Setting

The short story “Popular Girls” by Karen Shepard is set in 1982 in New York (l. 6) and follows the lives of five upper-class teenage girls. The time setting is a Friday in April (l. 150).

Physical setting

The physical setting includes various places that are character-building (the girl’s rooms), ironic (the girls study in a former Christian Episcopalian school, but they are promiscuous), or that illustrate the decadent nightlife of the 1980s (the club, the boys’ apartment).

The action begins on the benches outside the girls’ private school which used to be an Episcopalian school. The benches symbolize the way in which the girls have put themselves in a position of power at school.

The story describes the girls’ rooms in detail to suggest aspects of their character and the privileged, spoiled life they have:

Our rooms at home are designed by architects and interior decorators famous for their work on small museums and boutique hotels. Our rooms are multi-level and carpeted, with custom-made circular beds— an extra one for sleepovers. Or they are sunken, with marquetry wood floors designed to look like Persian rugs. We have first-generation big screen TVs and phones in the shape of something else... (ll. 120-125)

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Social setting

The girls belong to the New York upper-class and look down on anyone from a different social category, be they other students or the domestic help: “We rollerskate in parquet hallways and throw water balloons from roof gardens tended by Japanese men whose names we don't know.” (ll. 92-94)

Their parents hold important functions and titles and secure their material wellbeing, but they are mostly absent from...

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