Odd Girl Out (27 page)

By eighth grade, Kathy had been best friends with Nancy for three years. They were passionately close and spent class time writing long notes to each other, folding them in funky shapes and squeezing them in each other's lockers throughout the day.

One afternoon, Nancy wrote a letter about one of the popular girls being snotty. "I agree," Kathy started to scribble, then stopped midsentence, pen in the air. "I realized," she told me, "that wait, I could win favor with the popular kids if I told them what Nancy had said." Kathy gave them Nancy's notes. The popular girls promised not to tell.

The next morning, in the auditorium where everyone hung out before the bell, Nancy walked in holding a few wrinkled pieces of paper. Her face was red, her eyes swollen. Kathy asked what was wrong, "even though," she told me, "I knew exactly what was wrong, why she would be crying, why she would be upset." Nancy looked at her with blank, defeated eyes.

"How did they get these?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"How did they get these?" she repeated.

Over the thin sound of her own voice, Kathy suddenly felt the weight of the damage she had caused. "I couldn't bear to assume that responsibility," she told me, curling her legs under her, sucking hard on her second cigarette. "I couldn't bear to say, 'I did this to you. This is what I did.'" All day long, people bombarded her in the hallways, pumping her for information. She pleaded ignorance. "I kept trying to get the blame off me, to create this phantom third party so I could get out of it," she said, blowing her nose.

Their friendship was over, of course. "It was a complete betrayal." Kathy sighed. "It's almost unimaginable why the desire to be popular and accepted would make me do something that's so malicious. To betray someone so close to me." She cleared her throat, her voice deeper. "I was—I'm sure that—I'm sure that it has significantly scarred her." Kathy said she wants to forget what happened. "But you can't forget when you've caused so much hurt to someone."

She grew quiet. Her cigarette smoke hung in the air before us. "It is a little hard to talk about." She flicked her ash into a chipped bowl overflowing with butts. This was the second time she had ever spoken of what happened. I asked her why popularity was so important.

"I guess I thought that it kind of represented acceptance and belonging and desirability," she said. "I was feeling degraded from other instances of being bullied. If I were to be accepted by them, it would be to kind of get myself out of the degraded position. It wasn't really so much that I wanted to be friends with them. I felt like, then it wouldn't matter that I was Asian."

Nancy was one of several girls Kathy bullied. In one instance, she demeaned a close friend constantly out of jealousy over the attention she was getting. "I remember thinking, 'Why can't I stop this? Why can't I just sit back and let her have her time in the spotlight?'" Looking back at that time, she said, "I felt like there were so many people above me, to know that there was someone below me was comforting."

Kathy asked me again if I would definitely change her name in the book, and I said, yes, of course. "Well," she muttered, "if somebody can learn from my experience..."

"What would you like them to learn?" I asked.

"I guess to make them understand the impact that they're having potentially on another person's life," Kathy replied. "I can tell them for years and years I couldn't be friends with that person anymore. I was questioning my own loyalties to people. I was kind of like, 'Wow, if I'm capable of doing this, I'm capable of completely betraying somebody close to me for the possible favor of someone that doesn't really care about me at all.' I basically sold her out. You're giving up what's real for something that you see as more desirable, a higher social status or something."

The knowledge that she could so coldly hurt her friend, in spite of her values, was "very disturbing. I was old enough to know what's right and wrong. It was almost like I felt I wasn't really in control," she said.

"I can barely explain how much guilt I feel from this one situation," Kathy continued. "I don't know where to begin to make up for what I did. I always hoped that maybe my feelings of guilt would subside as time went on, but I don't feel like they have. I feel like on some level I can identify with soldiers that go back to villages that twenty years ago they had completely destroyed and ransacked, those soldiers that go back and apologize to the people they harmed, their kids and grandkids. And maybe in the future I will do something like that and talk to her about it."

