Odd Girl Out

by Rachel Simmons

  The girls' later conflicts would resemble this first one, and as Michelle pushed down with all her might on her own anger, the girls fought more and more. As before, Michelle explained, "If you were mad at her about something, she would turn it around so that it was your fault. It would always be my fault, my fault, my fault."

  "I always thought of it as like a dictatorship," she continued. "Kind of like where she has total control. If you say anything different, then you're wrong and she's right. She doesn't do anything wrong—it's all you."

  Michelle refused to tell Erin how she felt. "No!" she exclaimed. "Because I couldn't say it. I was afraid to say anything." She told Erin she thought they shouldn't be exclusive with each other, which allowed her some distance without as many fights. As Michelle grew closer with girls in another group, the one Erin didn't rule, Erin became fast friends with Jessica, another eighth grader. It made Michelle angry, despite her relief that she was finally away from Erin.

  Hanging out with new girls in eighth grade, away from the hypnotic pull of Erin, Michelle quickly discovered many of them thought Erin was a bitch. Kelly was angry because her ex-boyfriend Denis broke up with her for Erin; she had also not forgotten losing the popularity contest three years earlier. Mira was stewing, too. She had been best friends with Jessica when Erin had cast her spell. Now, watching Jessica and Erin at lunch, she was alone.

  As Michelle grew even closer with the other girls, she realized that she just didn't need Erin anymore. The girl was always thinking about herself. "She'll just be sitting here and everybody'll be getting ready and she'll be like, 'How do I look, you guys? Does this look okay?' Everything's about herself." If Michelle got a new purse, Erin would show off hers. "She has this egotistical thing," Michelle explained.

  So one day, when Erin called to borrow history notes, Michelle found it almost easy to refuse and hang up abruptly. Erin called back "thirty times," but Michelle let the calls go. Although she didn't need Erin, she was still unwilling to fight her. The specter of their past conflicts still haunted Michelle. "She would have turned it on me. She would have made me upset!" she predicted. "She would have told me I was a bad friend. Everything would be my fault and I didn't want to give up because it wasn't my fault!"

  In the meantime, Ashley had begun dating Luke, who still pined for Erin. One day, when Erin was over at his house, Luke kissed her. Erin says she stopped it, but a week later it happened again. Luke told Kelly. Erin told Jessica. As it turned out, Jessica had been nursing a long crush on Luke, and her adoration for Erin began to falter. But like Michelle, Jessica feared saying anything to upset her status as "Erin's everything."

  The next weekend, after Erin scored the winning goal in the field hockey finals, Kelly watched Ashley hug her and noted their increasing closeness. That night, Kelly slept over at Ashley's house with Michelle, and everything changed forever.

  "Ashley," Kelly said somberly. "I just have to tell you."

  "What?" Ashley asked, leaning forward.

  "Erin hooked up with Luke twice while you were going out."

  Ashley's face twitched in shock and she began to cry. Then she started throwing things. "That bitch!" she yelled.

  "This is so it," Kelly said quickly. "We're not talking to her anymore."

  "This is such bullshit!" screamed Ashley.

  "Forget it," Kelly said. "Let me handle this." She picked up the phone and called Erin. "Hi," she said. "You know what? Luke told me about you guys, and Ashley saw the e-mail. She knows everything. Okay? Sorry. I have to go. 'Kay ... bye." She hung up and smiled. "She's really upset," she said. The phone rang, piercing the silence.

  "Don't get it!" Ashley snapped.

  "Don't worry," replied Kelly.

  Finally, a reason to be angry. It was, Michelle added, "a reason Erin couldn't defend." And, she said, "Once one person got mad, it was kind of like everybody did." The next day, Erin called Michelle, who said she couldn't talk and hastily hung up the phone. Then Michelle called Jessica.

  Jessica was just leaving. "And I said, 'Jessica, how do you feel that Erin did that to you?'" Jessica said she didn't know. "I said, 'Jessica, I'm not going to tell anybody anything you say, I just want you to tell me, do you ever feel like you're afraid to get mad at her and you're afraid to talk to her?'" Michelle described her own feelings of fear.

  "That's exactly how I feel!" Jessica cried. She had, Michelle believed, "come to some sort of realization on the phone." Then Jessica stopped taking Erin's calls.

  From then on, Michelle explained, "it was kind of like we had to go around convincing people, saying you don't have to be afraid of her, you know? You don't." When the girls arrived at school on Monday, everyone ignored Erin.

  "We're all sitting together—beaming!—because we're so happy we don't have to have that kind of relationship [with Erin] anymore." Then Erin walked into class, wiping away tears as she sat next to a girl, Michelle recalled, "who she may have talked to once, who was kind of insecure, who was kind of overweight, and all of a sudden she became her friend, because she needed to have someone to sit with." The girls watched Erin spend lunch with people who had always wanted to be her friend, but whom Erin had talked about behind their backs. The sight of Erin eluding the isolation they had used to punish her enraged them. That, Michelle said, "is when it really started."

  Kelly would just laugh at Erin when she walked by. "It was because of Denis," Michelle explained, "because of when Erin and Nicole had excluded [Kelly], and I mean—we were like sticking together." The group became especially tight in Erin's absence. "We got so close and would always be like standing together in the hall, sharing our Erin stories. 'She asked me for this, and I was just like no!' and it felt soooo good because we could finally—like—be—people."

