The Girls from Ames (20 page)

In the days after the intervention, Sally says she felt the need to take an honest look at who she was. That soul-searching process turned out to be a gift she gave to herself. “It was a moment of self-definition for me, and it was good because it made me more assertive,” she says. “I realized that although I sometimes made mistakes, I was pretty happy with the person I had become and didn’t feel the need to change for anyone. It was wonderful and comfortable and a huge relief to come to that realization. It helped me gain confidence.”

Just sixteen years old, Sally was able to look maturely at some underlying reasons for the other girls’ behavior. She thought through why some of the other girls had turned on her and decided that perhaps they envied her relationship with Cathy, because they wanted to be closer to Cathy themselves. She concluded: “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m not going to question myself. I’m going to try to be resilient. I have other friends, and I can fit in with a lot of people, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

As an adult, she looks back with appreciation. “The intervention allowed me to get to know a lot of other girls I never would have spent time with if that had not happened. And I was able to go off to college with a pretty good sense of who I was.”

 

 

T
here are some old photos being passed around here at the reunion that do not include Sally. They are physical reminders of the period when she was out of the group.

By the time high school was over, however, the girls all found themselves concluding that they wanted Sally around. She had remained close with Cathy, of course, and she inched her way back toward the others after they invited her along to parties or got together with her to do homework. She’d also see Karla, Karen, Cathy and Jenny on the days she worked at Boyd’s, scooping ice cream, so that kept them connected.

Some of the photos the girls brought to the reunion show the other ten girls sitting together at the Ames High graduation, or embracing each other after the ceremony, all smiles. Sally isn’t in any of these photos. The girls did invite Sally to sit with them at the ceremony. She considered joining them—it would have felt good to be with them—but in the end she chose to sit with her other friends that day. “Maybe I went with my other friends because I felt they had always been loyal to me,” Sally says now. “Maybe it was payback for the intervention.”

Because the girls could never bring themselves to discuss what happened that night at Cathy’s, it remained an unresolved regret. Even after Jenny was in her forties, it weighed on her that she thought she had never adequately apologized to Sally. So she sent her an email asking for forgiveness. “What we did was rude and cruel and petty and high-schoolish,” she wrote. “I feel really horrible about it.” She said she liked to think that they were not mean girls back then, but she acknowledged that what they’d done that night was mean and awful.

“Your apology is accepted,” Sally wrote back. “I haven’t forgotten about it. But I forgave you all a long time ago. It was a painful time for me, but I learned a lot from that. And I think it has made me a better mother and a better teacher.”

(Recently, Jenny was surprised to come upon notes of apology that she had written to Sally back in high school. She hadn’t remembered these attempts to say how sorry she was after the intervention, and was glad to discover that her younger self had recognized her mistakes and taken the initiative.)

Now that the girls have begun talking about the intervention as adults, Sally says, “I’ve received some beautiful apologies from some of the others, too. They are nice, but not necessary. All of us behaved badly or said things we shouldn’t have at one time or another, but we all seem to be forgiving people. That’s probably one reason our friendship has survived for so many years.”

Looking back, the girls want to believe that they weren’t as hard-hearted as it seemed. They really did have Sally’s interests at heart, they say, and in their own clueless teenaged way, they were just trying to offer Sally tips for overcoming her shyness and being cooler around boys. “I’d like to think that if anyone else had said these things about Sally, that we would have gone to her defense in a heartbeat,” says Karen. It was like the dynamics within a family; family members can criticize one another, but no one else can.

Cathy says the incident was character-building for some of the girls. “In my case, it helped me learn that I have to let people take care of themselves.” Now, as an adult living in California, Cathy has noticed that she continues to follow a pattern in which she becomes a protector and supporter of certain friends. “I used to always have a friend who I’d bring along with me, and there were people who didn’t warm up to her right away. I would have to convince them how great she was.” She says the Ames girls remained that group of eleven after high school because of Sally’s maturity: “We’re all still together because of the kind of person Sally is. She was able to see what happened for what it was: stupid-girl nitpicking.”

