Odd Girl Out (22 page)

Two periods later, I asked the ninth graders to define a girl who thinks she's all that. Katie explained. "Say like you don't have as much money as them. They always get all the nice clothes and everything. They hang around the big groups and stuff. They think they're all that. They're like, well, you
wish
you could be in our group."

Lauren took up the slack. "Somebody's popular and they think they can get any boy in the school that they want, a lot of money and fancy clothes and stuff like that. She thinks she's so perfect."

"Yeah," Tanya said, "she's stuck up and she don't want to talk to nobody, but she might not be—you never gave her the chance to find out how she is."

"So why not?" I asked. "Why do we make those judgments?"

Heather again: "I was going to say she got it in her head that she thinks she's all that. She's snobby and stuff. She's got on Tommy Hilfiger and the other girls got on Jordache, and she goes up and says, look at my watch, I got it at such and such and it was $180."

"It's all about their attitude," Tanya said.

"You should be noticed," Kelly said, "but not calling attention to yourself. Have good posture and be confident and stand out but without saying anything."

"What's the biggest thing girls fight over?" I asked my first group of Ridgewood ninth graders. Toya raised her hand.

"If you go into a new school or something, and you come in decked out and got your hair down and stuff, other girls are going to be hating on you. They'll be like, she thinks she's all that. She too cute."

Tiffany added, "If you're at a new school they'll come up to you and be like, um, what's your name, why you tryin' to talk to my man, and all this stuff?"

"Why would girls do that?" I asked.

"They want to take you out!" Keisha crowed, and all the girls jumped in, their voices clotting indecipherably.

 

Today's girls come of age in a world that has replaced the glass ceiling with a space station. The twenty-first-century girl is a pro ballplayer, a CEO-in-training, a fighter pilot. She is anything she wants to be. Today, girl power is a cultural juggernaut.

And yet. The message that modesty and restraint are the essence of femininity persists. Contemporary feminist research shows that our culture continues to pressure girls to be chaste, quiet, thin, and giving, denying the desire for sexual pleasure, voice, food, and self- interest.
⁴⁷

In schools, the American Association of University Women found "the lessons of the hidden curriculum teach girls to value silence and compliance, to view those qualities as a virtue." Journalist Peggy Orenstein found that girls value in each other social characteristics of "sweet" and "cute," a term she found interchangeable with "deferential," "polite," or "passive." The good girl, Orenstein concluded, "is nice before she is anything else—before she is vigorous, bright, even before she is honest."
⁴⁸

Small wonder that singer Ani DiFranco is telling her legions of young female fans that everyone secretly hates the prettiest girl in the room. Or, she might have added, the most popular, the smartest, the thinnest, the sexiest, or the best dressed. Because, girl power or not, most girls know deep down that standing out can get you in big trouble. In
USA Today,
⁴⁹
a Virginia high-school teacher warned of a dangerous trip wire for girls at his school. Although a new student is usually ignored, he wrote, "as soon as she becomes a threat, especially if guys like her, she'll get ripped apart."

When I first started interviewing girls, I'd planned to organize their stories according to the qualities I assumed girls got punished for: the differently abled, the overweight, the poor, the haplessly uncool. I had not expected to find that girls became angry with each other for quite the opposite reason.

As most any girl knows, one of the worst insults is to be called a girl who "thinks she's all that." This girl, loosely defined as conceited, is considered a show-off, obnoxious, or full of herself. By fifth grade, girls are intimately familiar with "all that," an epithet that grows with them into adulthood, gradually evolving into the more genteel belief that "she thinks she's better than me."

How can you tell a girl who thinks she's all that? Well, it all depends.

 

The first people Stephanie met after switching schools were Marissa and Lori. Best friends since preschool, the girls made an odd couple: Marissa was the bubbly, magazine-cutout-cute cheerleader. Lori was stick thin and scrappy. Alphabetized seats in freshman homeroom fated Marissa and Stephanie to friendship.

