Odd Girl Out (31 page)

Two years later, Chloe was still sad and perplexed that someone who seemed to care for her so much could also coldly violate her trust. But in the time she'd had to think about it, she'd figured out a couple of things.

For one thing, Chloe said, she notices now that some girls can change themselves depending on whom they're with. When her mom, who's president of the PTA, takes her to ice-cream socials, there are popular girls there who "act totally different—like they've been friends with you for a long time," and when they see her at school, "act like they don't know you and don't care about you." She told me about a popular classmate who's cruel and critical in school, but at sleepaway camp becomes a "whole different person ... so much more nicer there."

The other thing, Chloe told me, is that she knows now that everything she did and said was being assessed and reported by Alisa. That it was, above all, currency to be traded with more popular girls. This year, she could sense the feeling of being judged following her around like a shadow, and it made her uncomfortable. The other girls watch and talk about everything: what she eats and wears, whom she plays with. "They care about everything but your personality," she said glumly. I asked what she meant. Well, she said, there was a girl in her class who wore capri pants with hearts and a matching shirt. "Everyone's gonna remember that," she explained, "because that's like baby and everything. Everyone will know that came from Kids 'R' Us. Everyone popular will be embarrassed to be her friend because they wear the updated clothes."

Chloe told me that fifth grade was a minefield: one misstep and you were done for. "If you do one stupid thing," she explained, "people will never forget that. Then they know you could not
ever
be a cool person. If you change, they don't realize it because they think of that stupid thing you did before." It's not worth it.

I asked her for an example of a "stupid thing."

"Like if you say a dumb comment," she said, blowing a bubble. "Such as?"

"Such as if we're out telling jokes in school and everything, and you make a stupid joke, like why did the chicken cross the road, when they're making mean jokes. Or we're all in music [class], and the teacher leaves the room, and everyone's like, 'Oh, that's a really stupid song,' and you're like, 'Some parts of it are nice,' and they're like, 'Well, we're all saying it's stupid and you're talking about it being nice.' And everyone will say that together.

"It's just weird," she explained, squeezing a Beanie Baby, "because the quieter you are, the better off you are, because no one's going to find out or have rumors about you or anything. And the quieter you are, no one's gonna find out who you like and everything. And then you're better off because you're quiet and no one's going to find anything out about you. You don't tell. So no rumors about you and they only think of you as a quiet, nice person."

She placed her palms in back of her and dropped her head back, staring at the ceiling. "It's like each girl has a file, and everything you wear—if you wear like one off thing—goes in it," she said. "They don't even care about you anymore. And they throw the file away."

Chloe told me that her best friend's duplicity had changed everything for her. At the moment her capacity for emotional intimacy was deepening, as she shared the first quiet feelings of her heart, she was betrayed. What she shared with Alisa was laid bare to be dissected and mocked by everyone else. She could no longer completely trust that a friend was a friend, even if she appeared that way.

 

There is a movement within feminism that believes the female orientation to relationship and connection—to nurturing and caregiving—gives women a uniquely wise approach to their world. Popularity, however, turns this phenomenon on its head. In the race to be cool, some girls transform friendship into a series of deals and calculations, using relationship as much to destroy as to build. Relationship is no longer simply an end; it is also a means. If popularity is a competition for relationships, getting ahead so- cially means new relationships must be targeted and formed, old ones dismissed and shed. Juliet, a ninth grader from Linden, explained why she and her two best friends used code names to describe the peers they ridiculed in fifth grade. "We wanted to be with our friends. We didn't want anybody to get in the way. We didn't want other people we didn't like hanging out with us. There were three of us and we knew so much about each other, and we didn't want that to break up or something. We didn't get pleasure out of making people feel bad. But we had to protect ourselves."

