Odd Girl Out (5 page)

In group discussions, girls spoke openly to me about their intentionally covert aggression. When I visited the ninth graders in Ridgewood, they threw out their tactics with gusto, prompting the semicircle of bodies to lean forward, nearly out of their desks, as eager affirming cries of "Oh yeah!" and "Totally!" filled our fluorescent-white lab room.

Walk down the hallway and slam into a girl—the teacher thinks you're distracted! Knock a girl's book off a desk—the teacher thinks it fell! Write an anonymous note! Draw a mean picture! Roll your eyes! Send an instant message with a new username! Steal a boy friend! Start a rumor! Tell the teacher she cheated!

"You step on their shoe. Oops!" Jessie squealed in a girly-girl singsong voice. "Sorry!"

"You walk past someone and you try to bump them. You say,
'Excuse you!
'" The girls laughed in recognition.

"The teacher says she didn't mean it, she just bumped into her," Melanie explained, "but the girls, they
know
what it is because it happens so much."

"Girls are very sneaky," said Keisha. "Very."

"We—are—sneaky!" Lacey crowed, emphasizing every word.

The next day, the Ridgewood sixth graders met. The freight of the good-girl image still weighed heavily upon them, and they lacked some of the boisterous energy and sarcasm of the ninth graders. Their voices were hesitant and halting. Amy was brave.

"The teachers don't say anything. They don't expect it. They don't think we're doing anything, but..." She paused.

"But what?" I asked. I was getting used to sentences abandoned midway.

She was silent.

"The teachers think girls behave better," Elizabeth explained.

"Does that make a difference in how people get in trouble?" I asked.

"Some people call each other names and stuff and the teacher wouldn't believe it. They would say, 'So-and-so did this to me,' and the teacher would say, 'No, she didn't.' Some teachers have pets, and you say, 'She called me a bad name,' and the teacher says, 'No, she wouldn't do a thing like that.'"

Leigh said, "Some girls act real good around the teachers, and then when they do something bad, the teachers don't believe it because they never seen them do it."

"Boys don't care about getting into trouble. They think they're all bad and don't worry about it. They don't care if they got in trouble, but girls don't want anyone to know they got into trouble," Maura said. "Girls worry about how they're going to look. They have more of a nervous system than boys." The room tittered.

Tina raised her hand. "A girl in my class passes notes and never gets in trouble for it. Around the teacher she acts all sweet and stuff."

"Everybody writes notes," Sarah Beth added. "Teachers are so stupid. They don't get it. You can see it. It's easy."

Kim said, "Girls can be passing notes during class and the teacher will find out about it. She won't get them in trouble because they're like one of her best students. Most of the girls in her class are but the boys usually aren't."

Torie sat up on the back of her chair, elbows on her knees. "If girls are whispering, the teacher thinks it's going to be all right because they're not hitting people. If they punch, they get sent to the office. Teachers think they're not hurting you," she said, looking cautiously at her classmates, "but they are."

At once I was reminded of scary movies in which only children can see the ghost. The adults pass through the same rooms and live the same moments, yet they are unable to see a whole world of action around them. So, too, in classrooms of covertly aggressing girls, targets are desperately alone even though a teacher is just steps away.

 

Sixth period was about to end. Jenny's stomach clenched harder with each loud click of the wall clock. She never jumped when the bell rang. Although she prided herself on her good grades, Jenny stopped paying attention five minutes before class ended. Still, at 1:58 her heart started to race. By 1:59 she was short of breath.

Through the cracks between her straight brown hair she watched the other seventh graders get up. As usual, she pretended to be slow and preoccupied. She shuffled her pencils noisily in the cool metal air inside the desk, buying time. In a moment she would be free to leave.

Ever since Jenny arrived two months ago from San Diego, the popular clique at Mason Middle School had decided two things: first, that she was a major threat to their status, and second, that they were going to make her life miserable.

She had moved reluctantly with her family to the small ranching community in Wyoming four days after the end of sixth grade. In San Diego, Jenny had gone to a huge city school and had mostly Mexican friends. She spoke fluent Spanish and loved the warmth and friendship of Mexican culture. She never minded being one of the only white students in school.

