Odd Girl Out (25 page)

The anti-girl, on the other hand, lacks the ideal girl's sophisticated indirection. She is the polar opposite of the "nice," other-oriented, relational girl. The non-ideal girl is mean, opinionated, and pushy. She is egocentric and selfish. She is not the sweet girl everyone wants to be around; she is unhappy and insecure. She is not social. She is not in control of her emotions. She is moody and hard to get along with.

The anti-girl doesn't blend in. She doesn't agree and she doesn't get along. Yet persistence, maverick thinking, and a fighting spirit are precisely the qualities girls are taught to embrace in the heroines they grow up to admire. The competing messages translate into conflicting visions of the women they are supposed to become. That day, I was confused and disheartened.

 

American culture is built on dual pillars of independence and competition, values that run directly counter to the passionate intimacy, care, and friendship between girls. Giving girls a chance at success means giving them full, equal access to the tools of the game: to the acts of competition and desire required to excel and to the knowledge that relationships can survive them. When competition and desire cannot be enacted in healthy ways and when girls are expected to give priority to care and relationship, resentment, confusion, and retribution follow shortly behind.

For the past twenty-five years, a growing number of psychologists have celebrated different cultures of play and work among boys and girls. Their portrayals carry the legacy of science's refusal to explore female aggression, and they end up idealizing female relationships. Where boys "stress position and hierarchy ... girls emphasize the construction of intimacy and connection. Girls affirm solidarity and commonality, expressing what has been called an 'egalitarian ethos.'" Sadly, this work has reinforced the image of girls' lives as idyllic, free of impulses toward unrestrained competition and desire.

It's not just girls who must learn to be comfortable with competition. Our culture stigmatizes assertive, professional women, casting them as cold, frigid bitches doomed to failure in their personal lives. I want to emphasize how this particular stereotype communicates to girls their worst fear: that to become assertive in any way will terminate their relationships and disqualify them from the primary social currency in their lives, tenderness and nurturing.

As we push girls harder and expect more, girlhood's codes will continue to divide them from one another. These codes have confused, shifting meanings. They are built on a second layer of truth hidden beneath a deceptive exterior. They leave girls ever suspicious of what is really being said and who will be branded next, leaving deep fissures of trust between them. "Someone can be a really good friend," an eighth grader told me, "but she won't be happy for you. She'll be jealous. It's not spoken, but you can feel it." Friendships are corroded in the silence that is a weak substitute for what must be expressed, for what is real and human and yet feels so sinful. Girlhood's stigma against competition and desire can never allow girls a healthy outlet for their feelings or the kind of straightforward truth telling to which every human being is entitled.

It would be nice to think we live in a time of cultural transition, of flux, of a world that is learning to give its girls equality in the ways it finds hardest. But by not socializing girls into healthy, supported acts of competition and desire, we consign them to a culture that refuses to put its money on the table and wager who and what it wants girls to be. We ask them to suffer the "tension when the ideals of womanhood and femininity are those of 'selflessness,' and the ideals of maturity and adulthood are those of separation and independence."
⁵⁵
Do we want to give girls the freedoms boys enjoy or don't we? If we as a culture haven't yet decided, girls most certainly have not. And if girls can never be sure who they are supposed to be, they will play out their (and our) anxieties on each other, policing themselves into the ground, punishing and bullying and fighting to know the answer for themselves.

Popularity, like trigonometry, was something I never quite grasped. It was like reaching under my bed to grab an errant shoe, willing my fingers to stretch out of their joints, feeling my fingertips closing in, and yet always coming up short. Sure, I had plenty of access, could count the popular girls as friends, sat at lunch and passed notes, went to parties. But there was something that separated us. It was unnamable, invisible, and yet utterly obvious. The knowledge sat in me like a sandbag. It followed me wherever I went. I was an addendum, an extra. What I wouldn't have given or done to be on the inside.

