That girl bullies are often likely to be the most socially skilled in a group complicates matters further. Like the popular girls profiled by researchers, these girls are mature and worldly. Less often discussed, however, is their intensely charismatic, even seductive aura. Girls like these have almost gravitational pulls on their targets. The friendship is mesmerizing, and often the target is gripped by dueling desires to be consumed and released by her friend. The target may rationally understand the relationship's problems, nod in agreement at her parents' entreaties to pull away, and then find herself inexplicably drawn to a bully's side. About a close friend who demeaned her and forced everyone she knew to ignore her, Chastity said, "She's the kind of person that whenever you'd meet her, you'd love her to death. She's the sweetest person. She'd hide her attitude so everybody loved her."
NATALIE'S STORY
In Ridgewood, Dr. Laura Fields, the city superintendent of schools, led me through a multipurpose room teeming with children lining up to leave. She strode confidently between the long brown benches, stopping to chat with students here and there: "How are you!...Good to hear it!...Now, don't you think you should close your backpack before you get on the bus? That's a good boy.... What a lovely dress!" Some of the kids waved shyly. Others just stared.
Outside at the football field, I marveled at the crowd already gathered. This was the spiritual center of town. Football was just about religion here, and it was common for town residents, even those without school-age children, to drive forty-five minutes on the interstate to fill the stands at away games. Laura led me up through the bleachers, and I could feel people watching me. After we found seats, Laura began chatting with someone while I sat by awkwardly, queasy as I felt the bleachers sway.
The bleachers creaked as a woman plunked down next to me. Short and stocky, with dyed red hair and acid-washed jeans, a cheerful, hearty voice rose up from her belly. "I'm Susan Patterson, how're you. I'm real excited for you to speak with my daughter, Natalie." So much for blending in. She turned intense eyes on me and gave me a friendly smack on the shoulder, guy-style. "I think she'd be good for you to talk to."
Natalie seemed less sure. In the days that followed, I said hi to her at school and got little more than a fleeting look before her pageboy hair swung back toward the floor, her locker, anyplace that was not me. I wondered if her mom was forcing her to meet with me.
The day of our interview, I slid into a desk next to her. Natalie was thirteen years old and in the eighth grade. She was wearing blue jeans with a matching jacket and a white T-shirt underneath.
Today Natalie would introduce me to a secret, repeat-offender girl bully in Ridgewood. She was the last one you'd pick in a lineup: picture your typical girl-next-door cheerleader captain. Reese had straight A's, a ponytail that swung like a metronome, and a face that would make Scrooge smile. I was introduced to her mother early on, a charming woman with a quick laugh and a reputation for being at the center of all things off the record in Ridgewood.
Natalie grew up with Reese. Their families had been friends, and the girls started playing in preschool. Natalie felt almost worshipful toward Reese, who always had a new game to pretend. She adored the time spent at Reese's house, which always felt more crowded than it really was.
In third grade, Reese started telling Natalie stories about having a brother who died or a pet that didn't exist. She'd come over to Natalie's house and criticize her outfits and the pictures on her bedroom wall. Natalie was hurt but figured if she changed her clothes and stripped her walls, Reese would stop. She didn't. At school, Reese started pretending Natalie wasn't there when they were around other girls, even though at home they were still best friends.
Reese was the girl version of the stealth bomber: she flew low and she was in and out before anyone knew who did it or what happened. Spectacularly sweet, she was one of the first to spring to mind when teachers ticked off a mental list of girls with good reputations. Which made her the last person most people even thought to look at. "She made good grades and didn't talk out in class," Natalie explained. "The teachers saw, oh, Reese and Natalie are friends, so they'd put us together in groups in class. We were quiet and we'd tell each other things."
But whenever they were grouped or paired together, Natalie clammed up. Reese berated and teased her. "I'd be the quietest girl in the grade because I didn't speak out," Natalie said. Although she had once loved to read aloud from her journal in class, Reese began exchanging looks with other girls, so Natalie stopped. Meanwhile, Reese projected an image to their peers of harmony and affection. "She was all the time trying to be my friend."
I asked Natalie if she'd ever spoken out against Reese. She looked at me quizzically. "I thought she was, you know, like the world. She was my best friend." She said this carefully, as if English was not my first language. "I didn't—I was just scared to say something to her because I was afraid she'd get mad at me or dislike me and start talking about me even more." The few moments when Natalie or one of their friends showed signs of resistance, "She tried to make everybody think she was just fine and that it was all me coming up with this stuff in my mind." Reese successfully convinced Natalie that she was not strong enough to fight, even if she'd wanted to. "She took advantage of me and I didn't take up for myself," she told me. "I would let myself believe that she was better than me."
That Natalie hid the problems with Reese from her mother was no surprise. Natalie's downcast eyes were a stark contrast with her mother's easygoing, how-ya-doing personality. Sometimes, when her mother asked if school had been good and Natalie said not really, Susan breezed on to the next subject. She was friends with Reese's mother—looked up to her, in fact—and Natalie never thought her mother would believe her. She was ashamed.