A few months after we spoke, she did. Nancy was surprised to hear from her. Kathy e-mailed me:

I lost the friendship and trust of the one person who meant the most to me. We are now friends again, but we lost the level of trust that we once had, in addition to the time that we weren't friends. What I lost through the thoughtlessness of my actions can never be regained, and if I could have understood that the state of our relationship today is the consequence of my actions, I think things would have been different. I never realized that I could potentially destroy my friendship with my best friend, and if I could have realized that, I would never have imagined that it would bear this much influence on my life these years later.

Kathy believes the experience has made her more compassionate and empathetic. Nevertheless, the memory of her betrayal has never faded. "What good does it do to say I'm sorry?" she asked me.

 

in control

Like Samantha, whose relationship with Annie is described in chapter two, some girls may be unaware of their cruel behavior. When I first started interviewing people for my book, I began speaking with my friends. Roma, whom I met in college, told me about being abused by one of her best childhood friends. Jane's aggression ranged from telling Roma she hoped she died in a fire to forming elaborate clubs that Roma wasn't allowed to join. Jane prank-called her, called her clothes cheap and her mother a hippie, frequently exercised her ability to turn her other friends against her, and ridiculed Roma's intense affection for friends. At the same time, Roma remembered, "She was a charmer. That was the other part of her. When you were in her favor, it was so great. She was fun and silly and just really sweet." The torment lasted eight years. It was ninth grade when the two finally let go of each other.

When Roma was twenty-three, Jane's mom called Roma's mom, Ellen, searching for Roma's number. Jane wanted to talk to Roma. Ellen explained that her daughter was not interested. "What do you mean?" Jane's mom asked incredulously. "They were such good friends." When Ellen told Jane's mother about her daughter's behavior, she was astonished.

Shortly afterward, Roma and her best friend Sally were home for the holidays and hanging out in a café when Jane came in. Roma remembered, "She started talking to Sally like I wasn't there, saying things like, 'I live in San Francisco now. Doesn't your best friend live in San Francisco?'" Finally, Roma asked Jane if she had something to say. Jane turned to Roma and said, "Why did you tell your mother that we were never friends?" She began to weep. "If we were never friends," Jane cried, "how do I know that you like to sleep with your feet above the blanket and that you don't like peanut butter?" Jane ran through a list of personal facts about Roma as Roma listened stiffly. The two women recalled such vastly different stories of their friendship that Roma didn't know how to respond.

 

Danielle, a sophomore at Linden, met me over lunch to tell me about how controlling she was of two girlfriends between third and seventh grade. She struggled to describe her behavior. "I don't know how to ... explain it," she said haltingly. "I wanted to control them and who they hung out with. I wanted to make sure they were never closer to the other girls than I was. And that they never did stuff with them when I wasn't there."

Danielle wanted to be the girls' only friend, although she allowed herself as many friends as she wanted. She was afraid the other girls would be more liked than she was. "I think that's basically why I did it," she said, remembering Jessica in a low, strained voice that sounded far older than her fifteen years. "She was really nice and everyone loved her. I guess I wanted to have control over that."

Later on in our interview, which was filled with increasingly long periods of awkward silence, Danielle admitted that Emma also made her jealous. "I remember when we'd just be hanging out and people would be like, 'Oh my God, I love your hair.' I was so jealous. And I used to be like, 'That's so annoying.'"

Mostly, however, Danielle remembered her need for control. "I never wanted her to do things. I wanted to be with her doing things, like going out. I didn't want her to have a sleepover somewhere and me not be there. That's the main thing," she said. That way, she explained, "I would have someone to fall back on, who would always be there for me and never be like, 'Oh, I'm doing something with someone else.'"

Danielle lived with her parents, both professionals, in an affluent Northeastern community. Her mother and father were invested in her social life, and her dad was especially interested. She told me, "I always feel like he wants me to live through him and be more—I'm definitely more outgoing than both of my parents. So I guess they feel like, um, they always make sure that I have tons of friends and that I'm happy."

