Is it really that dichotomous these days? Our school had warring camps. The stomps had a hierarchy in their own right, as did the jocks, as did the honor society to an extent. The skaters were sort of 2nd tier, who had a lot of overlap with the art/stoner crew, who were almost all goths, but had some overlap with the trench coat mafia. If you were to say "point to the popular kids" to a kid at my school, they would have looked around the lunch room and pointed in four or five different directions; the unpopular kids were evident but "popular" could easily mean "gets to have sex with the girls into Garth Brooks" as well as "had his tires slashed by the jocks." We also had an excessive police presence (19 cruisers, 3 4x4 party busters, 3 up-armored Suburbans and an armored car for SWAT plus NEST plus Delta for eight traffic lights) and pathetically few places to party, so most of the partying was intramural. There weren't "jock parties" or "honor society parties" as typically any warm-beer gathering in the woods had at least three cliques in attendance. Me? I hunted girlfriends amongst the trench coat mafia, was avidly pursued by the women of the drama crew, studied with the honor society and got into fights with the stomps. The guys I drank with most often are largely dead from overdoses and violence; the guys I studied with most often are largely tenured. An ex-girlfriend overdosed on heroin ten years back; an ex-nearly-girlfriend (who lettered in five sports and was national honor society) is still a facebook friend. It was mostly fluid like that. Things got a little awkward when one of my buds amongst the stoners knifed one of my buds amongst the skaters but it blew over pretty quickly when the stoner got shipped out to juvvie. And while my experience might be unique, I've always had a suspicion that people oversimplify their high school politics. "In or out" never fully explains the complex dynamics at play, and I think we all do a disservice to our social circles when we portray things in such a binary light.