In sixth grade, Reese became close with Drew, who had just moved to town. Reese put Drew through an unusually public torture, and Natalie eventually reached out to her. After watching Drew cry every day at school, Natalie tried to show her that she'd felt the same pain. It wasn't easy. "She was afraid to trust me," Natalie said. "And I was afraid to trust somebody at first, too. I thought I'd never trust anybody again because I put my whole trust in Reese. And she just totally went behind my back and talked about me. She told people everything I had ever told her. So I thought I could never tell anybody anything again. I didn't even tell my mama and my daddy anything."
When I asked Natalie if her friendship with Reese affected her in any way, she was modest. "I think it has affected me just a little," she said. "I used to be loud and funny and everything, but now I barely talk. I used to be the funny person with my friends and everyone would laugh at me. I used to stand out wearing funny clothes but I don't do that anymore because I'm afraid that Reese or somebody would make fun of me or talk about me."
"How does that make you feel?" I asked her.
"When I think about it, it makes me feel like I want to just cry. But I don't because I know that if I cry I'm letting her get to me and I just don't do anything." Natalie had befriended new girls and felt a world of a difference in these new relationships. But fear of new confrontations with Reese lingered.
As she sat before me, Natalie's face was anguished, but the pain was hardly fresh. It seemed stamped there. She had been on the verge of tears the whole time we were talking, reporting the facts with clarity and steadiness.
When we were done, I turned off the tape recorder. I told her how strong and wonderful I thought she was, and how brave. Natalie stood quickly to leave, and I felt intuitively that she would go somewhere else to cry. It was all I could do not to jump out of my chair and hug her, but I knew that was not what she needed. It was what I needed. Listening to her was like looking down into a deep well of sorrow, and the memory of Natalie stayed with me long after I left the building.
Chapter Three
the truth hurts
At 1:15 P.M., my first group of eighth-grade girls at Marymount were looking like they might pass out. It was the right-after-lunch-and-I-need-a-
nap class period. On the floor, the girls were drooping against one wall, refusing to make a circle, leaning into one another like reeds. It was March, and outside there was a hint of spring. Though it was no more than sixty-five degrees, many were wearing shorts or tank tops.
I pulled out the Oreos, and as if on cue, they sat up and began to munch. Relieved by these signs of life, I began the discussion by asking them to describe the perfect girl. They looked at me quizzically.
"Like in magazines. Movies. Dawson's Creek. Stuff like that."
A few hands went up. Hoping to foster a casual atmosphere, I had asked them to speak without raising their hands. Old habits die hard.
"Skinny!" one says.
"Pretty!"
Okay, I thought. And then: "Nice!"
"What do you mean, nice?" I asked, looking up from my notebook.
"She always has friends."
"She never gets in fights."
"Everybody loves her."
So began my understanding of girls' everyday aggression.
"Okay," I said, stalling to think. "So if one of your friends has done something to bug you or make you mad, or sad, do you tell her about it?"
"No!" came a chorus.
"Why?" I asked.
Silence. I waited.
A girl in the corner took a breath. "Because then it's going to cause a big thing."
"What's 'a big thing'?"
"There's going to be a big fight about it," someone else explained.
"Everyone's going to get involved. It's not worth losing your friendship over something small."
"People make stuff up."
"What if," I asked, "you were just telling someone how you felt, because you felt bad? You know, to make yourself—your friendship—feel a little better?"
"Then you might hurt her feelings," one said. Nods. Locking eyes.
"Can you tell someone the truth and not be mean?" I asked.
"The truth hurts," a girl in the corner said quietly. "That's why I lie."
When I set out to write this book, I sought the stories of women and girls who had been targets or aggressors of severe episodes of bullying. Following the received wisdom of scholars and teachers, I conceived of alternative aggressions as behaviors found outside girls' "normal" social structure. When I met with my first groups of girls, I was broadsided with stories of everyday conflict that bore a striking resemblance to their descriptions of bullying.
Girls don't have to bully, at least as far as we have understood the word, to alienate and injure their peers. In fact, the word bullying girl couldn't be more wrong in describing what some girls do to hurt one another. The day-to-day aggression that persists among girls, a dark underside of their social universe, remains to be charted and explored. We have no real language for it.
Girls describe their social communities as worlds in which unresolved conflicts hang like leaking gas in the air, creating a treacherous emotional terrain in which discord is rarely voiced and yet may explode silently with the slightest spark. For many, if not most, girls, every day can be unpredictable. Alliances shift with whispers under cover of girlish intimacy and play. Many girls will not tell each other why they are sad or angry. Instead, they will employ small armies of mediators, usually willing friends who are uncomfortably caught in the middle or eager for the moments of intimacy that result from lending a hand to someone in trouble.
Alternative aggressions, and the nonassertive behavior they suggest, are as embedded in the daily lives of girls as makeup, boys, and media. A girl learns early on that to voice conflict directly with another girl may result in many others ganging up against her. She learns to channel feelings of hurt and anger to avoid their human instigator, internalizing feelings or sharing them with others. She learns to store away unresolved conflicts with the precision of a bookkeeper, building a stockpile that increasingly crowds her emotional landscape and social choices. She learns to connect with conflict through the discord of others, participating in group acts of aggression where individual ones have been forbidden.
