Read Online A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity by Kathleen Gilles Seidel - Free Book Online

road” relationship. The boy had been raised by his maternal grandparents, and Chris had not even known of his existence for the first few years of the boy’s life. Chris had concealed none of this from the search committee, and because the backyard of a member of the committee butted up to Annelise’s backyard, we had gotten all the dirt.
    “Your daughter’s not in the ensemble, is she?” Chris asked now.
    “No, I’m here to pick up her friends.”
    “Is that an issue for her, that her friends are in the ensemble?”
    “Oh, no,” I said lightly, “she didn’t try out. There was never any question of her being in.”
    “But does she feel excluded in other ways?”
    Suddenly I wasn’t sure of the answer to that. Last year Erin would certainly have wanted to come to school with me. She had always grabbed any chance to see her friends. “I don’t know,” I admitted.
    “The one thing that gave me pause about enlarging the ensemble,” he said, “was Martha Shot saying that if we had more than ten girls, the ensemble would take over the social life of the sixth grade. The ensemble girls would be on the bus, and the rest wouldn’t. It’s hard to imagine that one girl would make such a difference, but she said one could.”
    “I’m sure it depends on the mix of kids.” The bond between Erin, Elise, Brittany, and Rachel was so strong, their lives intersected in so many ways with so many shared activities, that I couldn’t imagine the ensemble changing their friendship.
    He nodded. “Of course. I hope you’ll keep me posted if there are problems.”
    I had assumed that Mimi’s ranting and ravings had been the force behind the ensemble increasing in size. Now I wondered. Perhaps it had as much to do with a power struggle between a new headmaster and a teacher with thirty years’ tenure. If so, I was a little surprised that the headmaster had won.
    Oh, well, we would never know. The faculty and staff do a good job of keeping parents out of their own civil wars, probably because they know the parents would start by filing lawsuits and end up in negotiations with a Third-World nation that had nuclear-weaponry capability.
    The rehearsal was ending. The eleven girls had been arranged by voice, but as soon as they were dismissed, they sorted themselves out into smaller groups. Elise, Brittany, and Rachel were together, of course, and as they crossed the music room toward me, they were joined by the girl I now knew to be Faith Caudwell, the alumnae daughter who had moved back from Texas and been given the tenth spot in the ensemble.
    The girls hardly reacted to seeing me instead of one of their own mothers. They were so used to being driven by any of us that they probably didn’t even notice that I was there without Erin. Faith Caudwell stuck with us all the way to the car almost as if she were coming along.
    “Do you have a ride?” I asked her.
    “Oh, yes, but my mom’s always late. That’s the way she is.”
    Okay, one more person whom I, intolerant bitch that I am, didn’t want to drive a car pool with.
    The three girls said good-bye to Faith, they all promised that they would call one another the minute that they got home, and then in the car they talked about her, saying the usual sorts of things that kids said about other kids, that she was really really nice and really really fun and they really really liked her.
    Jamie’s parents came down from Pittsburgh for the weekend, and we were out and about so much that I didn’t think about whether the phone was ringing. Erin always checked the messages as soon as we got in, and so I don’t know how many she got.
    The following Friday afternoon she was again on the sofa watching the Disney Channel. Earlier in the week she had declared that the Disney Channel was for babies, and since her brother watched it, he must be a baby.
    I donned my helpful-mother cap. “Do you want me to call Mrs. Rosen”—that was Annelise—“and have her drop the girls off