Odd Girl Out (30 page)

Anyway, Haley told me, kicking her legs up and swinging us forward, Lucia was still a good friend.

"When?" Did I miss something?

"Sometimes, every Thursday after school, I stay till five and have dance class till six. So I stay for an hour and thirty minutes. Then we're friends." I sat quietly, unsure what to say, listening to us swing.

"Look," she said. "You have to make very sure you're not going to yell at them for no reason, and make a mistake."

"Why?" I asked.

And here was the real reason Haley was afraid to press the case. It was the thread of fear that runs through so many girls' relationships: the fear that conflict of any kind will result in relational loss. "Because then you would lose—they would be like, 'No, why are you doing this to me? Maybe I shouldn't be your friend.' So you could lose somebody."

"They can break you down," she explained, "until you're like, 'Oh, I shouldn't speak to anyone else. I should just curl up in the corner during recess and just not talk to anybody anymore.' Sometimes it makes you think you've got no friends even if you do. And it makes you hurt other people sometimes."

As Haley saw it, she had two choices: put up with the best she can get or speak up and lose everything. Hold on to the tatters of a relationship because it was preferable to no relationship at all. At ten, with her best friend Lucia, Haley was learning to settle for much, much less, and so to feel disposable and used. She was learning, as many girls do, to carve a tiny space for herself in this relationship—in this case ninety minutes a week during dance class—where she would tell herself that she was happy, that indeed this may be the most she deserves. And she would come to blame herself for the way she was being treated.

Haley would draw the line, she said, when Lucia was no longer nice in private. "I mean, I know she's always going to be a good friend to me and that I can talk to her. It's just the fact that when we're in class or..." She trailed off. "I don't know. I don't know."

Haley was still unsure. She veered between what she knew was true and what Lucia wanted her to believe. "Maybe she feels she spends too much time with me, and she needs to spend time with other people. I just don't wanna—I'm just—I'm just afraid—I don't want to try it—try risking a friendship outside. I'm just going to leave it because I've got other friends." She exhaled loudly, spluttering with frustration.

Like Haley, many girls describe their feelings in part-time friendships as simply "bad." There is a hint of resignation in their voices, a somber recognition that this is the way of their world. As Jessica told me, "Even though you feel like girls only want to be your friends for a few hours, they have to [do what it takes to] be popular."

 

the price of popularity

Some girls can't get popular unless they pay for it. Call it a dowry or hazing, a cover charge or a sacrificial offering of loyalty: however you look at it, sometimes a girl has to squash a friend to rise above the mortals. Girls told me two versions of this story: in the first, the supplicant, as I'll call her, publicly bullies her friend while she is nice to her in private. In the illustration to this story, I see the bully blowing on a single dandelion, her friend. Some wisps of friendship cling to the stem while others flutter to the ground, leaving parts of the core bald, bare, and struggling, yet still alive. In the second story, the target is offered up as booty to the popular clique, and the shroud of friendship falls away completely.

 

Now in her forties and living with her partner in the Northwest, Janet says her mind wanders often to the memory of Cheryl, her best and often only friend from third through eighth grade. Every day after school, the two girls talked on the phone or played together. They spent nights holding elaborate dance contests at each other's homes, which were only two blocks apart. In the winter, they ice-skated and drew maps of the sinewy streams that ran through their southern Illinois college town.

But when the homeroom bell rang, Janet never knew if Cheryl would be her friend. Cheryl wanted to be in the popular group, and Janet, short and awkward with thick glasses, was a liability. Cheryl was bigger and taller than Janet, a lightning-fast runner. At school, she always looked right in her clothes. Around the cool kids, Cheryl called Janet names and told her to get away. She nicknamed her "Bottle Eyes" and ordered the other girls to steal her glasses. She laughed the loudest while Janet, frightened and blinded, felt her way on bended knee along the black tar playground, searching for the school door. Whenever the cooler girls left Cheryl out, she would run back to Janet, who never protested.

