Odd Girl Out (8 page)

Not getting to find out why someone's mad often has the unfortunate effect of making targeted girls believe that whatever's gone wrong is surely their fault—if only they could deduce the unwritten rule they broke. Already prone to self-dissection, girls are only too willing to take up the challenge. Filled with dread, seeking some measure of control, they search for the mistake they're sure they made. In this way, the simple act of silence or a nasty look can take on a life of its own, continuing well beyond the moment it is shared.

To the aggressor, the silent treatment can be a quick, easy path around a direct confrontation. Putting it simply, a girl at Marymount remarked, "If you don't tell someone why you're mad, you can't get a rebuttal. You win." Girls on the receiving end will usually persist, begging for an explanation. But "when they come around, you just walk away," reported one girl. That's hard, her classmate explained, because if you're on the receiving end "you can try to tell them, try to say you're sorry, and they won't listen or solve the problem."

When confronted, girls often deny that they are angry, even as they project the opposite. Most women remember uncomfortably approaching a friend with the question, "Are you mad at me?" only to get a brusque or even cheery "No!" followed by a quick exit. The supplicant has to take the girl at her word, but she knows the score. As one ninth grader explained, "Last week, I asked my friend why she was mad—I had no idea why—and she said, 'I'm not mad at you.' Right then I knew she was mad at me." To survive in the social jungle, friends learn to doubt what they see and hear and instead search for a second layer of real feeling beneath a false exterior, a quality that comes to dominate girls' interactions.

Mean looks and the silent treatment are the ultimate undercover aggression. The least visible of the alternative aggressions, nonverbal gesturing slips easily beneath teacher radar, allowing girls to remain "good girls." Debbi Canter, a sixth-grade teacher in Ridgewood, said, "I see those looks flying around the room. I call them on it. And they look at me with those big, innocent eyes. 'What are you talking about?'" Indeed, some teachers justify their hands-off attitude toward girls' aggression because they can't confirm it. Middle-school assistant principal Pam Bank explained, "If I see a boy tapping his pen, I'll say, 'Stop that tapping.' But if I see a girl giving another girl the evil eye, I might say, 'Eyes on me.' I knew the boy was thumping on his pen, but I might not know for sure what the girl was doing."

Girls understand the futility of exposing nonverbal gesturing. Maggie, a Ridgewood sixth grader, said, "Teachers, most of the time, they're like, 'Don't worry, it will be okay, just ignore them.' But it's hard to ignore them. If they do it on purpose and they're right in front of you and they do something to make you really mad, it's hard to ignore them. And it hurts your feelings." Her classmate Emily told me, "If they're whispering, the teacher thinks it's going to be all right because they're not hitting people. She might think they're not hurting her, but if they're punching she might get on them and send them to the office." Kenni added, "Most teachers think, 'Oh, well, she's not hurting you. Don't worry about it.' But really they are hurting you. They're hurting your feelings."

In a social world where anger is not spoken, reading body language becomes an important way for girls to know each others' feelings. Yet the practice can have grave consequences. Bodies at rest are always in motion: no matter how hard a girl tries, it's impossible to be in conscious charge of every move she makes. Misunderstandings happen all the time. A girl passes her friend in the hallway, and her friend doesn't say hello. The girl is certain her friend is angry. Actually, the friend was deep in thought and never even saw the girl. It doesn't matter: a fight begins.

"People look at you and don't mean to, and you think something bad, and it starts something," a Mississippi freshman said. "If girls were more like guys and came out and said what they thought, a lot of stuff wouldn't get started." A Sackler sixth grader remarked, "If you, like, ignore me and don't talk to me so I don't know what's wrong, then maybe I'll turn against you."

Confusing body language can indeed lead to confrontations, albeit bewildering ones. Sixth grader Reena told me, "Last year, in my English class, there was this girl, and I wasn't that good friends with her, but one night she called me up and said, 'You've been mean to me and I want an apology.' And I didn't know what she was talking about because I never really was friends with her so I just said I apologized to her but I never really knew what it was for."

Silence deepens conflict intensity, as each side wonders what the other is thinking. As is often the case when girls avoid confrontations, there may be a long list of possible reasons and past squabbles to plumb. "You each have different ideas about what's going on," a sixth grader at Arden explained. "When you finally do talk, it's worse than when it started."