 

When Anne and I met one evening for drinks in Washington, I hadn't planned to talk about the day I stopped speaking to her over a decade before. Anne had been my best friend in the fifth grade, and our love for each other was irrepressible. We were frequent visitors to Mrs. Katz's time-out chair, where we nearly fainted choking silently on our laughter, squawking "Dead dogs! Dead dogs!" to get control. We named each other the Booger Twins, after the animated Wonder Twins. We passed notes marked with skull and crossbones, labeled "BBL" for "Booger Breath Lives."

Anne lived in Washington's Cleveland Park, and because of her I got to ride the subway for the first time. We spent nights in her huge bed listening to the Top Ten at Ten on the radio and days making bracelets with beaded safety pins bound with elastic. For a while that year she was like me, gingerly toeing the borders of the popular clique. Then, one day, without ceremony, she was swallowed inside.

By ninth grade, Anne, Rebecca, Sandy, and Julie were the powerful four. They were the usual: best dressed, prettiest, got the most guys. I hung out with them, as I had for the last four years. Rebecca and Anne both liked Geoffrey, a freckled, ginger-haired sophomore. One day, before the last bell, someone passed me a note. "Omigod!" it said. "Rebecca dumped Anne!"

That day, Rebecca had decided she didn't want to be friends with Anne anymore and over sandwiches and juice boxes had told her as much. Within minutes, the popular clique stopped speaking to Anne. And so did I.

I remember very little beyond that day. For a while Anne floated through the hallways, sallow and empty-eyed. Eventually, we saw her eating lunch or on the bus with other girls, unpopular, of course. By year's end, she and Rebecca had reconciled, but the lines connecting us were torn. The last time I saw her, she was cleaning out her locker. She never returned to school the next fall. Three years later, during my first week of college, I bumped into her seeking shade beneath a maple tree. It took years before we were able to talk for more than a few strained moments. Each time I saw her, I felt something curdle inside me. I remembered what happened the way I might wake from a dream in the night, in pieces that didn't fit together but still left me uneasy. Shortly after college, we both took jobs in politics and became friends. With enormous relief, I felt sure I had earned the right to let go of what I had done.

Now as adults, twenty-five years old, we were sipping drinks in an elegant D.C. lounge. So removed had I become, so fiercely had I clung to our present friendship, that I cheerfully summed up my project on girls and bullying without a single thought to our past. Anne played absently with the ashtray. "Remember ninth grade?" she asked. I froze in my chair. As she began talking, I pulled out my tape recorder. She nodded as I placed it on the table. I listened. Toward the end of her remembering, she said, "I just spent that whole year like a
wounded animal.
Like I just didn't know how to collect myself. It was so ... God. You just feel like you have no way to protect yourself. You feel like there's nobody there to help you. You feel like naked in a room filled with people pointing and laughing at you and nobody will hand you a blanket to cover yourself with. It's that feeling all the time, all this vulnerability. You don't have the tools at that age to pick yourself up and wipe yourself off."

There was a long silence. "You were part of it, too. You witnessed it," she said. She took a sip of her water and looked at me. "What do
you
think it was?"

It felt like someone had dropped an anchor in my stomach. How could I have done this? How could I, always the outsider, once a target—how could I have done this?

Easily.

 

When I pulled into the horseshoe-shaped driveway at Linden, Megan was hanging out with her friends. She waved and hopped in the back seat, followed by another girl, who slid in next to me. "Hey, I'm Taylor," she said. "Can I come, too? Cool music," she added, nodding to my Jill Scott CD.

We headed to Starbucks and grabbed a table. While they scoped out the other girls there, I got us a snack. Then Megan began to tell me her story.

In fifth grade, at her small Catholic school, Megan got into an exclusive clique for the first time. Though she loved being popular, it was hardly the paradise people made it out to be. It was work. "I always worried that they would do something without me," she said. "That I'd be left out. I wasn't like one of the main people. I wasn't the one that all the guys liked." She strove for the attention of Jackie, the queen of the grade. If she liked you, you would be safe. Apparently it had always been that way.

Megan paused. I knew she was here to talk with me about being a bully; she'd told me as much over e-mail. I stared at my coffee so she wouldn't feel self-conscious, wondering if like so many girls, Megan would clam up, deny what she had done, claim she'd forgotten, play dumb. "I was kind of like, the nice person, kind of. I wasn't really anything special," she said, beginning to backpedal.