Janet found comfort in academic success and relied on it to distract her through the rough days. Often the only one to raise her hand in class, Janet remembers a powerful intent to be good and do the right thing. Despite her success, Janet confided that "my doing better in school didn't count in my eyes that way. She dominated me. She wanted to be in control." When Cheryl asked Janet why she'd gotten a better grade on a test, Janet answered, "I think I'm more focused than you are." Cheryl teased her mercilessly about using the word "focused." In her junior high yearbook, Cheryl wrote, "To one of the dumbest people I know. Oh well, maybe you'll grow out of it. Your friend, Cheryl." Janet was crushed but remained silent.

Eventually, Cheryl's attacks moved beyond the perimeter of the school. Little was visible to others as she hollowed out the center of their friendship and filled it with meanness and hate. To anyone looking from the kitchen window into the backyard the girls were the picture of loving friendship, while outside on the grass Cheryl dominated Janet, demanding that she obey her every wish. The mur-mur behind Janet's door was the familiar hum of chattering girls, while on the rug Cheryl snarled that Janet's shoes were stupid and pushed her to wear her first bra, pantyhose, and other "cool" accessories. Janet was broken and quiet, attached to and abused by her only friend.

Today, in counseling, Janet feels certain that resolving her feelings about Cheryl will help her cope with lifelong feelings of low self-esteem. Not surprisingly, the hardest part has been renaming the friendship as the abuse that it truly was. "I'm still struggling to know that it was abusive," she told me. "At the time I thought there was something wrong with me, that I deserved this treatment. I thought of her as a real friend. I thought this is what friendship was. I'm still working on extracting myself from that point of view.

"I don't remember ever thinking she shouldn't be treating me like this, that this is not what a friend does. I really didn't know that," she said. "I took whatever friend was willing to play with me. When she was mean to me I thought I deserved it because somewhere down in there I believed I was a bad person who hurt people, so if someone was angry at me or hurting me, that was what I deserved."

As a child, Janet was sexually abused. Now, looking back, she sees shadows of her friendship with Cheryl in her experience as a survivor of sexual abuse. Both episodes, she told me, deprived her of power and control. "Someone has the right to do whatever they want to me and it doesn't occur to me to say no. There is the feeling that it must be right for this to happen to me just because someone else is doing it," she said.

Janet cannot explain why she endured Cheryl's treatment in the first place. "That's still a mystery to me." Thinking of Cheryl today, she remembers "a very vivid image of her looking at me, her eyes hard and slitted." Yet she also remembers a best friend that she loved.

Janet surrendered her version of reality to her tormentor. Her need to remain in the relationship became destructive as she steeled herself at the greatest costs to know this relationship as friendly. The impulse of some girls to cling to a damaged relationship at any cost demands our attention. Its link to the trials of bullying remains largely unexplored.

Elizabeth had no trouble telling me that Deirdre was no friend, that she ruined fifth and sixth grade. Elizabeth e-mailed me that she'd like to talk, so I called her one day in Indiana, where she was in graduate school for psychology. Elizabeth said she became an outcast in third grade, though it was really only the popular girls who disliked her. Although she had always been well-liked at summer camp and during afterschool activities, she became the main target at school. Every September, Elizabeth prayed for a new girl to come to school. "It was my only hope," she said, laughing ruefully. "Anytime there was a new girl in school I would try my damnedest to sit next to her and talk to her and get to her before they did, because then I might be able to prove that I was worthy of being her friend before she found out I wasn't cool to be friends with."

In sixth grade Elizabeth had her chance with Deirdre, who slid behind a desk next to Elizabeth on the first day. It was friends at first sight, and they had a blissful month of busy sleepovers and lunchtimes and recesses. On the day of the Oktoberfest festival, Deirdre signed up to sit at a table during lunch selling baked goods with two popular girls, and their friendship was over as quickly as it started.

"She must have realized she was jeopardizing any chance she had of being popular by hanging out with me," Elizabeth told me. "She found out it just wasn't cool. She began to realize this would not bode well for her future. All of a sudden, she just switched, like night and day, and she was in with the popular girls and torturing me. She became the ringleader of the girls who did this."