If girls' relationships are distinguished by secret telling and intimacy, the popularity seeker—or in girlspeak, the "wanna-be"—will use the accoutrements of relationship to her advantage. In a relational race, the winner will use intimacy as the mortar to wedge herself most tightly among the "right" people. She will communicate in words or actions that she can be depended on and trusted. To signal her loyalty, she may appear to abandon other relationships in her life; hence the mean-in-public, nice-in-private behavior. To shore up her position or edge out another girl, the wanna-be may have to minimize, even eliminate, the relationships of someone else; hence the tormenting and secret telling in the presence of popular girls. In the typically tangled parlance of a teenager, a Mississippi ninth grader explained, "A lot of people may really like Melissa, but maybe the person [a girl is] talking to doesn't like [her]. To keep friends with both of them, she talks bad to the one who doesn't like [Melissa]."

In friendship, girls share secrets to grow closer. Relational competitions corrupt this process, transforming secrets into social currency and, later, ammunition. These girls spread gossip: they tell other people's secrets. They spread rumors: they invent other people's secrets. They gain calculated access to each other using intimate information.

Despite their dreams of glory, plenty of wanna-bes still fear direct conflict. A girl who, like Plunkett of Tammany Hall, "seen her opportunities and took 'em" is equally likely to abandon her lower status friends without explanation. Rather than face an uncomfortable conflict where she has to announce her intention to move up and on, the wanna-be may assure her old friends that nothing at all is wrong; hence, Lucia's repeated assurances and Haley's feeling of craziness.

Girls bullied by their best or close friends often find themselves in these situations. Many parents have asked me to decipher the power these girls exercise over their daughters. The only answer I have is the one the girls give me: the bully controls her target by controlling her version of events. For instance, when Michelle protested Erin's behavior, Michelle was told that she was almost always wrong, that it really happened this way, or not at all. "She would always get mad," Michelle recalled. "If you were mad at her about something, she would turn it around so that it was your fault. It would always be my fault, my fault, my fault."

When I suggested to Natalie that she confront Reese, Natalie retorted, "When you talk to her, she'll tell you a different story, and she's going to have all these explanations that make sense to you!" For these girls, it feels easier to believe someone else's story rather than their own. If they can know themselves as at fault and in need of forgiveness, they can continue to believe in the relationship rather than feel that they have been cast out of the circle of friendship.

 

the truth about popularity

It may come as a surprise, but once a girl gets her coveted status, popularity is no walk in the park. Competition and insecurity are rampant. When popular girls talk about their social lives, many of them talk about losing themselves. Their feelings closely mirror the symptoms psychologists associate with girls' loss of self-esteem.

Corinna, a sixth grader, was devastated when she lost one of her close friends to the popular clique. The girl and her new friends would "talk and walk very close together, and if one of their other good friends said hi, they won't, they don't, they can't hear," she remembered. Corinna set out to be included in the popular group and eventually won her way in. Once she was the one excluding her other friends from the popular crowd, Corinna felt dislocated and strange. "I know that I am kind of excluding [my other less popular friends] and I don't want to do that. But I feel like it's literally a bubble or something, and you get sucked in and then when you go out and stuff, it's just like so weird." She paused. "It's like, you go in, it's like, all of this talk and I don't know what else. They talk about boys and all these things. They have inside jokes that I don't really get."

I asked what it felt like inside the bubble.

"It kind of feels good because I'm like included, but then again I know these aren't the best friends for me," she explained. Here Corinna echoes the observations of Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan: she has sacrificed her connection to her true feelings in order to remain in less authentic relationships with others.
⁶³
In the process, she becomes disconnected from herself.

"I belong but I don't belong," she continued. "I fit into a lot of groups but I'm not part of any group. I'm walking around alone at recess. Sometimes I feel like I have so many friends but sometimes I feel like I have none, and everyone likes me or maybe they're just being nice." And sometimes, she said later, "sometimes I'll get sad and go into a shell even though I'm a happy-go-lucky person."