"There was this one girl named Liane Chapin," she said, exhaling. The group had always thought she was kind of weird, and in fifth grade, Liane started acting like she was friends with their clique. "She was
such
a follower," Megan said. "She tried to be like us in every way." Liane copied them. It was annoying.

One day, hanging out after school, someone had an idea. What if they invented a rock band to see if Liane would act like she knew it, to see if she'd copy them to the point of lying? "So we were like, 'Liane, have you ever heard of Jawbreaker?' And she's like, 'Yeah!' And we were like, 'Really!'" It went from there. The girls wrote lyrics to songs, sang them in front of her, and snickered when Liane tried singing along. "She'd be like, 'Yeah, I heard that on the radio yesterday,' and we'd be like, 'Really?'"

It was a joke that never lost steam, and a genuine opportunity for Megan. She applied herself diligently, composing several songs. Jackie loved them. By year's end, Jawbreaker had an album's worth of material and a half-choreographed video. Megan was the closest she'd been to the inner circle. "It kind of made me feel like I had a more secure place in the group," Megan explained. "It made me feel like—when I would write the songs, they'd be like, 'Yeah, that's so funny!' It made me feel like, 'Wow, I can be mean, too, kind of.'"

It all felt easy, like the transition from ice skates to Rollerblades. People say you'll be good at it, but you never quite understand why until you feel yourself rolling forward. That's how being mean was. Plus, the girls never said an unkind word to Liane. To the contrary: "We acted nice to her. Like, we acted nice to her face, but we totally just like talked about her so much behind her back. We totally like destroyed her." It was easy to keep Liane hanging around because she had considered Megan a really good friend since the previous summer when they had gone to camp together, long before Megan had gotten really popular.

One day, for no good reason, Megan felt something within her catch as abruptly as a sweater on a nail. At her old school, Megan told me, her best friend, Anna, had used her as bait for the popular clique, abandoning and insulting her publicly. As she told me this, Megan was trying intently to fish ice out of her plastic cup with her straw. "It was so bad," she remembered quietly. She gave up on the ice and started chewing a cuticle. "It was horrible. I didn't have any friends. I would look in the mirror and, 'Oh, I'm just like an ugly person, inside and outside. I'm just disgusting.' Like nothing was shining." After recalling her own victimization, Megan said that being mean to Liane felt easy and hard at the same time. "We would be laughing at her, in her face, and, like, I'd be thinking this is exactly what Anna did to me, and I'm doing it to her right now."

But Jackie was the sun, and the other girls orbited around her, each maneuvering to move closer in. In the girls' bathroom, Megan and Jackie were fixing their hair. Megan glanced compulsively under the stalls and saw platforms belonging to Jenny, the second most popular, just as Jackie started berating her. Megan nodded and uh-huhed, glancing furtively at the platforms that stood still as stone. "I didn't make her stop," Megan explained, "because I knew Jenny was listening."

As Megan had predicted, the conversation triggered a six-month war between the girls, and the hostility never dissipated. Megan's silence led to a tectonic shift in their social universe. "Everyone was like, 'What happened?' And I was like, 'Oh, my God.' I could exaggerate however much I wanted. I was in the bathroom with Jackie and Jenny who were the most popular girls. That was really big." People Megan didn't even know approached her for information. "If you're involved in something," she told me, "you know what's going on and you're a part of it." Simple as that.

But the betrayals Megan witnessed and experienced have filled her with social anxiety. "I still feel this way," she said. "I'll get kind of like panic attacks. My personal thing is that everyone's talking about me, so when I see two people whispering, I'll just be like, I'll kind of read their lips and catch part of their conversation. People are talking about me. I hate it when people do things without me, and I'm like, 'Oh, I'm going to miss all these inside jokes, or they'll be talking about me.' We have another best friend, and whenever I miss going somewhere, I'm even like, 'Shit, I'm going to miss all these inside jokes.'"