Odd Girl Out

by Rachel Simmons

  Her best efforts notwithstanding, Meredith at Arden thinks it's useless to hold in her anger. "When you don't let one of your friends know, it builds up inside you. There's bitterness inside you. It's hard for them and for you." Charlotte agreed. "You can't make the feelings go away. If it's hidden it gets stronger and it gets harder andharder to hold in."

  One student told me when she felt angry she kicked her dog. Plenty more said they hit their siblings. Some students I interviewed described feeling depressed as they tried to sequester their anger. Others told stories of escalating fury. "You get angrier and angrier when you can't hold it in. Then you explode," said Emily at Marymount. "It gets bigger and you find even more stuff to dislike about that girl." Disturbingly, the more intense the problem, the more likely a girl may pretend that everything's cool. Said Nancy at Marymount, "I was so angry I couldn't tell her about it. It was easier not to say anything and for her not to know I was so angry."

  Fear of speaking face to face usually ends up worsening girls' conflicts by forcing them to involve third parties. When Shelley couldn't get Sarah to talk directly about the problem between them, Shelley began asking others what was wrong with Sarah. But to the ignorant observer—say, Sarah—Shelley looked like she was going behind her back. Sarah was enraged. "But I'm getting advice!" Shelley exclaimed, echoing innumerable girls I spoke with. A Mississippi fifth grader saw it as damage control: "If you tell the person you're angry at yourself, they're going to be madder quicker than if you tell someone else. And then later you have time to think what you're going to say and what you're going to do." A sixth grader from the same school described it this way: "You're scared the person will take it the wrong way, so you try out different versions and opinions. Otherwise, you might get it wrong and make it worse." Unwittingly, they are doing just that.

  Other girls believe anything is preferable to the loss of a relationship. In their minds, they are merely choosing a lesser evil. "Girls can break each other," Hannah said simply. "Instead, they cool off by gossiping behind their backs. Otherwise you could end the friendship." Some girls reported trying to circumvent the conflict process by expecting their friends simply to know, like mind readers or superheroes with X-ray vision, that they were upset. Linden sophomore Lily Carter, whose quiet thoughtfUlness gave the impression of her being far older than she really was, laughed shyly as she handed me a tiny pink journal that she promised would detail the social chaos of her middle-school years. She had already flagged the pages with yellow Post-it notes, and in the very first entry of seventh grade she wrote, "It's hard having my feelings bottled up inside. I'm a sensor. I sense things and give people hints to how I'm feeling." She later noted:

  It's strange kinda feeling that the people you've been friends with so long can't get the hints I give. You'd think they'd know. When I'm not with them, they NEVER ask if I'm mad at them or try to talk to me. They just ignore me, as if I don't exist or like "thank heavens she's gone." I'm MISIRABLE [sic]!

  Like a boat adrift at sea, Lily was sending distress messages no one could hear. The more she used indecipherable speech and gesturing to communicate, the more alone and abandoned she felt.

  When silent pleas are ignored, a girl's despair can turn swiftly to anger. Many girls reported feeling indignant because their friends didn't know how they felt. These girls felt it should be obvious from the clipped tone of their voices, the terseness of their notes, the nights they didn't call. Yet their friends never responded. And as the girls silently willed their friends to know their inner feelings, their rage doubled when their friends didn't.

  not my fault

  Why not just take the girl aside and tell her calmly, in a nice way, what's bothering you? It's a question countless parents, guidance counselors, and bullying experts have asked. So did I.

  "I try that," a Linden ninth grader told me anxiously, "but she tells me something I did wrong and then it's my fault." It was a comment I would hear over and over again, from girls of all ages. "She'll turn it around," "she'll make it about me," or "she'll get everyone on her side." Because so many girls lack facility with everyday conflict, expressions of anger make listeners skittish and defensive. The sound of someone upset feels like the first sign of impending isolation, a kind of social thunder rumbling in the distance.

