Odd Girl Out (26 page)

Taylor, who was nodding gently throughout her friend's interview, described the surprise party she and Monica threw Megan last month. Taylor had been stealthy in the planning, and the day before the party, she'd tried to plot details with Monica during soccer practice. When Megan approached, the two girls stopped talking. Megan stood frozen watching them, then ran to the locker room, got her things, and went home. "I was sobbing. I had a panic attack. I was like, 'Oh my God, I don't have any friends.'" Taylor smiled sheepishly at her friend and rolled her eyes.

 

In a social world where anger explodes unannounced, anxiety is the norm and security a luxury. For Megan, the sudden, inexplicable abandonment of her best friend taught her that people and feelings are not always what they seem. Never knowing for sure if she was truly liked by others made the need to exclude someone else a fact of life. "I guess I wanted someone else to feel bad," she said simply.

It's often said that one girl alone is rarely a problem, but get two or three together and they're different creatures entirely. Because girls often aggress as a group, exclusion and its cruel trappings can be a perversely good opportunity for secure companionship. An odd girl out is undeniably so; her exclusion is made possible by the banding together of many. When it happens, all bets are off and the borders are unpatrolled. Anyone with guts can make a run for status and acceptance by attacking the designated target. For Megan, writing songs and positioning herself in the middle of a fight were chances to stand out. They were a way in and a step up. They may have been fleeting opportunities, but they felt very real and very safe.

But if the gratification is as temporary as it is cruel, it begs the question: What takes someone over when she surrenders to these impulses? What did I stand to gain when I turned my back on Anne and left her to wither?

If I had to name one trait many girl bullies and targets share, I'd say that both draw a potent mix of power and security from the close relationships in their lives. And they are terrified of being alone. When the dark cloud of relational instability dominates girls'
everyday
social worlds, the threat of isolation hangs over them. For some, it is a gripping fear; for others, an emotional white noise. It's true that popularity is a gravitational force, inexorably pulling girls into behaviors that in a normal world would seem outrageous. But in some cases, the ambition for popularity may be secondary, even beside the point. The girls I met described an equally powerful drive to avoid the desolation of solitude.

Solitude, after all, undermines the essence of the girl identity. Girls know we expect them to be sociable creatures, to be in nurturing relationships, especially with other girls. The constant sense that isolation is imminent and the ground unsettled can make girls feel desperate. Without the luxury of social security, a girl will do anything to survive at school—whatever will get her through the homeroom, the lunch hour, the hallway. Acts of exclusion in these instances assure a girl that she is acting as part of a group and won't be the one left behind.

Indeed, some girls describe a kind of exhilaration derived from excluding one of their own, which bears a disturbing similarity to the joy of close friendship. Michelle, profiled in chapter three, described the mesmerizing hold Erin had on her when they first met. Erin was like "a drug almost.... She says everything that you want her to say and she acts like she's such a good friend and acts like you're the best thing ever to happen to her, and you're kind of excited because you're like insecure and you're her everything. That's what people generally want to be. They want to be important to somebody else."

Later, Michelle explained her clique's retaliation against Erin in nearly identical terms. "It was amazing to be able to let it go when everybody else was, so you weren't by yourself. It was like you had control over her, which was just like the best feeling." She added, "I know that it had to do with having a sense of power that I'd never felt before.... I think it was mostly just like, nobody can get mad at me for something. I was the good friend. I wasn't the problem.... I have everything that she thought she had. It was just like a sense of empowerment. I didn't need anybody, like I had everything I needed."

Both of Michelle's accounts emphasize the rush she felt when her connections to others seemed unbreakable, when the specter of isolation was at bay. In these moments, friendship feels pure, unthreatened, and free of insecurity.

 

musical chairs

Lisa was early, in time to watch me spill coffee on myself jiggering the key in the door to the room where we'd planned to meet. Athletic and dark-eyed, with a ponytail of raven hair that curled and frayed at the ends, she watched me quietly from beneath a thick arc of bangs. As we sat down to chat in a parlor on her college campus, her words were as spare and sharp as her looks.

