Odd Girl Out (15 page)

In May, at eighth-grade graduation, Erin stood alone with her family. Her friends linked arms and skipped away, mortarboards and gowns trailing like streamers, to parties that would last all night. "We left," Diane said. "I was crying. I had tears streaming down my face. It was so painful." In the parking lot, a mother approached Diane. The woman had commented to Ashley's mother about how hard this must be for Erin. "That girl got everything she deserved," Ashley's mother had replied.

Diane knew she was missing a huge piece of what had happened, but despite her tearful entreaties, Erin stayed quiet. That summer, Diane sent Erin to visit her family in California. On sleepaway camp buses, at friends' houses, even in kindergarten, Erin had been the intrepid girl who never looked back, not even to wave good-bye. In Santa Monica she disintegrated, calling her parents sobbing in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, hyperventilating with anxiety.

 

At some point over the summer, Michelle relented. "Part of me missed her, part of me felt bad, and part of me just like wanted to be a good person and talk to her." At Ashley's house one day, Michelle called Erin to ask for some money Erin had owed her for a long time. Michelle knew she was looking for a reason to call her, plus Ashley had wanted some shorts she had lent her, and Jessica wanted to say hi, too. The conversation was "nice." But there wasn't much to say.

Right before school started, Michelle was ready to start over, though she feared breaking the group's official silence. "I was like, 'Okay, it's a new year. I can let myself do this. I don't have to be worried about what my friends are going to say.'" Besides, she'd been having trouble with some of the other girls, and as it had been in seventh grade, Erin offered a willing ear.

Together, the two girls felt at once new and old, comfortable and tense. But by then Erin had made other friends, making Michelle's friendship with her too difficult to sustain. Michelle feared "getting sucked in" to the old dynamics that irked her before. Nowadays, Erin is "just another person we walk by in the hall." Reflecting about what happened at the end of eighth grade, Michelle said, "I was feeling kind of bad, like maybe we should have gone about it a different way.... It was just a big part of all of our lives. It was probably something that needed to happen." Anyway, Michelle told me, Erin hadn't really changed. Everyone agreed about that. Which made Michelle feel okay about where things were in the end.

 

In her mind, Erin felt she'd changed completely. "I'm such a scared person now," she told me. "I'm always worried about what people think about me. I'm always worried about what people are going to say about me behind my back. I never used to care! Because people talked about me all the time, and I just didn't care. I'm always worried about why people hate me," she said. "They made me like this now."

Trusting her new friends is daily work. "I'm better about it, but I still become a wreck just because I'm scared that it will happen again, or I'll be a bad friend."

Erin spent ninth grade narrowly avoiding being asked to leave her school. Her academic performance continued to falter, and she was tortured by anxiety, finding normally easy assignments overwhelming. She remained in intensive therapy and was diagnosed with anxiety and depression. Fearing a recurrence of her peers' anger, she refused to let them see her appear weak. "I was trying to prove to them I could be okay. I was like, no, I'm going to have just as much fun." So she hung out with seniors, got invited to parties, and managed to appear as cool as she had been. Unfortunately, school administrators found it hard to believe she was as depressed and anxious as her parents claimed.

Erin grew close with Kim again, and she began to feel confused as the friendship offered her a second glimpse inside her old clique. She missed them, and apparently, they'd missed her. "How come I still get upset and miss stuff from before?" she asked me. "It's bad because I should know. I'm like, 'Why am I still friends with you? After everything you've done,'" she said. "I'm a completely different person."

The most marked change in her, she told me, is the way she approaches her friends. Before, when she was popular, she'd felt the need to be perfect, to perform in a particular way for others. Now, she can see how the strategy backfired.

"I think that being perfect was [my] way. You have to go up [in status]. You don't even look. Your peripheral vision is—you don't even care about the people next to you because you have to be better than them.... In some ways you know people are looking at you. And you're kind of like a show for people to see. You know when you walk down the hall that people are like, 'Oh, she's cool.' But you don't realize that they're like, 'Oh, and she's a bitch, too.' You don't know you're a bitch. You deny things; you avoid things. You should know it, but you don't know it because it's a normal thing to do and if you don't do it you're out of there."