  For these girls, absorbing anger is just as frightful as voicing it. The idea that they may be "at fault" or "wrong" makes them uneasy, and it can breed panic and impulsive decision making. In many cases, they grasp for whatever will move the harsh spotlight away from them and onto someone else; sometimes, using alliance building (explored later in the chapter), they grasp for the girl who will stand with them and assure them of continuous, unconditional friendship. Raised in a culture that prizes sweetness, what feels right to these girls is an anxious scramble to remain the "good" girl; to hold up a mirror to their friend and, instead of listening, point out a past infraction. Needless to say, such conflicts escalate swiftly, often leaving both girls filled with regret and fear.

  i'm sorry

  The surface of a girl fight can be silent and smooth as a marble. You know that if you've ever been the last person to find out someone's mad at you. Many girls use double doses of distance and silence to announce their anger, leaving defendants clueless about what they've done. Beneath the surface, of course, is another story.

  Girls approach the rituals of fighting and peacemaking with an eerie rigidity. For many, the shared knowledge that they are "in a fight" is much easier than actually going to the trouble of having one. Freyda and Lissa's "fight" may entail passing each other in the hallway silently for days before anyone speaks. No matter that the source of their conflict is utterly trivial and that in the silence between them the conflict will swell, taking on a life of its own. As one girl waits for the other to give in and say she's sorry, both girls may lose track of why they are fighting at all. "When [girls are] angry, they won't listen, and if you don't talk, [girls will] build up with anger and then you won't remember why you're in a fight," explained a Sackler sixth grader. "Sometimes it's over, but you have to keep going," an Arden sixth grader remarked. "You don't want to give up. You don't want to drop it. You don't want to be the loser."

  When the fight is concluded, one girl has usually surrendered and apologized—via note, messenger, e-mail, instant message, or in person—while the other has "won." It is not uncommon for girls, especially preadolescents, to avoid processing what happened beyond the immediate apology and relief. Many sit on the sidelines of their own discord, skirting the substance of conflict and instead clinging to process—to the rituals of a fight's beginning, middle, and end. Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan observed in girls an uncanny ability to say "I'm sorry" and give conflicts "almost fairy-tale-like happy endings, so that strong feelings of pain and indignation end abruptly with this final act of attrition."20

  So the denouement is often as troubled as the fight itself. The prime directive for girls is to maintain the relationship at any cost; this, along with the accompanying fear of a lost relationship, is what drives almost every step of a fight. Sorry may be a universal code word for a truce, but it is often perfunctory and swift, casual and automatic, like saying "bless you" when someone sneezes. However it is delivered, via written, cyber, or human medium, sorry is a razor-sharp, clean slice through a fight, shutting it down as abruptly as pulling the plug on a blaring stereo. And because this perfunctory apology often comes when a fight has not yet played itself out, because it is driven more by the fear of a lost relationship than the need to clear the air, sorry is often a purely procedural event, calling for peace while the source of the conflict still festers, tucked away like a genie stuffed into a bottle, stewing unresolved until the next trigger comes.

  One girl recalled her usual "make-up" line: "Let's just be friends. I can't understand why we got in such a stupid fight." Steering clear of the details, a sixth grader told me, avoids being brought too close to the precipice of her own anger. "Someone might say the w
rong thing again," she explained. Others simply can no longer endure the isolation. "I didn't want her to stay mad at me," her classmate explained, "so I'd just say sorry." Anyway, another girl offered, if you wait it out, "your anger just melts away." A Ridgewood eighth grader said, "You forget about what you're mad about because you don't want to lose the friendship." Still another recalled an erstwhile friend who bullied her mercilessly, then approached her at school and inexplicably apologized. "It just happened," she said. "Sorry."

  Carmen Peralta said being direct with friends doesn't work for her, since everyone she knows gives knee-jerk apologies instead of really talking about their feelings. "When a person tells you [she's angry], it makes you feel like you're going to say sorry automatically—automatically, not thinking. But if you don't say, 'I'm mad at you,'" she said, and instead speak without words, forcing the person to wonder why you are acting strangely around her, "the person will actually think about what [she's] doing wrong."