After a long pause, she added, "I don't tell my dad when I'm having problems with friends because I think he would be disappointed in me. I'm just afraid he's going to look down on me, like why are you having problems? Or if I'm not friends with someone anymore."

I had never known Danielle, normally exuberant, to be this quiet. "I look back on it now and I realize it was so mean and cruel," she said. And then, somewhere after sixth grade, she said her personality did a "complete change." It was as simple as understanding that control isn't the right way to make friends. "I should gain my friends by being nice rather than..." She didn't finish. She could hardly imagine herself behaving in those ways today, and it was hard to remember the other times.

Listening to Danielle, we are returned again to the centrality of relationship and connection in girls' lives. As the fear of isolation has fueled some girls' decisions to stay in bad friendships, here it inspired Danielle's controlling behavior. Adrienne Rich has written that a person who does not tell the truth "lives in fear of losing control. She cannot even desire a relationship without manipulation, since to be vulnerable to another person means for her the loss of control."
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A fear of isolation or abandonment, then, may be key to understanding some alternative aggressions.

 

the wages of repression

"When my parents divorced, I was mad a lot," said Molly, who was sitting opposite me on the yellowed grass in the sun outside her junior high. Pale and lanky, she had a mop of brown hair, green eyes, braces, and the awkward, slightly stretched features of a girl on the cusp of a growth spurt. "I was mad at my friends," she explained, "because, you know, everybody has two parents and I don't."

Molly was in eighth grade and living in Ridgewood with her mother, who has a degenerative disease. Although her mother was not wheelchair bound, her walking was impaired and she was in chronic pain. Molly's father, whom Molly saw every other weekend, lived in another town. Her mother's illness made her father's absence even more difficult.

Molly thought her friends often bragged about their nuclear families. They talked about going to the mall with their mothers, a trip Molly's mom had never been well enough to make. Recently, a friend had a birthday party and invited all the girls and their mothers to shop together. Molly couldn't go. When her friends asked why Molly's mother did not volunteer at church, or mother-daughter activities, Molly felt embarrassed and left out. "I'm like, 'Well, that's kind of hard for me,' and they're like, 'Well, I can't help it,' and I'm like, 'Well, I can't either.'" Molly looked at me. "It's not fair. It's like they're laughin' at you or something."

I asked Molly if they have laughed about it to her face.

"I don't think they exactly laugh at me," she said slowly, thinking. "I'm sure most people feel sorry for me. I just think that maybe when I say stuff like that, they kind of look at each other, look around, just try to get off the subject or something. And that really hurts my feelings."

When she gets angry, Molly said, she tries to ignore it and stop thinking about it. "I try to look on the bright side," she said, "and think, at least I have a mother, some people don't have a mother." She listed a few things that could be worse. But sometimes, when she can't ignore the anger, she feels it inside all day "till it drives me crazy." Then she cries. During those times, she said, her father is not around when she needs him, so she may get angry at her friends or their parents. "It's not their fault," she said, "but the anger has to go somewhere so it goes to whoever I'm around."

She had "blown up" only once at her mother for the ways her disease constrains Molly's life, and especially for not having a boyfriend. "I didn't mean to," Molly said, twisting a clump of grass into rope. "Now I'm just kind of sorry I did." After Molly yelled, her mother was silent for a long time. "She goes, 'Well, I can't help it. I'm disabled. Nobody wants me, you know.'" Surely there was someone out there, Molly pleaded. "And she just sort of looked at me funny." The conflict "sort of blew away," she said, because they never spoke of the subject, or the fight, again.

In general, Molly tried to keep her mother at arm's length. Molly was always having to take down posters in her room when they offended her mother's fervent Baptist beliefs, even the Backstreet Boys pictures. Her mother wouldn't buy her rock-and-roll music and preferred to hear Christian music in their home. Out with her friends once, Molly mentioned her mother didn't like her browsing through the rock posters. "They look at me like I'm crazy. And that makes me mad because I'm like, y'all, it's just the way she is, I can't say anything about it."