Sally has clear memories of who said what in Cathy’s basement—“when people say nasty things to you, you always remember,” she says—but she’s now grateful for it on other fronts, too.

Memories of the incident have led her to strive to instill self-confidence in her two daughters. She’s proud that both of them aren’t clingy with their friends. Meanwhile, as a teacher, she is hyperaware of mean-girl tendencies. In her fifth-grade classes over the years, there have been “cool” cliques—girls who pay more attention to how they dress or girls who have a more sophisticated sense of how to flirt with the boys. These groups have sometimes excluded other girls in the class, who are a bit slower socially. Sally sometimes thinks it’s just that the slower groups aren’t yet ready to be preteens; they want to be children for a while longer.

Sally once saw a girl get booted from a clique in the wake of an argument. Sally was impressed with how the ostracized girl responded: She had enough self-awareness and self-esteem not to fall apart over what happened. And eventually, she found her way back into the group. Sally was proud of her. “She reminded me of me.”

Back in Ames, Sally’s mother knows that the Ames girls are all middle-aged women now, and she appreciates that they have supported and loved Sally for decades. But she has never forgotten that night Sally came home from Cathy’s house in tears, and how her heart ached for her daughter. “I think the girls now recognize that what they did, well, they shouldn’t have done it. That’s all. They shouldn’t have done it.”

 

 

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here was another episode in the girls’ pre-adult lives that offered insights into how they carried themselves, and how others perceived them. It was the infamous graduation-cake incident.

The night they graduated from high school, the girls gathered for a sleepover party at Cathy’s house. Her mom had ordered a cake from the local supermarket’s bakery, and the frosting on it was supposed to read “Congratulations S Sisters!” The “S,” of course, was an inside joke, because kids in school called them “The Shit Sisters.”

Cathy’s dad picked up the cake, brought it home, opened the box, and no one could believe what was inside. Someone at the supermarket bakery had written “SHIT SISTERS SUCK!” in large letters on the cake. Even worse, all over the cake were giant gobs of brown frosting. With its base of white icing, the cake resembled a snow-covered field after a pack of dogs had stopped by to leave their droppings everywhere. There were pretty flowers made of pink and green icing all over the cake, but each flower was topped with a gross brown glob. It was a cake you wouldn’t want to eat.

The girls were more amused than upset—Karla immediately took a photo of the cake for her scrapbook—but Cathy’s father was livid. The girls had never seen him so mad. This purposely disfigured expletive cake just set him off. “Let’s go, girls!” he said, and Karla, Kelly, Cathy and a few of the others piled into his Ford LTD and sped with him back to the supermarket. He confronted the store manager, who was stunned and apologetic. The manager vowed to mount a full investigation of his entire bakery staff. If there were fingerprints on the brown frosting container, he’d find them.

The girls knew, of course, that some people didn’t like their little clique. Several times, Jenny’s car wouldn’t start because other kids had put sugar in her gas tank. Some of the girls’ houses got egged by male classmates angry at them for dating those boys from nearby Marshalltown. And once “Shit Sisters” was spray-painted on the steps leading into Cathy’s house.

But who at that supermarket would want to ruin their cake?

Suspicion immediately fell on deli employee Nancy Derks, a fellow graduating Ames High senior. Nancy, who hung out with the female jocks at the school, considered the “Shits” as a group to be prissy, looks-focused, boy-teasing conformists. At the same time, however, she was neutral about most of the girls individually. In fact, she admired some of them. Now living on a farm in Stanhope, Iowa, and working in marketing at a meat-processing plant, she hasn’t seen any of the girls since high school. But she says she had no issues with Marilyn (“She was really smart and had her own mind”) or Sheila (“very bubbly”) or Sally (“I remember her as Cathy’s sidekick, and she was nice”). She was friends with Kelly in junior high and recalls her as a good athlete. In fact, she was OK with most of the girls. It was just that as a clique, they completely annoyed her.