She is chagrined about the person she was, about the mistakes popularity led her to make, yet she struggles to understand the force of her friends' anger.

So does Diane. Watching Erin in the days after her friends retaliated, she could never have predicted the crushing impact their anger would have on her child. Today, she shares with me an abiding regret that she did not try harder to force the school into action. Even this year, as the school has questioned whether it is appropriate for Erin to continue at Linden, Diane has been awed at the school's willful ignorance of the incident that so clearly marred her daughter's confidence.

During her sophomore year, Erin finally righted herself academically, bringing home all B's and one A. It's an "amazing feat!" she crowed in a recent e-mail to me. And, she reported, she'd fallen in love.

Erin's story illustrates with terrible clarity the consequences of girls' repression of their true feelings. Over three long years, each of Erin's friends buried everyday bursts of jealousy, anger, competition, and betrayal deep inside her. The point at which their anger finally broke the surface of their silence is extremely significant. Of all the incidents that upset the girls, the only one that incited them into response had two important features: it was an event they could experience and act upon together, and it was a socially acceptable reason for female anger.

At home in a culture obsessed with romantic love, where talk shows feature women sparring in you-took-my-man catfights, the girls knew instantly that kissing Luke was a valid cause for anger. This was not like the awkward feelings of jealousy for not being popular or not having the guy you want like you; it was not the discomfort of secret competition over grades or the sadness of having been abandoned by a friend. This was clearly wrong, a misstep no one could deny.

The trouble was, once the girls got going, their anger got out of control. Every past grievance shot to the surface and crashed down on Erin. Because the girls had sequestered their feelings, hurt and jealousy were transformed into a dangerous well of rage. Michelle celebrated that no one would have to be afraid of Erin any longer. She might have added that no one would have to be afraid of conflict and anger, either.

Yet at the peak of their fury, what these girls wanted was nothing more than to isolate Erin. They didn't want to strike her, spread rumors about her, or confront her. They wanted her alone. When Erin tried to hang out with less popular girls, her friends were even angrier. "She was getting friends," Michelle said. "We wanted her to see what it was like to not have anybody there."

Michelle's willingness to speak with me about her feelings toward Erin was extraordinary. She is an example to all of us who struggle to express our own anger. Yet she's very much an ordinary girl: funloving, sensitive, kind, and smart. She is the very opposite of cruel. What she struggled with was how to negotiate her anger and still maximize her intimacy with the friend she loved most. The same can be said of Erin. She is hardly the "bitch" her friends made her out to be. She is instead a girl who got lost in the demands of her own popularity and ended up making mistakes. Like Michelle, Erin is a lovely young woman, sparkling with laughter, wit, and a generous spirit that pulls everyone to her like a magnet.

The salience of relationship in girls' lives makes their practice of imposing isolation worthy of our attention. As we have seen, girls experience isolation as especially terrifying. Since girls earn social capital by their relationships with others, isolation cuts to the core of their identities. For most girls there is little more painful than to stand alone at recess or lunch.

Erin's fear of her new friends' anger is echoed in different degrees by many survivors of bullying. These girls described feeling unfamiliar with the most basic rules of relationship, things taken for granted by any socially adjusted person. They no longer feel certain of what makes people angry or upset, not to mention how to tell when someone is feeling that way. Their emotional radar is incapacitated. This can turn a girl into a cautious ghost of her former self, stifled and silenced by fear.

The fear is felt by degrees among girls who struggle with everyday conflict. One of the chief symptoms of girls' loss of self-esteem is the sense of being crazy, of not being able to trust one's own interpretation of people's actions or events.
Did she just look at her when I said that? Was she joking? Did she roll her eyes? Not save the seat on purpose? Lie about her plans? Tell me that she'd invited me when she hadn't?
The girls I interviewed confirmed a similar unrest, the disturbing belief that what they were sure they knew or saw wasn't that at all, but was in fact something quite different. In discord between girls, gestures of conflict often contradict speech, confounding their intended targets. In such a universe, for a girl to trust her own truths, her own version of events, can be excruciatingly difficult. At the cusp of their most tumultuous years of development, girls cling tightly to one another to know, as one told me, "that we're not crazy." Yet it is their close peer relationships, and the rules against truth telling, that often trigger these feelings.