Stephanie was pretty. She was no cover girl, but she had majestic height and a head of perfectly blow-dried, blond-streaked hair that made her, she said wryly, the "preppiest girl in school." She was also smart and a talented actor. Coming from the tiny, bland Catholic school where she'd been cooling her heels for the last eight years, Stephanie still felt queasy about starting at a much bigger place. Finding Marissa and Lori was a huge relief. When Stephanie got a crush on Josh after he headed a soccer ball into her locker, she sensed that things might just end up right.

On a Saturday night in late fall, Stephanie was invited for her first sleepover at Lori's. The three girls holed up in a makeshift mountain of pillows, sleeping bags, and junk food. While they were watching a movie and doing their nails, Lori's brother Steve came into the den with his friend Jeremy. Steve sat next to Stephanie on the floor. Everyone talked and joked for a while, the boys threw handfuls of popcorn at the girls, Lori got angry at Steve, and the boys left. The girls finished their movie and fell asleep on the TV-room floor.

On Monday, after study hall, Stephanie stood very still before her locker sensing something might have changed in a way she didn't understand. She felt dread. She opened her locker door. No notes from Marissa and Lori. She went to the bathroom. No one waiting for her there as usual. Stephanie drifted through the afternoon classes obsessing silently over what could be wrong, and why.

She decided to sleep on it. The next day, Marissa and Lori ignored her during homeroom, and her eyes nearly burned out of her head trying to hold their gaze. Later that morning, two girls informed Stephanie that people had been talking. Something was going on behind her back. Still, no one had spoken to her. Marissa and Lori were nowhere to be found. Yet everyone seemed in the know. Stephanie was out, gone from the group. No one would acknowledge her. She was invisible.

By fifth period, Stephanie was reeling. She didn't understand what had happened or why, only that she had no control over it. No friends. She slouched, sobbing and gasping, on the linty rug by her locker, hiding her face in her coat sleeves. What was going on? Was it because a geeky senior had asked her to the prom and she was only a freshman?
(She'd said no!)
Was it that she tried out for the play? Had Marissa not been joking when she'd called her a copycat for buying the same Gap pants? Maybe she'd been trying too hard. Maybe she needed to back away from people so they didn't get mad at her so quickly.

Soon Stephanie learned the truth. The whispers found her in the cafeteria as she sat alone behind a crowded table: At Lori's house she had flirted with Steve. Marissa had a crush on him and was furious. Stephanie was too stunned to move.

She had not flirted with Steve. She'd never
meant
to, anyway. It was Josh she thought constantly about. They knew it! What did it mean that she had flirted? What had she done, and when? And if she didn't know the answer, how would she ever know if she was doing it again?

No one would tell her. For the rest of the year, Marissa and Lori pummeled Stephanie with cruel, invisible abuse. On Valentine's Day, they sent her flowers from Josh. When Stephanie called to thank him, he was clueless and she died of embarrassment. The girls threatened to tell Stephanie's parents she smoked if she ever spoke to Steve again. When Stephanie did well on a test, they told people she cheated. They quietly advised the teacher to keep an eye on her. Lori wrote a letter to an enemy of Stephanie's, telling her Stephanie had called her ugly names, and the girl threw Stephanie against the wall, stuck her face up close, and threatened to kill her. Lori wrote a sexually explicit letter to Josh and signed Stephanie's name.

 

Now twenty-nine, Stephanie was sitting on a couch in her Washington, D.C., apartment, her mitt-sized mutt, Buddy, next to her. Sensing as only dogs can that I was there to ask tough questions, Buddy had indicated we were not going to be friends. Perched on a barstool, my feet tucked as high as I could get them, I asked Stephanie how her parents had handled it. She sighed.

"Do people get upset when they talk to you about this?" she asked.

"Sometimes."

"Okay. Because I'm getting upset." I offered her a tissue, which I had learned to carry with me. The dog growled. I curled my feet tighter around the stool as I told Stephanie that my closest friends waited years to confide their most painful stories. She continued.

Stephanie told me that she waited until after college to tell anyone about her experience. I was only the second person to know, but if it would help another girl, she'd do it. "I wouldn't take any amount of money to be fifteen again. Ever," she said, settling cross-legged on her couch. "I'm ready. I'm totally ready." She continued her story.