  Sometimes Carmen does apologize, but she can't stand it that she's always the one to say it first. "Sometimes when I say, 'I'm sorry,' [it's because] I just feel more guilty [not because I] understand what the person's saying. I just figure, 'What the hell, I'll say I'm sorry and make it all better.' I don't think that does make it all better," she added, shrugging, "because I'll probably still act the way that's annoying the person."

  Under these social conditions, a cycle gets put into motion. Old conflicts are printed indelibly into memories and, unresolved, are summoned for use in the next conflict. One of the most common grievances I heard from girls was: "We remember everything. We never forget." One girl explained why: "Boys duke it out. Girls, they don't finish [the fight]. It grows bigger. And there's another fight and the next one's huge. That's what leads to people not being friends anymore." A Sackler sixth grader said, "You go back to these teeny tiny things that you didn't talk about before. Then it gets bigger." Lisa, at Arden, said, "Girls always look back at what you did the last time."

  just kidding

  Girls who want to bypass conflict entirely may turn to other behavioral pathways. Humor is an especially popular way to injure a peer indirectly. Joking weaves a membrane of protection around the aggressor as she jabs at a target. A sixth grader described a classmate who easily got away with teasing. "She'd say something, the teacher would kind of look, and she's like, 'I was just kidding!'" At Linden, students talked about the moment in which teasing crosses over into insult. "Slut is the worst insult," said Erica. "Ho is said easily. Like, 'That's such a ho outfit.'" When the jostling goes into shaky territory, someone quickly exclaims, "We were just kidding!"

  Rarely, if ever, does the targeted girl disagree. The fear of being called hypersensitive—Can't you take a joke?—is enormous. Nobody wants to hang out with someone like that, and everyone knows it. "What's the big deal?" can sting when you're trying to act cool. "When a girl is the butt of all jokes, she wants to tell her friends it hurts her," sixteen-year-old Ellie said. "She thinks, 'I know they're not doing it to hurt me.' And they deny it. But it beats at your self-esteem."

  The feeling of being crazy plagues the target of these "jokes," as she must choose between the sting of her own feelings and what she wants to believe about her friends. Believing a friend while ignoring the hum of her own instinct is an important example of how a girl can "give up or give over [her] version of reality to those who have the power to name or reconfigure [her] experience," a major symptom of girls' loss of self-esteem observed by Brown and Gilligan.21

  Fear of reprisal is not the only deterrent to speaking up. Tasha Keller had just gotten her learner's permit, and she was scarfing down a bagel at a deli as we talked about how she responds when girls use jokes to cover their true feelings.

  "In the end you see how foolish it is to get upset," she said, her words muffled with chewing.

  "Even though someone's being nasty?" I asked.

  "If someone's joking around, you're not supposed to think it's such a big thing."

  "Even if someone hurts your feelings?"

  "If someone told you something that hurt your feelings, would you think that's worse than being beaten up? The bigger thing would have been if someone's beating you up at school. That's what you think of a bully as." She was practically lecturing me now. "You don't think of it as someone who's..." She paused, searching to describe the phenomenon that has for so long remained unnamed—"nicely abusing you also."

  Some mainstream psychologists view the ritual of comic or casual peer insults as formative to child development. University of California at Berkeley professor Dacher Keltner argues that "teasers convey that they are joking through laughter, knowing looks and nudges, and tone of voice."22 Here girls' social world is again seen through a male lens. With access to a much wider range of opportunities for direct aggression, boys' use of humorous one-upping can be clearly distinguished from "real" or serious moments of anger. For girls, whose aggressions are frequently conveyed in body language, and who mostly share in common the need to sequester anger, the use of humor serves a different purpose. "A lot of times," thirteen-year-old Jasmine told me, "what you say when you're joking is really what you mean but you're too afraid to say it." And, she added, "humor doesn't work unless both people know it's true."

  ganging up

  "It's weird how time erases things," muses the once-popular, now-outcast Julie in the film Jawbreaker.

  "Time doesn't erase things," replies the once-outcast, now-popular Fern. "People erase things."

  "People erase people." Julie sighs.

