls like Tracy, girls whose families scraped together the money to send their daughters to Beck because they believed no price too high to give their girls the opportunity to gain entry into the good life. That was most of the girls on the team, Tracy realized: Patricia Butler, Toni Christian, Evelyn Dent, Karla Head, Deidre Lowry, and LaKisha Thomas. However, most of the student body belonged to the first three groups. And of all the groups, the most elite were not the super-rich Alpharetta girls but the MacDonald Park girls—who also happened to be, in Tracy’s opinion, the most snobbish when dealing with girls in Tracy’s group. Tracy had come to believe that Sheila Roundtree was the epitome of this unpleasant homegrown stratum, but now she would have to reorganize her opinion. Not only did Sheila speak to her in front of other students, she had also smiled and given a compliment. Tracy concluded that the incident meant two things. One, that Sheila Roundtree was actually a nice person and, two, that she did not know her man was trying hard to turn Tracy into a vanilla milkshake.