Deirdre carried out flashy demonstrations of cruelty to show off to her new friends. She pointed and laughed from the lunch table and insulted Elizabeth at recess, often using what she knew intimately of Elizabeth to sharpen her barbs. The popular girls circled Deirdre like the petals on a single flower, and Elizabeth watched, stunned and silent. She steeled herself at school, refusing to let the girls see her break down, and collapsed on the couch at home to cry to her mother every night. "I had no self-esteem. I didn't trust anybody. I cried myself to sleep most nights," she said.

Once she was safely ensconced in the folds of the clique, Deirdre let up, but their group's disdain vibrated around them like a force-field. By the time Elizabeth graduated eighth grade, she said, "I had a wall a mile thick around me. I was the most defensive little ball, no one could get into me. Everyone had hurt me. Everyone I had trusted had abandoned me and made me feel like shit. I would trust people and think they were my friends, and then they would turn around and stab me in the back." Elizabeth began viewing herself as her own twin, inventing stories about her other life to new kids in the neighborhood. "I thought that maybe if I didn't tell them anything about who I really was, they might like me."

Like many women I spoke with, Elizabeth is certain the experience permanently altered her development as a person. "I had always been mellow and easygoing and all of a sudden I was hostile and sarcastic and bitter," she said. I can almost see her shrugging resignedly through the phone. "I had never been that before." Today Elizabeth studies psychology in part to understand how she was changed and how, as she put it, "could someone do this? It's just so wrong. It just didn't work in my head. It didn't compute."

In high school, Elizabeth's sudden popularity shocked her. She was amazed that people could like her just for who she was. Nevertheless, she said drily, "I'm still reaping the benefits of all this." She has only now, in her late twenties, begun to reconnect with women. Elizabeth felt safer around guys because, as she put it—echoing countless women I spoke with—"there was no bullshit, there was no cattiness, there was no competitiveness, there was nothing." She attended a women's college to avoid fraternities, only then realizing how fearful she still was of other women. "I put myself at a distance. I wouldn't trust them right off the bat. I always felt like there was a hidden agenda." Even now she can never shake the feeling of being an "outsider, feeling like I will never truly belong and also feeling like not wanting to."

 

secrets and lies

The popularity race shines a harsh, relentless spotlight on its contenders, raising the stakes on everything they say and do, making every utterance and outfit subject to peer punishment, reward, or worse, indifference. A girl at Linden explained, "Girls are judging me every second, examining me and thinking if they want to be my friend or not." A classmate added, "You don't see girls for who they are. You see girls for what they wear, who they hang out with. It's a package." The feeling of constant scrutiny creates an unpredictable social landscape that frequently causes sudden changes in behavior, so that many girls become different people depending on who they're with.

Chloe Kaplan, a fifth grader at Sackler Day School, and I were hanging out one afternoon on her tall twin canopy bed, white ruffles and stuffed animals spilling out beneath us. The wall above her desk was plastered with gummy, curling magazine cutouts of *NSYNC and Backstreet Boys, and a wicker dresser was scattered with tubes of glitter cream and disks of lip gloss. We sat cross-legged, shoes off, facing each other and unwrapping sticks of bubble gum.

For a ten-year-old, Chloe had an astonishing grasp of the politics of popularity and betrayal. She learned the hard way. In the first weeks of third grade, Alisa had approached and asked to be best friends. Delighted, Chloe said yes. At the time, she told me, "I didn't have the most friends in the third grade and I was making as many friends as I could." Chloe and Alisa played and spent recess together every day, chatting, playing jacks, trading stickers, and—their favorite—having upside-down contests on the monkey bars.

Some months later, Chloe found out that Alisa had been making up lies about her and telling her secrets to the popular girls. Chloe said she felt "really bad. It was like if you write in a diary, and someone reads it and they tell their friends what was in it and they tell their friends." When you've trusted someone that way, it hurts a lot. Chloe was afraid to say anything about it, she said, because "most of the friends I had came from her. If I lost her, I lost the rest."