In my conversations with girls, many expressed fear that even everyday acts of conflict would result in the loss of the people they most cared about. They believed speaking a troubled heart was punishable. Isolation, they cautioned, was irreversible, and so too great a price to be paid. As a sixth grader told me, "You don't want to say it to them and if you do, it's like, well, you might as well just walk off because they're not going to want to be your friend." Hannah, an Arden seventh grader, explained, "If I tell my friends I'm angry at them, I'll have another enemy. It's a vicious cycle." In a world that socializes girls to prize relationships and care above all else, the fear of isolation and loss casts a long shadow over girls' decisions around conflicts, driving them away from direct confrontation. By taking uncomfortable feelings out of everyday relationships, girls come to understand them as dangerous to themselves and others, worthy of being carefully shielded or perhaps not disclosed at all.
Many girls are afraid of not being able to anticipate the response to their anger, so they resolve to maximize what they can control. One of the reasons girls like to write letters, an eighth grader told me, is that they "help us to organize our thoughts and get it out perfectly. If I say it to her face, I'm gonna break down, mess up my words, say things I don't mean." Some girls described writing letters that they burned or trashed in order to balance feeling angry and preserving friendship. Letters were preferable, eighth-grader Shelley said, "because if you have a conversation, they can see your face."
A one-on-one conversation is scary, an Arden seventh grader said, because "I don't know what she's going to say next. You don't want to lose the fight. You're scared the friendship's going to end. You don't know what they'll say. And if the discussion goes badly, she might get other people involved. That's why I don't talk." You can't just tell someone that they're being mean, her classmate told me. "You think, 'Oh my God,' [she'll] get mad at me, or [she] won't be my friend anymore. People are afraid she'll spread rumors. You don't know what that person's going to think."
The need to consider others' feelings at the expense of their own was a theme that ran through my interviews. No matter how upset they were, these girls said they would rather not hurt someone else's feelings. Their own needs seemed to them utterly expendable. They described shrinking problems and feelings into "little things," calling them "unimportant," "stupid," "not worth a fight," stowing them somewhere inside, an inner room that would one day be too small to contain them.
boom!
I went to Jennifer's house twice before she agreed to speak to me. The first time, I sat drinking tea with her mom, and the eleven-year-old girl's fuzzy slippers hung slightly over the cracked divide between the kitchen and the den. She was checking me out. The second time I visited, she nodded shyly. On the couch in the den, I was pleasantly surprised to find her animated as a dragonfly, hands streaking the air with energy. Rapid-fire, she said, "My friend and I always ask each other if we're mad at each other. Immediately after we go, 'No,' because you don't want to say, 'I'm mad at you.'"
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because then you make the other person feel bad because you know someone's mad at you."
"Is it important that you feel mad?"
"Yeah, but are you supposed to let it out at the person you're mad at?" she asked, as though she really did not know.
"Some people would say yes because your feelings count," I said.
"What about her feelings?" she asked.
"What about them?" I asked.
"I just ... no. We don't talk about this. I don't know if best friends talk about this. This is private." I ceased and desisted.
With twelve-year-old Carmen Peralta, a wry Latina student at a private school in the Northeast, I was asking about what it's like to tell someone you're angry. She said she never did, and I asked why. "Because it sounds weird for one thing! 'Hey, by the way, I'm mad at you!'" she drawled sarcastically. Becoming more serious, she began to stall
. "I won't say, 'I'm mad'—it just—I don't know—I don't like that way of dealing with things because it's weird—just to say, 'I'm mad at you.'...It's kind of like boom!"—Carmen made a huge, satisfying noise—"to them. They're just like, 'What did I do?' And if you say, 'Hey, I need you to know I'm mad at you,' it's just like boom! I think they'll end up thinking less of you." For Carmen, conflict falls like a bomb inside friendship, apparently blowing it to smithereens. Conflict for Carmen is outside words, outside relationship, indeed seems to have no comfortable place anywhere in her life.
Some girls face conflict by appealing to lifelong lessons in being nice. In Mississippi, ten-year-old Melanie was explaining to her classmates why she couldn't tell Kaya she was mad.
"You can't do that!" she cried.
"Why not?"
"Because some people are really sensitive in our school, and if you said something like that, they'd bust out crying."
"But you'd be saying how you felt, right?" I was pushing for a reason.
"But then you'd be hurting some people's feelings."
"But what if you're reeeeeeealllly upset?" I asked, and some girls giggled.
"Sometimes you tell your friends but [sometimes you don't] tell anybody," she decided. Anyway, she said, you'll probably get a chance later to be mad at them. "You'll go up to somebody and say, 'Oh you know, Kaya gets on my nerves. She told me that so and so, and so and so.'"
"But why don't you go up to Kaya and just say, 'Hey, you made me mad!'"
"Because," she said simply, looking at me with cautious eyes, "you want to get back at them."
For most girls, anger and hurt become the elephant in the room. As the feelings grow in size and intensity, so does the challenge of restraint.
Odd Girl Out Page 8