That everything was different in Mason was an understatement. There were eight hundred white people in the whole town. Everybody knew each other's business, and outsiders were unwelcome. So it didn't matter to Brianna and Mackenzie that Jenny's entire family had grown up right in Mason. Even though Jenny spent her summers riding tractors through their families' fields with her grandfather, the town alderman, she may as well have been born on a spaceship.

Brianna and Mackenzie were the queen bees, and they presided over the seventh grade. Brianna was the prettiest, Mackenzie the best at sports. Their favorite hobby was having a boyfriend. Jenny wasn't really interested in a boyfriend, but she still liked hanging out with the guys. Mostly she liked to play soccer and basketball with them after school. She liked to wear jeans and T-shirts instead of makeup and miniskirts.

She had barely introduced herself when Brianna and Mackenzie gave her a code name and started calling her Harriet the Hairy Whore. They told everyone Jenny was hooking up with the boys in the woods behind the soccer field. Jenny knew that being called a slut was the worst thing in the world, no matter where you lived. No one was even kissing yet. It was the lowest of the low.

Brianna and Mackenzie started a club called Hate Harriet the Hore Incorporated. They got every girl to join except two who didn't care. All the members had to walk by Jenny in the hallway and say, "Hhiiiiiiiiii...." They made a long sighing noise to make sure she knew they were sounding out the initials of the club: HHHI. Usually two or more girls would say it and then look at each other and laugh. Sometimes they couldn't even say the whole thing, they were laughing so hard.

Then Brianna got the idea to charge into Jenny as she walked the hallways. The other girls followed suit. Wherever Jenny was between classes, a girl would body slam her, knocking Jenny's books, and sometimes Jenny, to the ground. If someone was watching, they'd pretend it was an accident. Even though Jenny was small for her age, only four foot eleven, she decided to start smashing the others first, figuring they'd stop. They didn't. She ended up with a lot of bruises, missing papers, and an uncanny ability to predict when the bells would ring. There was no teacher in the hallway to see.

She tried to shrug it off the first few days, but by the end of the week, Jenny burned with embarrassment and fear. What had she done? It seemed like Mackenzie and Brianna had suddenly made it their goal in life to ruin her. Nothing like this had ever happened before. In San Diego, she had three best friends. She had always been good at everything but not because it was easy. She strove for success in everything she did. In her head she heard her father's voice: "If you try hard enough, you can do anything." This was her first failure.

It was her fault.

She knew she'd never touched a boy, but maybe there was something really wrong with her. There were two other new girls in seventh grade, and they were doing just fine. They worked hard to fit in, and they did. They bought the same clothes and listened to the same music as everyone else.

Jenny closed her eyes. They also let Mackenzie and Brianna and the others determine who they would be. Jenny didn't want that, at any price. She wanted to keep speaking her mind. She liked her California clothes and Mexican embroidered shirts. Maybe she didn't want to try hard in the ways you had to in seventh grade. Her father was right.

Jenny began to weep quietly in her room not long after she realized there would be no end to her torture. She managed to wait until her homework was done, and then she cried, silent always, her sobs muffled by her pillow. There was no
way
she'd tell her mother, and certainly not her father. She felt nauseous just thinking about telling her parents she was such a reject.

Every day was an endless battle. She was exhausted trying not to cry, stiffening her body against the hallway attacks, sitting through lunch after lunch alone. There was no one else to be friends with in the grade because everyone, the few that there were, was against her. Her cousin was a year ahead of her and felt sorry for Jenny. Sometimes she let Jenny hang out with her clique. It was small consolation that they were the popular group of the eighth grade. In fact, it seemed to make Brianna and Mackenzie even angrier.

One night Jenny's sadness left no room for her fear, and she picked up the phone. Jenny called Brianna, Mackenzie, and a few other girls. She asked each of them, "Why do you hate me?" They denied everything. "But why are you doing the Hate Harriet the Hore club?" she pleaded.

