American Girls (34 page)

Billie and her friends Sally, Madison, and Michelle had dinner one night at Rise, a sushi restaurant in a shopping plaza in Boca. They came together in Billie's car. Sally was an Asian girl with long dark hair and bangs, and Madison and Michelle were white girls, brunette and blond. They wore sundresses and tank tops and cotton skirts and flats and sandals. Sally and Madison were Billie's “nerdy” friends, and Michelle was the one Billie had told me was “fun, and a little wild.” Sally's and Madison's fathers both had civil service jobs, and their mothers were stay-at-home moms. Michelle's mother had her own business and her father was an engineer. All of their parents were married, except for Michelle's, who were divorced.

They were a close-knit squad, they said; they had their own finsta, one only they could see. “We post funny things and try and make each other laugh,”Billie said. They had a group chat where they communicated with each other all day, every day.

They were sitting at a table in the casual family place in front of heaping plates of sushi, laughing, showing me an Instagram picture Billie and Michelle had taken. Billie was dressed up like a guy and Michelle in an overtly sexual outfit; they were doing the duckface, arms around each other's shoulders. It was some kind of parody picture, like “Kim and Kanye, like when you think you're the sexiest couple,” Billie said. “We sent it to him!” Michelle said, giggling. She was referring to the guy she'd been hooking up with, Kyle, who, she found out, had a girlfriend named Morgan.

“I liked him since like the first day of school freshman year,” said Michelle. “I thought he was smart. He was really sexy. He seemed like he had his stuff together. We would text about homework all through sophomore year, text about chemistry homework, flirt with each other over text.

“So this year we hooked up.” They slept together, Michelle told me later, saying, “He actually got mad at me when I said I was nervous and he pressured me, like, Just do it, we like each other. And so we did.

“And then, okay, after we hooked up he ignores me,” said Michelle. “He ignores me for a few weeks. He was like, Don't tell anybody. I still didn't know he was with this other girl.

“So then I was in his car one day and her name,” Morgan, “came up on his [phone] screen and he was like, Oh, don't worry about her, she's obsessed with me. So after that I would ask him about her, but he would make it like they were just on and off. And then I didn't want to have anything more to do with him. I stopped returning his texts.

“So I wake up one morning and I go on Instagram and I see he followed me and he liked a picture of me in a bikini. And I'm like,
Really
?” She frowned. “So I go back and look at his profile picture on Facebook and see this other girl Morgan commented, ‘So handsome babe.' Which made me really mad. So I commented,
‘So handsome babe,'
under her, like mocking her, 'cause he's liking my photo and he's obviously with
her.
So he deletes my comment immediately.

“So he's been hooking up with me
and
her, and now he's liking my bikini picture, and deleting my comment!” After she made the comment, she said, “he blocked me on Facebook and Instagram.

“Me and him and her, we're all in the same first hour” at school, she said. “It was me, him, and this other girl in class together that same morning—it was so awkward.

“So I start texting him. I was mad. I was being really angry at him. And he starts saying really sexual things to me and he sends me a picture on Snapchat of his dick and he says, Did you miss it? And he says, Do you want to hook up with me? So I asked him, What are you
doing
? And he says, I want to put you in a good mood. So he's obviously trying to calm me down by coming on to me so I won't say anything to her.”

“Or maybe just the whole situation is making him horny,” Billie suggested.

Michelle said, “That, too. And then I'm so like not returning his texts. But then he was being so confusing. I did text him again and he would not answer. So he's shitting on me
again.
And so then this girl he's dating, Morgan, she posted a picture of herself with him on Instagram and she's like, My babe. Billie saw it and sent it to me. And I'm like, Oh my
God.
So me and Billie, we imitated the picture and we sent it back to him on Snapchat.” This was the picture they had showed me.

The girls giggled. Billie made the same bro-ish duckface from the picture.

“So he texts me like, I'm not okay with this,” said Michelle. “And I said, You're with
her
and you're trying to get with
me
and I'm not okay with
that.
So the next day in school I saw this girl Morgan. I had never talked to her before. So I go up to her and I'm like, Are you dating him? And she's like, Yeah, we've been on and off for a while. And I said, You know, he's been cheating on you with me. And she starts, like, crying and freaking out. I showed her the dick pics and all the texts and she's crying and going crazy. So he comes outside—'cause I texted him—it was in the courtyard of school—and there was a
beatdown.
She's smacking him. I took a video.”

Michelle pulled up the video on her phone. It showed a teenage girl beating a teenage boy. You could hear the slaps and the cracks on his skull and the girl screaming and crying. “You're a fucking asshole!”

The other girls at the table watched the video—they had seen it many times before—gasping and cracking up.

Michelle put down her phone when it was over.