At Linden, Alexis, an extremely popular freshman, confided how hard it can be to keep up with other girls. "You don't trust anyone. You're totally insecure. To everyone you look fine, but it's very fake." Her friend Sarah agreed. "Are you my friend because of me or because I know this guy? False friendships are kept up for image all the time."

Now a sophomore, Lily Carter told me, "It takes so much more effort to be a part of that group than not to because when you're in that group it's so intense. It's like every second of every day you have to be perfect. You need to be perfect, your makeup needs to be perfect, you need to be wearing the perfect clothes. Your whole presence needs to be perfect, the way people look at you, the way you look at yourself. You know, I mean, what you say, everything you say, how the guys treat you, everything has to
be perfect....
[The hardest part] is that you're not perfect. That you're not doing everything perfectly. And that one day, you're going to wake up and you're just not going to be popular. And you're not going to have those friends anymore."

The closer they edge toward the center of the clique, the more some girls are urged to silence their own authentic voices. A few spoke to me wistfully of wanting to appear less "hyper," while some mentioned friends who warned that boisterous play was inappropriate and unattractive. These girls feel like they are no longer entitled to "be myself."

 

Heathers
was the first in a string of movies depicting the clandestine politics of popular girl cliques. By the late 1990s, however, something had changed. A new fairy tale was being spun, and this time the prince was beside the point. In films like
She's All That
and
Cruel Intentions,
the romance was with popularity, the transformation of the girl from school geek to clique goddess. Popularity became so popular that it got its own show on the WB channel. In the film
Jawbreaker,
Courtney is part fairy godmother and mostly witch as she offers Fern the chance of a lifetime: "You're nothing. We're everything. You're the shadow, we're the sun. But I'm here to offer you something you never dared dream of. Something you were never meant to be. We're going to make you one of us. Beautiful and popular."

For better or worse, popularity is accepted by researchers and schools alike as a tool children use to group themselves socially. But the sheer volume of incidents of aggression spawned by the race for popularity deserves a closer investigation. Why is it so many of us are well trained to spot destructive images portraying girls as thin and beautiful, but we overlook the subtext of the race for popularity: that girls must be liked, even worshiped by their peers, often at the expense of authentic relationships? If some girls who want to be skinny starve themselves, some girls trying to be popular destroy one another. This makes popularity, and the race for it, as dangerous an issue for girls as weight, appearance, or sexuality.

When the politics of popularity devastate girls' relationships, the loss is multilayered. A girl is abandoned by someone she loves and trusts. The loss signals her low social value, an event that shrinks her self-esteem and for which she blames herself. She learns a new, dark understanding of relationship as a tool. And where the abandonment is public and followed by cruelty, there is public scorn and shame. For the newly popular girl, there is the danger of losing herself as she moves on and up into the "bubble."

The rules of popularity require that the girl who has arrived police herself as harshly as others do to maintain her status. The myth that popular girls are blissfully content couldn't be more wrong. The closer you get to the epicenter of popularity, the more perilous it gets. "Even though it looks secure, it's the most insecure thing in the world," Erin told me. "Everything changes in there. You compete with those five people every day: who does things first, who looks the best. It's hard and competitive. There's so much insecurity and fighting because you're selfish."

Lounging in a circle, sixteen eighth-grade girls were speaking informally with me about the feeling of being judged by others. Leslie, lying on her back, head propped up under clasped hands, had had it with me. I could tell. If her brown eyes rolled any higher they would disappear. She rocked her body up, exasperated. "Look, we can't stop talking about each other, okay?" she said. "We're addicted! As soon as we walk out of this room we're going to talk about what everyone said."

Bronwyn, a popular girl who had been sitting quietly for thirty minutes, finally raised her hand. "I just wish that people wouldn't judge each other, saying this person's not good enough. I hang around some people who just sit there and make fun of what people wear. I sit there and listen to it because I consider them my friends, but it bothers me. If they talk about other people, what are they saying about me?"