Their voices were light and sweet. "We don't have a Hate Harriet the Hore club!" each one assured her, as though they were telling her the earth was round. They were so nice to Jenny that for a second she didn't believe it was really them. Then she could almost feel her heart surging up through her chest. The next morning, she actually looked forward to getting out of bed. It would be different now.

Then she got to school.

"Hhhiiiiiiiii...!"
Slam.

Jenny blinked back tears and locked her jaw. She hated herself for being surprised. She should have known. The strange thing about it was, even though she was used to it, this time her heart felt like it was breaking open. Brianna and Mackenzie had seemed so genuine on the phone. And Jenny, stupid, stupid Jenny, she muttered to herself, had imagined herself at their lunch table in the back of the cafeteria. "Stupid, stupid, stupid," she repeated through gritted teeth, raising her books as a shield as she made her way into homeroom.

One day, months later, searching through desks after seeing the girls pass it around in homeroom, Jenny found the petition. "I, Mackenzie T., promise to Hate Harriet the Hore forever," it said. Every single girl in the class had signed it, and it was appended with a long list of reasons why everyone should hate her. Jenny's eyes bore into the paper until the words blurred. She suddenly felt dizzy. The weight of her anguish was too heavy. She couldn't take it anymore. Jenny felt like her world was crumbling. She went to the principal.

Mr. Williams called Brianna, Mackenzie, and some of the others into his office. They glared at her for weeks but said nothing. HHHI was officially disbanded.

Jenny struggled through seventh grade alone. Because the meanness of her peers was almost invisible, not one teacher had noticed or intervened on her behalf. Because she was a new student, it was difficult to observe changes in her behavior and character. Her parents had known something was wrong, but had they asked her how she was, Jenny told me, "I would have told them, 'Fine.'"

HHHI never resurfaced and Jenny adjusted well over the next several years. She became captain of the softball team and pep club president, but her pain stayed fresh and hidden as she waited patiently for revenge.

Brianna, her chief HHHI tormentor, had begun dating the most popular boy at Cheyenne High School in fifth grade. That was the way things were, Jenny said. "You pretty much picked who you were going to date when you were ten or eleven and that's who you dated until you left Wyoming." Eric was captain of the basketball team and everything else that was important at Cheyenne. Brianna had lost her virginity to him and wanted to marry him.

Jenny's chance came in the fall of her junior year, when she was asked to manage the boys' basketball team. She quickly became friends with Eric. "I made it my goal to steal him from her, and I did," Jenny said. "I know for a fact it had nothing to do with him. It had everything to do with taking what was important to her." Jenny and Eric dated secretly for a month before Jenny made him call Brianna from her bedroom and break up with her. I asked Jenny how it made her feel.

"I just had this feeling of victory. I wanted to rub it in her face. I felt really good that I had hurt her back," she said. "It's vindictive and it's sad, I know, but to this day I hate this girl and I wanted to hurt her." Today Jenny is thirty-two, and she feels neither shame nor remorse, only the anger that still smolders some twenty years later.

 

relationship and loss

At first glance, the stories of girls not being allowed to eat at the lunch table, attend a party, put their sleeping bag in the middle, or squeeze inside a circle of giggling girls may seem childish. Yet as Carol Gilligan has shown, relationships play an unusually important role in girls' social development. In her work with girls and boys, she found that girls perceive danger in their lives as isolation, especially the fear that by standing out they will be abandoned. Boys, however, describe danger as a fear of entrapment or smothering. This contrast, Gilligan argues, shows that women's development "points toward a different history of human attachment, stressing continuity and change instead of replacement and separation. The primacy of relationship and attachment in the female life also indicates a different experience of and response to loss."
¹²
The centrality of relationship in girls' lives all but guarantees a different landscape of aggression and bullying, with its own distinctive features worthy of separate study.

To understand girls' conflicts, one must also know girls' intimacy, because intimacy and anger are often inextricable. The intensity of girls' relationships belongs at the center of any analysis of girls' aggression. For long before they love boys, girls love each other, and with great passion.