Lisa spent her first three years in school as the girl everyone pretended not to see. From the first days of kindergarten at a small Catholic school in New Jersey, she was alone on the playground. At recess she would tarry behind a large metal box and stare at her reflection, holding her coat at different angles. "If my coat touched the ground," she recalled to me, "I would be a princess, but if it didn't, I wasn't. That was my whole world. I was either a princess or nothing." Through the end of second grade, Lisa would go home after school and cry in her room. She performed poorly in class, and teachers warned her parents of possible developmental delays.

Lisa convinced her parents to transfer her to a public school, where she got straight A's and found social respite. Two years later, she moved on to a large middle school, a feeder for several area public elementaries. Barely a day passed before Lisa's stomach tightened in that familiar knot. "I saw the same stuff happening. Girls being mean to other girls. But this time," she said evenly, eyes fixed on me, "I was going to be the one to be mean."

Lisa met Karen the second week, when she successfully faked needing a tissue to pass Karen a note from Jason. Karen smiled gratefully and passed her a note. It said, "Thanks! What school are you from?" with a smiley face and bubble letters. When the girls sat together that day at lunch, it was clear Karen had been popular at her old school. You couldn't deny the special electricity she gave off. Lisa felt an uncomfortable sense of—what was it? luck? guilty pleasure?—whenever they were together.

"I always thought she was cooler than me, and being mean was something we did together," Lisa told me. "It made us better than everyone else." The girls filled their lunches and study halls with notes, gossip, giggling, and furtive glances at other girls. They started the We All Hate Vicki Club, drafted a petition, and convinced the whole school to sign it. The chubby girl in chorus was next; they wrote a song about how she was fat and unloved, called her a prostitute, wouldn't look at her while she sang. The girl didn't come back to school after spring break.

For Lisa, meanness was as much a part of middle school as meals and morning announcements, as basic and oppressive as the stale air and annoying tick of classroom clocks. Yet Lisa clung to Karen by gossamer threads at best. She could bet everything that others were talking about her, too. The constant hum of under-the-breath remarks and whispers and notes and nasty looks swirled together and filled the air around them. Even if she stopped being mean, it was clear there would always be someone to slide into her place. As Lisa explained, "Maybe there were twenty girls in the class, and all of them would be talking about each other behind their backs. Because you sort of felt like everyone was your friend, but if everyone else was like you, they were talking about you because you were talking about them. It was just terrible. I remember feeling terrible all the time. Because I knew my friends were talking about me, and I was talking about them."

The constant manipulation and ganging up, the uneasy sense that no one was who she seemed or said she was, was dizzying. In her frenzy of betrayal and insincerity, Lisa constantly wondered who her real friends were and at times, if she had any at all.

Meanness was Lisa's social amulet. Still, she said, "the only thing I wanted was for somebody to be my friend. Someone I could depend on. And there wasn't anyone like that." In spite of her efforts, her relationships felt increasingly unsteady. "It was a time," she explained, "when I didn't really feel like I had anybody except the girls that I was being mean to someone else with." She couldn't win. No matter what, "I always thought there was something wrong with me. I felt like a bad person. I was either a dork for being the target or a mean, horrible bitch for being the bully." And anyone could beat up the dork. Her mother had begged her not to be the girl who bullied. "But I couldn't do that," she said simply. "I didn't want to be the dork."

When she graduated eighth grade, Lisa felt worn and beaten. She was convinced she was, as she put it, "a dork and a loser and a bitch." As a joke, her class voted her most likely to become a nun, but she was crushed by the prude label.

Two years later it all began again. When she'd turned down some boys who asked her out, they called her a lesbian. News spread, and Lisa felt her sorrow relapse. She found solace in writing poetry and was asked that spring to read an original piece at assembly. The next day, she was pegged a feminist, at her school the equivalent of being a lesbian. It was the last poem she wrote.