At the supermarket, the deli section was adjacent to the bakery section, and Nancy had a friend from Ames High who worked in the bakery. This girl also was no fan of the S Sisters, and when she arrived at work on the afternoon of graduation, she saw that the cake had been baked and frosted earlier in the day. She called Nancy over from the deli section. From the moment they saw that cake, they knew they had to defile it. “It was just too tempting,” Nancy now says. They took out the frosting and turned “Congratulations S Sisters” into “SHIT SISTERS SUCK.” Once that was accomplished, adding the brown globs seemed like adding appropriate punctuation points.

After they were finished ruining the cake, they stapled shut the lid to the box a couple dozen times, so whoever came to pick it up wouldn’t bother to open it at the store. Sure enough, it remained unopened until Cathy’s dad got the box home.

Nancy and her friend were long gone from the supermarket by the time Cathy’s dad and the girls showed up to complain. But the manager soon figured out that Nancy and her friend were likely suspects and he called them in. He told them that if they didn’t confess, he’d hire a handwriting analyst to determine who wrote “SHIT SISTERS SUCK!” in frosting. He worried that Cathy’s father could sue for defamation of character. He told Nancy he had called the cops, and that she needed to go down to the police station to confess before things got even worse for her.

Nancy did as she was told, and the police officer seemed intrigued by the whole escapade. It was the first cake caper of his career, and he said he appreciated that she had owned up to it. “Could you really have done a handwriting analysis on the frosting?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. “You wrote in block letters. So we couldn’t have analyzed it. That’s why we’re glad you confessed.”

Nancy was charged with criminal mischief, had to pay a $50 fine, and was fired from her job at the supermarket, which she had held for three years. The manager fired her over the phone. Her friend, however, was fired in person, and the manager yelled so loudly that every shopper in the store heard him. (That helped news of the defiled cake to spread around Ames.)

When Sally’s mother learned about the defaced cake, she assumed the Ames girls had been unkind to the culprits. Given what had happened to Sally that night in Cathy’s basement, she thought to herself: “People wouldn’t just write something like that on a cake unless they’d been hurt in some way.”

But actually, Nancy Derks says, the girls hadn’t been mean to her or to anyone else she knew. It was just that some girls at Ames High were put off by their friendship, by the sometimes haughty way they carried themselves, by the way they interacted—by their whole mini-sorority-like sisterhood. In truth, of course, some girls just envied the bonds between them.

Through the years, Nancy has told friends the story about the cake, the frosting/handwriting analysis threat, and her confession to the police. People find it amusing. She has no regrets about her decision to find that brown frosting and squish it into globs on that graduation cake. “I’d do it again,” she says.

Almost thirty years later, the girls can now look at the photo of that graduation cake in Karla’s scrapbook and see it as a kind of badge of honor—proof that they didn’t go unnoticed in Ames. But they also know that the “Shit Sisters” cake photo is a reminder of how others sometimes perceived them and how they weren’t always their best selves, whether to the wider world or to each other.

F
BB.

What was FBB, anyway?

Here at the North Carolina reunion, Jenny has brought letters from Sheila and Karla, written decades ago, and FBB is scrawled on more than a few of them.

“Fabulous Best Buddies. That’s what it meant,” says Jenny.

“You’re so polished now,” Karla says. “Maybe that’s what we’d like it to be. That’s not what it was.”

FBB?

“It was farts, burps and boobs,” says Karla.

Of course. It was like a secret code for the Sisterhood of Unladylike Behavior. If the girls were in only each other’s company, with no boys around, it was no big deal to release the F, to summon up the first B, and to obsess about the second B.

When some of the girls reached their twenties, FBB became their shorthand reference. Scribbled in the margin of a letter, it was a nod to the good old days when immaturity was one of the bonds of their friendship—when fabulous best buddies could enjoy their bodily functions without blushing. In their memories, FBB suggested that very little was off-limits between them.