“But now they're back together,” she said with a shrug. “She was texting me like, He's so disgusting. But she took him back. He's being so nice to her—he took her on all these crazy dates and everything. He added me back on Snapchat just so I could see all these pictures of them together. There's pictures of them at the beach and he's like hugging her.”

One day, some months after I met Sydney, she was meeting her friends for lunch at Serafina, an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. It's a casual place with yellow walls and waiters who look like aspiring actors. Tourists with shopping bags from the Metropolitan Museum of Art were sitting at tables next to families with toddlers playing on iPads. There was a five-year-old's birthday party going on, with bobbing balloons and mothers snapping iPhone pics and children begging for ice cream.

Sydney's friends looked a bit mortified by this juvenile atmosphere as they were led to their table. They were all very fashionable in the way of Manhattan girls, all age seventeen. They were slim and slinky and wearing eyeliner wings and sheer sleeveless tops, short shorts, and ankle boots. It was a sort of hipster, fashionista version of provocative.

They sat down and ordered salad and one plate of pasta and split it among them. “I'm not hungry,” they said. “I had a big breakfast.”

Sydney said nothing during the entire conversation, not a word. She'd been very talkative when I met with her before. But this was a powerful squad, a bona fide clique which, she said, “terrorized” girls in her school, and they seemed to make her watchful and wary.

I asked them to tell me about their school, and they started talking about how it was full of “mean girls”—which was a curious thing since this was how Sydney had characterized them.

“Girls in general are mean,” Jenny said. She was a white girl who looked like Snow White. Her parents were both actors.

“So mean,” said Lydia. She identified herself as “Blewish,” black and Jewish. Her mother owned a fashion company and her father was a writer. “Not
us.
”

“It's not
just
girls,” Isabella said carefully. She was Asian and Latina, tall and Bette Davis–eyed with a wavy bob. Her father was a social worker, her mother a stay-at-home mom. “At our school,
people
can be really mean to each other,” she said. “Like there's this girl—well, she happens to be overweight—which is
fine,
a lot of people
are
—but a lot of boys in our school tend to tease her or make fun of her.”

“She stalks celebrities and she was named ‘The Stalker Girl,' ” Lydia said flatly, as if to suggest that the teasing had some justification.

“Like, she had a fascination with celebrities,” Jenny chimed in. “She has a few boy bands that she's really into. She follows them on Twitter and stalks them.”

“She'll wait for them outside hotels,” Lydia piled on. “It's really intense. She'll be like, I met Nick Jonas. She knows their license plates. She knows when their car comes out of the hotel, I mean.”

“I think she signed up with a special website that notifies her where the celebrities are. There's a whole community of stalkers,” Jenny said. She and Lydia tittered.

“I mean, I like celebrities, too,” Lydia said. “But I wouldn't
stalk
them. That is highly creepy.”

“But there was an instance,” Isabella pressed, “where one of the boys, like, hacked her Gmail account and e-mailed some other boys from our school, like, Do you want to go to prom? Like to humiliate her. It was like bullying. And she posted on Facebook about how she was upset. And I commented, Are you okay? I hope she didn't think I was being sarcastic.”

The other girls were silent a moment.

“I've never seen an instance where people are bullied,” Jenny said with a sniff.

Her two good friends, who were sitting at the table with her, had been cyberbullied in the past. (Isabella later said she had been cyberbullied in sixth grade on Myspace.)

I asked them more about the behavior of boys. For example, did they comment on the way girls dress?

“The problem is with
girls
slut-shaming,” Lydia said, a tad impatient. “It's all coming from girls. If a girl wants to dress slutty, I'm all for it—do you—but there are girls that slut-shame on other girls. It's disappointing, 'cause you're a girl, too.

“Like if a girl hooks up with three boys in one night,” she went on, “that's a problem for girls. But if a boy does the same thing, they're celebrated. It's like, Oh, congratulations, that's great. Boys don't shame each other—they
high-five
each other. But for girls it's like, You're a slut, why would you do that? Girls call each other names—like thot and slide,” another word for slut.

“So only girls slut-shame? Not boys?” I asked.

The girls said nothing. Sydney stared at her salad.

I asked them to tell me more about the parties at their school. “They're not
all
Business Slutty,” Lydia said, shooting Sydney a disapproving glance. “A lot are just regular parties. It's called a ‘free.' ”

“They're almost like every weekend. Everyone goes,” Jenny said. “Sometimes kids rent a hotel room, at like the Plaza or Trump Tower. Everyone who's invited knows each other. If not from schools, then from social media. Like you'll see a girl and be like, Why do I know her full name? And you'll realize, Oh, she's been in pictures with my friends on Facebook or Instagram. So you smile at each other even though you don't know each other. It's actually really creepy.”