  The girls flooded Erin's e-mail account with angry messages. It seemed that everyone was in on it; even students who had no connection to the incident were volunteering reasons for shunning Erin. Some called her a bitch. Ashley wrote that it made her sick to look at Erin.

  At what point, I asked Michelle, were people planning on talking with Erin, even forgiving her and moving on?

  "Oh, no!" Michelle said, surprised. "Nobody wanted to be friends with her anymore. They just wanted to see her suffer like she had done to everyone else."

  But let's assume, I said, that Erin would do anything to be forgiven, that she'd promise to be a better friend.

  "We knew her. We knew that she wasn't going to be. We were all sick of it and we just wanted to get away from it."

  "What would you have rather happened?" I asked.

  "Well, she was suffering, but she was getting friends. We wanted her to see what it was like. I mean, subconsciously, we wanted her to see what it was like to not have anybody there, because she needed to."

  Every day the girls tallied their sightings of Erin's anguish. They shot her dirty looks when she passed by. "We were like, 'This is brilliant.' We'd just be so happy. Everyone was so happy that it was finally being taken care of."

  "That was the end of it," Erin said, "and they were my world! They were my everything! I didn't care about my family; I didn't care about anyone else but that one group of people. Oh my God."

  We were sitting on Erin's bed talking, and I had promised we would be done in time to watch Dawson's Creek.

  "They loved to see me cry," she recalled. The girls would stand in a circle a few feet from Erin's locker. "Today is going to be so much fun!" they'd crow, casting sidelong glances at Erin. "They would just talk to each other right in front of my face and they wouldn't look at me. They'd be like, 'Come to the bathroom with me?' and I'd walk by in tears."

  When Erin went home, her parents didn't understand. "I would come home and scream, 'Get away!' I was like, my life is over. My life is over."

  Erin had no idea what was going on. She knew she had screwed up, but she didn't understand why everyone was involved. The confusion spun her downward as her grades went from straight A's to straight C's. She'd never needed
help with homework, and now her mother had to sit with her every night and pull the essays out of her. "I could not do anything," Erin said. "I lost all my confidence. They totally ripped me down to nothing. They told me how horrible a person I was. So I was just nothing anymore. I just remember telling myself, 'A month ago you were so happy.'"

  Bewildered at the sheer intensity of her friends' anger, Erin became despondent. The light went out of her. "I wasn't anything anymore because they had made me who I was, so I didn't even know who I was. I was always depressed."

  The hardest moments for Erin were when she saw all of them together, without her. It felt as though she had died and was now a ghost. "I wasn't there. There was no Erin anymore."

  The girls broke into her e-mail account and changed her password to "Slut." Luke broke in and deleted his love letters so he wouldn't look responsible for their kiss. Not that anyone had blamed him to begin with.

  Erin's mother was frantic. The more Erin stayed out of school, "the more she fell apart." Erin was lethargic and depressed. Like a top ceasing to spin, Erin simply stopped doing everything. "She seemed very childlike again. She sort of crumbled in our arms." Diane remembers pleading with her to come to school, coaxing her with anything that came to mind to get her to school before noon.

  By the time they got there, even Diane was filled with dread. "Here were these kids who had spent the night at our house, who had eaten at our house—whatever—and they would act like I wasn't there. It was just so"—she inhaled sharply—"so aggressive! I couldn't understand how they could be so rude to another adult. They were so defiant, so hostile, the look in their eyes was just—I was really—" Her voice broke. "We were devastated for her."

  Diane watched as her daughter wept uncontrollably every night.

  The days Diane couldn't arrive early to be in the car-pool lane when the last bell rang, she'd find Erin alone on the curb, her shadow almost touching her friends', who stood chatting close by. In the car, Erin would dissolve into tears. Embarrassed, she refused to tell her mother what happened with Luke. Diane found a psychotherapist she prayed Erin would confide in and began sending Erin every week.

  "Erin tried to talk to us," Michelle said. "She's the kind of person that no matter how upset she is, she loves herself too much to hurt herself. Everybody knows that about her. She wrote Jessica these e-mails that were like little poems: 'I have no one. I have no life anymore. I lost you.'" Michelle sounded confused. "Like all these random, random things so you're like what is she doing? And we'd see them and we'd be like, that is so funny and we'd like forward them to each other."

  When Erin told a male friend that she wanted to kill herself, he became alarmed and told the other girls. They laughed it off. "She was like, 'I don't want to live anymore!'" Michelle said. "She was doing it all for attention. We knew she wasn't going to."

  One day, as Michelle and Ashley were shelving their trays in the cafeteria, Erin approached. She took a deep breath.

  "I am really, really sorry about what happened with Luke. Please forgive me."

  Michelle shrugged. "That's not what it was about. It was about the kind of friend you were to everybody." They walked off.

  By then, there was no going back. "She was such a bad friend, but I didn't know it," Michelle told me, then paused. "She's like evil!"

  Diane went to the guidance counselor almost every day. "They kept telling me, 'It's going to pass, it's going to pass, believe us, it's going to pass.'" It was only when a boy sent Erin an e-mail that began with "You disgusting whore" that the school called a meeting to set limits on student e-mail. Diane watched helplessly as her daughter took to bed, claiming headaches, crying at night that she wanted to die.

  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.