 

Over the next weeks and months, Stephanie refused to tell her parents. She didn't want them to worry or to see the punishment she was being forced through. Plus, she had friends from a nearby public school, so she never seemed as alone as she felt. Instead, she started dieting and exercising obsessively. "I thought if I lost twenty pounds it would all get better, you know?" It also seemed to Stephanie that if she could hide what was going on, it would all be less real. "If you handle this enough and if you just keep it inside, if you don't actually say out loud that everybody hates me, it's not true. You know what I mean? You build the armor around yourself."

But slowly, Stephanie turned inward as her confidence and self-esteem withered. Since she didn't understand what she'd done, since there had been no fight, no moment of confrontation, she decided it could be only her fault, that her habit of saying anything on her mind was a mistake. She talked too much; she was a flirt. The answer, she decided, was to disappear.

"I blamed myself for speaking. For confiding so much in them. For letting them know so much about me," she said. Stephanie no longer trusted people. "I saw the negative in everything people said to me." She stopped sleeping. She quit the swim team after she had an anxiety attack during a relay race. She left the house wearing her new team jacket and then tried to lose it at school. She didn't look anyone in the eye, a habit that would take years to unlearn. Fearing she'd be dissected by the other girls for wearing loafers, or a cheaper brand of sweater, or unmatched colors, it was all she could do to get dressed in the morning. When her mother bought sweaters for her uniform and Stephanie feared they were too loud, she wore them out the door and removed them in the school bathroom, shivering through the day.

"I did anything and everything to just try to be [unobtrusive]," she told me. "I didn't want to have anything. I didn't want anything to draw attention to myself at all."

If she found herself having feelings for a guy, Stephanie was terrified that someone would find out. "I didn't look twice at them," she told me. All she could think about was what people would say if they saw her. "I just closed down from people."

During this period, Stephanie began remembering the month before her life changed. She had never thought twice when Marissa and Lori were being rude to her. One time, the two girls had given each other the names of girls in a popular band, but Stephanie didn't get one. The week before the sleepover, they'd chalked all over the homeroom blackboard that she loved Josh, humiliating her. "We're just playing with you," they'd said. "It was always, 'We're just playing with you,'" Stephanie told me. "'Don't be so uptight.' 'Don't be such a tight ass.'"

She recalled how some weeks before, at a school dance, a hot guy from the boys' school had come up to her and asked if she wanted to dance. "All right," Stephanie had said. "Well, I don't," he sneered, laughing as he walked away. Earlier that week at a softball game, Stephanie had told Marissa and Lori she thought the guy was cute. She'd been so sure that letting it all slide would be easier than confronting them. She had forgiven them immediately. "I just never saw the signals," she explained.

Marissa and Lori played down the prank at the dance, making light of it. "They were like, 'Oh, Stephanie, we just thought you'd laugh.'" Fifteen years later, Stephanie told me, "I remember what I was wearing. I remember what it smelled like. I remember what song was playing. I remember everything about that moment. I remember every single time I saw him after that I could not speak."

Stephanie coped by creating what she calls an "alter personality." Monday through Friday she was tortured and afraid. Friday nights she went out with friends from another school and appeared to be having a blast. But the stress at school literally consumed her from within. At fifteen, she was diagnosed with an ulcer. Her parents were astonished. "So my mother's saying, 'What, doctor, why does she have an ulcer? She's fifteen years old,'" Stephanie recalled. "'Why is she puking and why is she throwing up food, and why [are] burps ... coming out of her body that smell like ninety-year-old eggs that have been cracked open?'"

Someone suggested Stephanie see a psychologist. For twelve weeks, at the end of each forty-five-minute session, her mother thrust a wad of bills at the doctor as Stephanie watched. "She said she didn't want to write a check to a therapist, because she told me she didn't want it to come back and haunt me that I had seen someone." The weekly ritual did little to encourage Stephanie to talk about what was haunting her. Nor did it assure her that it was not her fault to begin with.

It all ended as quickly as it began. One day, the girls simply lost interest. But in the eerie silence that lingered in their absence, Stephanie only intensified picking apart everything she'd ever done in an effort to understand what triggered the nightmare.