Today, Lisa describes herself as "really defensive. It's made me not willing to share myself with other people. It's made me hard to become friends with." Her first year at college, most people called her "Ice Queen" because she never told anyone anything about herself. At the end of freshman year, she met someone who encouraged her to trust others: her boyfriend. "I hate to say that," she told me. "It isn't true that it was him who saved me. It was me that saved me. He loved me for who I am and it didn't matter that in school I was a bitch or a dork. I am who I am now."

***

There is a kind of musical-chairs quality to Lisa's middle-school ex- perience. Winners and losers are easily interchangeable, and for no compelling reason. Some women and girls I spoke with described weeks when they were the odd girl out, only to be on top the following week when it was someone else's turn. "It was all about having somebody be 'out,'" Maggie recalled. "If there were three of you hanging out, two of you would make a plan to 'go off' and just have inside jokes and tease the other person and just make them feel bad." Just who rotates into the odd-girl position is arbitrary. As one guidance counselor remarked to me, "The same girls who are ostensibly the doers will be in here crying about what others are doing to them."

Lisa's story is about the intense hunger for retaliation. The desire to take an eye for an eye is a common fantasy for many victimized girls. "For all the times I'd been excluded and cried, I wanted her to know what it felt like to cry," Emily, a ninth grader, told me. "I was so angry at this person. I got joy from seeing her upset because she had gotten joy from seeing me upset." Said sixth-grader Jessica: "I want to get back at them. I want them to experience what it's like not being wanted." Again, the punishment envisioned is isolation and the loss of human connection.

Research indicates that girls who are victimized are significantly more likely to become bullies themselves.
⁵⁶
Indeed, memories of being the odd girl out figured prominently in the stories of girls willing to identify themselves to me as bullies or mean.
⁵⁷
Like Lisa, these girls framed their behavior in terms of avoiding injury and maximizing security. In other words, they bullied because they felt threatened, because in their minds there was no other choice.

 

memories of betrayal

It was Thursday, and Kathy Liu had forgotten about our interview. Again. Clearly she had me on her to-do list between "alphabetize canned foods" and "start stamp collection." I took this as a good sign.

When she finally answered the door to her Washington home, she was clutching tissues and wearing flannels. Aha, I thought. Too sick to ditch me. Kathy let me in, smiling and apologizing. A senior at Georgetown University, she was living in what can best be described as a girl frat house. Indie movie posters plastered the walls. I'd like to say the carpet was once green, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. It was furry, an inadvertent shag, closer to brown now. The kitchen was gnarled with hanging rusted pots and piles of bottles and dishes and spice jars. An errant Hoyas sweatshirt was draped on an easy chair that was leaking stuffing. "Sorry about the mess," she said sheepishly. "Oh no!" I told her, remembering my apartment in college, "I feel right at home."

A first-generation Korean American, Kathy was twenty-three. "So," she said, raising an eyebrow. "Do I get to quit school if I make it into your book? Make lots of money?" We laughed. She pulled out a cigarette.

Kathy grew up in South Carolina. Her parents, Korean-born, emigrated to New York following their wedding. Kathy's father was accepted to study engineering in South Carolina and upon graduation was hired locally.

Theirs was the only Asian family in the small community, and they were among the first Asians many there had ever seen. At age three and four in the grocery store with her mother, Kathy noticed the pointing fingers, eyes pulling back, nudging elbows, and whispering. By middle school, people saw no problem with making "chink" jokes in her presence. She was even nicknamed Suzy Wan at school. In the hallways, she was often trailed by high-pitched "ching chong" noises. Most people, including her friends, thought this was hilarious.

Kathy did not. Fitting in meant everything to her. She felt something was wrong with her, that she looked funny and wasn't normal. She loved going over to friends' houses and begged her mom not to cook Korean food when her friends were around. They thought the kitchen smelled funny, that the food looked weird. She hated it. Kathy was stylish and cute, able to wear, as she put it, the "right brands." She spent a great deal of time on her hair and makeup (no small expenditure in the late-1980s South). She was second-tier popular, B-level: a hair's breadth from the top. In other words, she had potential.