High School Is Over: Dear 'Popular' Girls, No One Wants To Sit With You

How could we ever forget the posse of “mean girls” in high school?

The seven-to-10 women army made up of perfectly bronzed clones who traveled in a wolf pack sporting their other-worldly stick-straight hair, matching silver Tiffany ID bracelets, stud-adorned true religion skinny jeans, Coach mini backpacks and sunglasses perpetually resting at the tops of their frizz-free heads?

You could smell their artificially sweet fragrance wafting through the hallways from miles and miles away.

Their lunch table held court smack in the center of the cafeteria, and they always made a big show of executing to their audience (aka the student body) how much “fun” they were having -- even though anyone with half a brain could see right through their overzealous performance.

Like anyone living in the spotlight, they were as hated as they were worshiped, and they viciously ruled the school population with a perfectly buffed iron fist.

High school is a period of your life that feels so painfully important at the time, as if the whole world revolves around that relatively meaningless four-year span.

It’s a microcosm of social dynamics, and everything feels so HUGE and so NEW that it’s practically impossible to see even a small semblance of reality when you're caught in the thick of it.

But alas, you leave high school and embark into the real world.

The bubble pops. Suddenly, you’re free to roam the city streets and gain some perspective. 

And with each passing year, high school seems further and further away until it becomes nothing more than a distant blur in the folds of your memory.

Four years becomes reduced to nothing more than a faded photograph of a bad hairstyle you keep safely tucked in an old shoebox stowed beneath the bed.

But there is still this bizarre sprinkling of adults in the real world who remain mentally stuck at the "popular" table.

The aforementioned mean girls who peaked in high school who can’t and won’t accept their glory days are vastly over. They’re akin to the retired beauty queen who sleeps in her pageant crown 25 years after winning Miss Teen Arkansas.

The irony is once the high school queen bitches transform into adult entities, they're only resting on the throne of coolness in their minds.

The rest of us have moved on. We can only bow our heads and chuckle at their delusional “you can’t sit with us” attitude because:

You still tell us we can't "sit" with you -- but we don’t f*cking want to.

Because truth be told, why would any fully realized adult want to sit with vacant, judgmental bitches who are still too self-conscious to have a good time?

Girls who remain shackled to the high school mentality find themselves wildly left behind in the big, bad world of grown ups because…

You still make fun of nerds, but now the “nerd” is your boss.

Former Queen Bees still living in the cruel world of high school still deem anyone who doesn’t fit into the high school definition of cool as a “nerd.”

Luckily, karma is a fabulously wise woman, and the once bullied “weirdos” now are the most badass, successful adults on the block.

They make up the CEOs, the icons and the groundbreaking entrepreneurs of the world who grace the pages of Vanity Fair’s exclusive “International Best-Dressed” list.

The “freaks” are now the very people the high school bitches have to ask for permission to leave before taking their 1 pm lunch break.

You’re still dating the quarterback of the football team, but now he’s an unemployed f*ck boy.

Social media is both a blessing and a curse.

The blessing: When I scroll through my news feed and run across the football star of my high school (the cocky villain whom I still hold solely responsible for my scorned middle school reputation), I’m able to lightly giggle at how the former golden god who endlessly stomped on the fragile hearts of teen girls now has a dad bod, an alarmingly red puffy face and appears to be largely unemployed.

The curse: That I wasted two minutes of my precious time even looking at his page AND he has the ability to elicit such snarky thoughts in my head (even if he did practically send me over the edge for the entirety of my adolescence by incessantly calling me a "slut" merely because I was 13 and had boobs).

You still roll with the same clique, and they’re still fake as f*ck.

While it’s perfectly normal to stay in touch with a smattering of friends from high school -- it’s slightly unsettling to witness a group of girls who never in their entire lives made new real-world friends.

The high school mean girls still run in the same snarling, wolf pack -- only high school, sadly, is long over.

And they’re still posing with the same pink cocktails with the same clavicle-grazing, over-highlighted hair.

The most tragic aspect is their “friendship” dynamics seem to still be built on the frail foundation of ruthless sh*t talking about one another.

You’re still wearing Juicy Couture while we’re wearing real couture.

What is it about high school mean girls and an irrepressible affinity for Juicy Couture velour sweatsuits?

Not only are these girls mentally still stuck in high school, they’re style is too.

And while tracksuits are nothing short of hideous on an 18-year-old girl, they’re a triple homicide fashion crime on a 25-year-old woman.

You’re still gossiping about everyone, but no one is listening.

Oh, the holidays. The only time of year I risk running into the former Queen Bees from high school.

The routine is reminiscent of “Groundhog Day “-- the same conversation year after year:

After a few minutes of forced polite conversation, they’re immediately gossiping to me about how Rachel Goldblatt got a breast reduction, that Matt Piers is just leaving his fourth stint in rehab for an alleged Red Bull addiction and little Shelby Green from across the street most definitely f*cked her way to a successful career in finance.

Yawn. Their words are inaudible garble in my ears.

Once you develop your own life, one filled to the brim with real friends and sweeping with rich passions -- who cares about what anyone else is doing?

Live and let live, ladies.

You’re still Queen Bee in your hometown, but you’re the only one who still lives there.

It’s so hard for these ladies to let go of their high school glory days that after their obligatory post-college, two-year stint of living in New York City; they quickly retire back to the comforts of their hometown.

The lovely place where they once ruled the roost and sometimes still do -- because nobody else lives there anymore.

You’re still self-conscious, and everyone still sees it.

People who are outright MEAN are hiding behind a mask of bitchiness because they’re deeply insecure.

People who calculate and micromanage every single word that comes out of their mouths are direly unsure of themselves and riddled with anxiety.

People who perform rather than unabashedly live are mind-blowingly self-conscious.

It was as transparent in high school as it is now.

Only, as adults, the rest of us attain enough of a real sense of confidence to no longer expel effort into caring about the opinions of clones who look down on others and treat anyone "different" as their punching bags.