Two twelve-year-old girls were sitting cross-legged on the floor of a bedroom, hunched over a stickered laptop. Leah and Ellie were Facebook chatting with Ellie's ex-boyfriend who, moments earlier, had asked if he and Ellie could get back together. His request prompted Ellie to screech.

"Calm down!" Leah said briskly. Ellie froze. Her face grew stony. She stood up and walked a few feet over to her own laptop. The room began clicking with stubborn, angry keyboard strokes.

"ur so obsessed with Lilly! y dont u guys get married? all u do is talk about Lilly, y r u even here?" Ellie typed.

Leah stared at Ellie. "You can't say that to my face? We're five feet apart!"

Ellie typed, "SHUT UP B——CH!!!!"

Leah kept talking. "You're kidding, right? You can't even call me a b——ch to my face?"

When we spoke, Leah recalled the scene and sighed over Ellie's behavior. "She can say anything to me over text and it won't matter. We're five feet apart and she calls me a b——ch on Facebook."

***

It is now impossible to parent, teach, or even talk about girls without considering the roles of technology and social media in their lives. The virtual world has become a place girls go to hang out, no different from a hallway, locker room, or cafeteria. What has changed is the efficiency of aggression: social media is a bathroom wall with a jet engine, giving kids the ability to launch their graffiti into a peer's bedroom or pocket.

Depending on who you ask, anywhere from one fifth to one third of youth aged eleven to eighteen have been targets of cyberbullying, or the "willful and repeated harm inflicted through the use of computers, cell phones and other electronic devices." Ask girls if they have been targets of passing online nastiness, and the number skyrockets.
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Technology makes cruelty chillingly simple. Angry at the friend who ignored you today? Click. Annoyed at the girl who is copying your look? Click. Jealous of the girl who is flirting with the guy you like? Click. There is no eye contact, no tone of voice, no immediate consequence. Social media offers a limitless arsenal of weapons: Start a Facebook group to punish the guy-stealing girl. Tag an embarrassing photo of her for everyone to see. Send a vicious text at midnight, then turn your phone off.

"The Internet erases inhibitions," writes
New York Times
reporter Jan Hoffman, eliciting "psychologically savage" behavior. All this in a world where adults and policy have been slow to catch on, and even slower to act. Parents are alternately intimidated and overwhelmed, while most schools decline to intervene in behavior that occurred "off school grounds."
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Website and software developers are slow to respond to distressed families. Law enforcement mostly clings to the threat of bodily harm as its standard for intervention. Into this vacuum of regulation move the cyberbullies and targets, who operate with few deterrents.

If we can no longer talk about girls without talking about technology, the same is true in reverse: girls' distinctive fears and passions are digitized in BFF 2.0, girls' online social universe. Girls perpetrate and experience cyberbullying in ways that are uniquely Social media lets you type instead of talk, offering girls an oasis from the direct conflict so many of them fear. Armies of girls who avoid face-to-face confrontation can now use their fingers to vent rage, betrayal, or anxiety. "Online," a high school senior told me, "you can say whatever you want to say."

But like a mirage that vanishes upon closer inspection, technology betrays girls. When they turn to social media to resolve their problems, they are more likely to interpret others' messages negatively and act aggressively. These girls, who might otherwise struggle in a direct conversation, become suddenly fierce, cruel "orators" online. Before social media, girls might exchange a phone call or two; now, there are blizzards of nasty texts. "Somebody can't come through the phone and beat you up," a seventh grader told me. "But somebody can beat you up over text all day long." Girls' false confidence and unbridled emotion ignite conflicts for which they are scantly prepared.