 

intimate enemies

Eyes frozen wide in horror, Veronica is gaping at the corpse of her best friend, whom she has handed a now-empty Drano cocktail.

"I just killed my best friend!" gasps the heroine of the film
Heathers.

"And your worst enemy," purrs her accomplice boyfriend.

"Same difference," she moans.

The word
bully
evokes the image of an enemy, not an intimate, and yet it is often the closest girlfriends who are caught in protracted episodes of emotional abuse. The meanness can unfold secretly under a cover of intimacy and play. Young and ignorant of the signs of relationship abuse, targets struggle to reconcile their circumstances with what they have learned about friendship. Aggressors tend to be equally unaware that their "possessiveness" or "bossiness" is crossing a line. To the contrary, they are often deeply attached to their targets. In the course of these relationships, both target and aggressor often assimilate their behaviors into their concept of friendship. These stories of girl bullying are seldom told. They are a singular alchemy of love and fear, and they defy many of our assumptions about female friendship.

 

VANESSA'S STORY

Even in the first grade, Vanessa recalled, Stacy was popular and funny. Vanessa was instantly awed by her, and when Stacy asked her to be best friends, she was overjoyed to become part of her clique. Throughout elementary school, Vanessa would relish her status, and especially her power over Nicki and Zoe, who let Vanessa be second-in-command to Stacy. Not long after they became friends, Stacy started asking Vanessa to do things for her. At first, Vanessa felt important when Stacy singled her out, saying she'd like Vanessa if she did whatever it was she wanted at the time. Stacy seemed to leave Nicki and Zoe alone.

"I was very attracted to that," Vanessa, now twenty-seven, told me. Under this arrangement, Vanessa could look tough and still allow herself to be controlled. "I was an insecure kid, but I was confident on the outside," she explained. "And I wanted to be accepted by her, to be her. I wanted to be her second, you know. I wanted to be her right-hand girl."

One night during their frequent sleepovers, when they were nine, Stacy asked Vanessa if they could play dress-up. "I'll be the man, and you'll be the woman," she told Vanessa. That night Stacy kissed Vanessa, and Vanessa enjoyed it. Their sleepovers always included some dress-up for a while after that, and they never told anyone about the game.

In fifth grade, dress-up stopped. The game was never mentioned again, though Vanessa didn't forget about it. The memory became hers instead of theirs; for Vanessa it was strange to have a secret that only she thought about.

That year, Stacy's popularity skyrocketed. Not only was she the first girl in the grade to get MTV, but her parents were cool and let her and her friends eat junk food whenever they wanted. Stacy had the best bike, too. Over at her house, Vanessa told me, "We'd make crank calls. She was always really good and really vicious, and she knew exactly what to do to get the person really upset."

Most of all, though, Stacy was fun, and she had a lot of it by controlling her friends. "She had this way with the other girls," Vanessa recalled. "In a minute, she could make them do anything she wanted. She was the one who always had crushes on boys, and she would tell her friends to go up and tell them something so she didn't have to do anything." She made Vanessa steal candy for her from a local store. "Of course I did it," Vanessa said. "All I wanted to do was make her happy. And of course there was the underlying fear of being rejected by her."

One day, on the bus to school in sixth grade, Vanessa mentioned their old dress-up game. Stacy stared darkly at Vanessa. "What are you talking about?" she snapped. Vanessa stiffened as she watched Stacy turn away.

"Was she afraid?" Vanessa wondered years later. "I think that's when she felt I was a threat. I had this information on her. And that was the beginning of the end."

Stacy began writing songs about Vanessa. "They went something like, 'Vanessa is fat, Vanessa wears a bra.'" Vanessa was the first in the grade to develop breasts, and she had also put on some weight. "There were these limericks. And they would snap my bra all the time," she said. "The boys wouldn't. The girls would."

Nicki and Zoe didn't hesitate to back Stacy up. "They were very creative in the way they would torture me. They would steal my notebooks and they would just write all over [them], 'Vanessa is fat,' 'Vanessa wears a bra,' 'Vanessa sucks,' and all this stuff. In the wintertime they would scratch it into the ice on the bus, and we'd ride around town like that."

The ironic thing, Vanessa recalled, is that Stacy was the only other person developing breasts at the time. "But it was all focused on me," she said. "At the time I thought it was because I was gross and ugly and they didn't want to have anything to do with me. Now I think Stacy saw a lot of things in me that reminded her of herself, and it scared her. I was a bit too close to her. The other girls didn't look at all like her, they didn't act like her, but most of all, they didn't know her secrets."