  Nothing launches a girl faster, or takes her down harder, than alliance building, or "ganging up." The ultimate relational aggression, alliance building forces the target to face not only the potential loss of the relationship with her opponent, but with many of her friends. It goes like this: Spotting a conflict on the horizon, a girl will begin a scrupulous underground campaign to best her opponent. Like a skilled politician, she will methodically build a coalition of other girls willing to throw their support behind her. Friends who have "endorsed" her will ignore the target, lobby others for support, or confront the target directly until she is partly or completely isolated. "You kind of declare war in your own way," explained Daniella, a sixth grader.

  Ganging up is the product of a secret relational ecosystem that flourishes in an atmosphere where direct conflict between individuals is forbidden. By engaging in conflict as a group, no one girl is ever directly responsible for her aggression. Anger is often conveyed wordlessly, and the facade of the group functions as an eave under which a girl can preserve her "nice girl" image. The loser usually ends up isolated from others, giving her exactly what she fears conflict begets: relational loss. The specter of isolation is often enough to make most people "forget" their angry feelings.

  Girls use alliance building to short-circuit the link expected between anger and the loss of relationship. Victoria, interviewed by Brown and Gilligan, explains that when people get mad it helps to "pass [their feelings] on to someone else and it will keep on going around so everyone can pick corners." Kenya, a Ridgewood sixth grader, explained, "They are mad at their friend, and their friend's mad at them, and they need to go find another friend and get to know them better and tell them about their problem, and maybe that will help another friendship to start." In this way, alliance building becomes an event of friendship. It provides a way for girls to displace their aggression while remaining connected to others. No matter how intense the fight, a girl is assured of a friendship that will outlast it; the girls who rally to her side promise her that with their presence. In this way, the trials of conflict are transformed into a series of relationships to be negotiated, a skill at which girls excel.

  Nikki, an eighth grader from Marymount, described how it works: "If I'm mad at someone, it's just a lot easier to tell everyone else and turn them against the person because then I'm the one who's right. If you just tell the person, one-on-one, then the two of you are out there to be judged by th
e whole grade, and you can't know if you are going to be the one who's considered right by the others."

  During alliance building, discussions spread like wildfire through circles of friends, growing in intensity until they dominate the day. "First people tell each other; then they use the phone, then the Internet; it gets bigger and bigger; they cut and paste conversations [from instant messages]," recalled thirteen-year-old Rebecca at Marymount. One girl wins, her classmate Maria noted, when she "gets people not to like the other one."

  Another girl described it this way: "I think it was mostly just like, nobody can get mad at me for something. I was the good friend. I wasn't the problem. I am like best friends with all of these people now that I didn't used to be friends with. I have everything that she thought she had. It was just like a sense of empowerment."

  Alliance building also conforms to girls' tendency to stockpile old conflicts. The aggressor's strategy is to appeal to those who have a history with the target. Particularly where girls have known each other for many years, the aggressor can plumb a rich history of relational trouble.

  Alliance building was in full swing among the Mississippi fifth graders. Danika explained, "Girls try to get information from you about your other friend, [who] is their enemy. Such as, do you like so and so?" I asked how it works.

  "They take [the information] from you and say, 'Thank you.' Then you say you have to be right back, that you're going to see somebody, and you go tell [your friend]. It's just like collecting information from the enemy." The potential foot soldiers have usually been waiting for the right opportunity. Beccy explained, "One person can have a problem, talk to one person, and she's got something she remembers from last week."

  This is classic indirection, since it allows girls to hold the conflict at arm's length as they watch others fight it. Girls have multiple incentives to become embroiled in each others' conflicts. First, alliance building offers a chance for girls to belong, even briefly, to an ad hoc clique. Jumping on another girl's bandwagon to show support in her time of conflict affords a rare moment of inclusion and comfort. Nikki remarked, "People don't know what we're fighting about, but they want to be in it. They want to be part of the gossip." Said her classmate Mallory, "It gives you something to belong to, and inclusion is such a big deal." Since the girl coordinating the alliance is usually vulnerable, stepping in with support is an opportunity to be a friend while racking up a future favor for when your turn inevitably rolls around. Needless to say, effective foot soldiers can take leaps up the social ladder. "If you take sides," Rachel explained, "you can become popular through them and be their friend."