I asked what happened at the parties.

“Drinking, drugs, smoking pot, cheap liquor, beer and vodka,” Lydia said matter-of-factly. “Molly.”

“It's not unusual to go to a party and be like, I can't go in 'cause the police are there,” Isabella said.

“Some girls act just ridiculous at these parties,” said Lydia. “I've seen two girls hook up with one guy. These girls came out of the bathroom once screaming, like, We just hooked up in the bathroom!” She made a face.

“There's this group of three best friends and one of them wasn't there and she liked this boy and her two friends hooked up with that boy at the same time,” Jenny explained.

“It was so mean,” Isabella said. “This other girl had feelings for the guy. I think they were drunk.”

“It's
girls
initiating it usually,” Lydia said. “It's one way girls mess with other girls, by hooking up with guys they know they like.”

Isabella seemed to be getting antsy, as if she wanted to correct something about all this. “But boys mess with girls' heads, too,” she said. “Like I've certainly experienced this: you kiss someone or you hook up with someone, and the guy doesn't say anything about it to you after. In the beginning, when I was first getting involved with guys, it used to, like, really bother me—that guys just talk about how many girls they get with, but then if a girl hooks up, they say, She's such a slut, she's so easy. When I was first getting involved with guys, I was so upset by it. I was so upset. I got like anxiety issues about going to parties 'cause I felt there was this pressure to hook up. So when I was thirteen I just started to hook up with random guys and it was really overwhelming to me. I didn't know at first that, like, I could kiss a guy one night and then he wouldn't ever text me or talk to me again.” She looked around the table tentatively, as if nervous about having revealed all this.

The other girls said nothing.

“I've never experienced that because I've always had a boyfriend,” Lydia said dryly. “I've never been ‘out there.' ”

“But boyfriends are rare,” Isabella countered softly.

“There are a
lot
of boyfriends and girlfriends,” Jenny said. “They just don't, like, go out on
dates
—it's just, like, cuffing season.”

Cuffing season? I asked.

“That's a period of time in the winter,” Jenny explained. “You know, like when people stay in a couple because it's cold out and they want to nest. Boys say, I'm cuffed, I'm whipped,” meaning handcuffed, pussy-whipped.

I asked her if she thought the phrase was sexist.

“They
want
to do it,” Lydia said, referring to boys. “They don't
have
to be cuffed. They do it because they like the girl.”

Isabella suddenly seemed ready to explode. “I don't feel like guys ever have to take any responsibility for what they do,” she said, her voice trembling with emotion. “I feel like guys get away with not having to contact a girl, like, after they do stuff with them. And then it's like, Oh, that's just how guys are. I've heard that so many times—like, Oh, that's a guy, you just have to deal with it. No, I don't have to deal with it at all. Like some of my closest girlfriends have told me, like, Don't expect anything from guys. And I think that's just like—really? Like, you know what, no, I
am
going to expect something.”

She looked around again. Jenny and Lydia seemed annoyed. Sydney was staring at her pasta.

“Yeah, but there is a lot of pressure on guys, too,” Lydia responded quietly after a moment, narrowing her eyes. “Like saying, Don't expect anything from him, he's a guy—that's categorizing guys.
That's
sexist. Like, Don't expect anything from him? What does that even mean? Him being a guy shouldn't mean he can't have emotions or can't get attached to anyone.”

“I—I didn't mean it like that,” Isabella said quickly. “I was just saying some girls will say that after guys hook up with someone and never talk to them again.”

“Well, what do these girls expect?” Lydia said. “Just going to parties and hooking up with people—not every girl does that.
I
wouldn't want to meet a guy that way.”

Isabella looked deflated. “I'm not saying I do that
now,
” she said, “but when I did it in the past, I didn't like how the boys acted after. I didn't like the feeling of boys having all the control—of like having to wait for them to call you or text you. I feel like their brains are wired differently and they don't even realize the effect that they have on a girl sometimes—they should, but they don't.”

“A lot of the time they
don't
realize what they're saying or doing,” Lydia agreed. “My close guy friend hooked up with this girl and he ended up telling everyone that she was a horrible kisser. And that is something you
don't do
—it was so wrong and it really hurt her and I made him feel horrible for it. I was like, I can't even look at you right now. And now people see her differently. But
he
didn't know what he was doing.”

Isabella wrinkled her brow.

“Nobody's teaching them respect,” Jenny said after a moment to Isabella. “And without respect, there's this whole thing where girls can be treated as sexual objects. And if you're a sexual object, why would anyone have to worry about your feelings? If boys were taught respect, these things wouldn't happen.”

“That's exactly what I was trying to say,” Isabella said.

“I know,” said Jenny.

Isabella smiled, relieved.