Vanessa's closeness with Stacy seemed only to inflame Stacy's cruelty. Nevertheless, Vanessa clung to her. "Every day I'm hearing these songs, and every day I'm hanging out with them," she explained. "I'm going to lunch with them. I'm going after school to their houses. It was like I was her best friend, and yet I was her total target."

The girls promised that it was just a joke. They told Vanessa they needed to write a song and that she was just so easy to write about. Vanessa wanted to believe them, so she did. "I didn't have any other friends," Vanessa said. "I was so wrapped up in these people. There were other people I knew who were really cool, and I just—I was so wrapped up. I was so wrapped up in wanting to be part of this group because it seemed to me to be the center of power." Since Nicki and Zoe were affectionate whenever Stacy wasn't around, it was easier for Vanessa to stay with the group.

It also allowed the bullying to be built around the friendship and vulnerability Stacy sensed in Vanessa. One morning at school, before class started, Stacy somberly announced that her mother had died. Vanessa was devastated for her. She got Stacy lunch, told teachers she wouldn't be able to attend class, and covered for Stacy all day. "I thought, 'She finally needs me,'" Vanessa recalled. "She needs me as emotional support, not just to mess with. I was so excited because I'd take care of her, do anything for her."

At the end of the day, Stacy surrounded Vanessa with a large group of girls and told her she'd lied. You're a sucker, she said. "She had convinced the whole school to be in on this," Vanessa said, anger like gravel in her voice. "She wanted to show everyone that she could manipulate me to such an extent, and everyone else wanted to be involved. They all stood up behind the lie. Everyone. And watched me the whole day feel so sorry for Stacy."

Stacy never lifted a finger against Vanessa. She abused Vanessa quietly, deftly using third parties throughout sixth grade. She sent so many notes and messages through other willing girls that Vanessa, feeling surrounded by hate, stopped wanting to go to school. "Wherever you were," she recalled, "there would be a note waiting for you."

One day, the phone rang at Vanessa's house. It was from a trainer at a local gym, asking if Vanessa was still interested in the weight-loss program that she had signed up for. Her father had answered the phone. Vanessa had never been to the gym. Although this might have been a good opportunity to tell her parents about her peers' abuse, Vanessa pretended the call was a mistake.

When I asked Vanessa why, she replied swiftly.

"I never wanted my parents to think that I was making bad decisions," she explained. "I think deep down inside I knew. I knew this wasn't good for me and that Stacy was mean. But you never want to admit your mistakes to your parents, especially when you're eleven, and you're just starting to feel like you can make your own decisions." It was a comment I would hear often from the adult women I interviewed.

Vanessa's mother, who had begun suspecting her daughter's victimization, didn't help. When Vanessa refused to listen to her mother's warnings about Stacy, her mother countered with sarcasm and anger. Adding to the problem was her increasing pressure on Vanessa to lose weight. Her mother stepped up the encouragement, offering to put coins in a can every time Vanessa lost a pound and buy a new dress with the money.

When Vanessa's mother joined the critical voices of her "friends," Vanessa was left feeling alone, without any allies. That they targeted the area that Vanessa was most sensitive about—her weight—seemed to validate the abuse. As she told me, "There was no way I was going to my mother because I was so sure she'd say, 'Well she's absolutely right, Vanessa.'"

By seventh grade, Vanessa was depressed. She began wearing a black trench coat. Inside the pocket she kept a bottle of pills stolen from her grandfather's medicine cabinet. Vanessa imagined they were sedatives as she walked the hallways in school, sometimes holding them absently in her hand. At night she would stare at them, imagining her funeral. Fortunately, she reported, "I was too much of a wimp to do myself in." In school, her grades nose-dived from A's and B's to straight D's. She started hanging out with kids who smoked pot, and she began smoking cigarettes. Her parents were called in to a conference with her teachers, and that night they confronted Vanessa to ask what was wrong. "I said, you know, all the typical things," Vanessa recalled. "School's boring. I'm not interested anymore. All my teachers suck." Her parents believed her, and Vanessa pulled her grades up to the point where she knew she would be left alone. "At one point, it had gotten so bad," she told me, "that people were ripping my clothes in the hallway. I had a horrible pit in my stomach where I couldn't move and I just wanted to throw up everywhere I went.