Odd Girl Out

by Rachel Simmons

  When I first started interviewing girls, I'd planned to organize their stories according to the qualities I assumed girls got punished for: the differently abled, the overweight, the poor, the haplessly uncool. I had not expected to find that girls became angry with each other for quite the opposite reason.

  As most any girl knows, one of the worst insults is to be called a girl who "thinks she's all that." This girl, loosely defined as conceited, is considered a show-off, obnoxious, or full of herself. By fifth grade, girls are intimately familiar with "all that," an epithet that grows with them into adulthood, gradually evolving into the more genteel belief that "she thinks she's better than me."

  How can you tell a girl who thinks she's all that? Well, it all depends.

  The first people Stephanie met after switching schools were Marissa and Lori. Best friends since preschool, the girls made an odd couple: Marissa was the bubbly, magazine-cutout-cute cheerleader. Lori was stick thin and scrappy. Alphabetized seats in freshman homeroom fated Marissa and Stephanie to friendship.

  Stephanie was pretty. She was no cover girl, but she had majestic height and a head of perfectly blow-dried, blond-streaked hair that made her, she said wryly, the "preppiest girl in school." She was also smart and a talented actor. Coming from the tiny, bland Catholic school where she'd been cooling her heels for the last eight years, Stephanie still felt queasy about starting at a much bigger place. Finding Marissa and Lori was a huge relief. When Stephanie got a crush on Josh after he headed a soccer ball into her locker, she sensed that things might just end up right.

  On a Saturday night in late fall, Stephanie was invited for her first sleepover at Lori's. The three girls holed up in a makeshift mountain of pillows, sleeping bags, and junk food. While they were watching a movie and doing their nails, Lori's brother Steve came into the den with his friend Jeremy. Steve sat next to Stephanie on the floor. Everyone talked and joked for a while, the boys threw handfuls of popcorn at the girls, Lori got angry at Steve, and the boys left. The girls finished their movie and fell asleep on the TV-room floor.

  On Monday, after study hall, Stephanie stood very still before her locker sensing something might have changed in a way she didn't understand. She felt dread. She opened her locker door. No notes from Marissa and Lori. She went to the bathroom. No one waiting for her there as usual. Stephanie drifted through the afternoon classes obsessing silently over what could be wrong, and why.

  She decided to sleep on it. The next day, Marissa and Lori ignored her during homeroom, and her eyes nearly burned out of her head trying to hold their gaze. Later that morning, two girls informed Stephanie that people had been talking. Something was going on behind her back. Still, no one had spoken to her. Marissa and Lori were nowhere to be found. Yet everyone seemed in the know. Stephanie was out, gone from the group. No one would acknowledge her. She was invisible.

  By fifth period, Stephanie was reeling. She didn't understand what had happened or why, only that she had no control over it. No friends. She slouched, sobbing and gasping, on the linty rug by her locker, hiding her face in her coat sleeves. What was going on? Was it because a geeky senior had asked her to the prom and she was only a freshman? (She'd said no!) Was it that she tried out for the play? Had Marissa not been joking when she'd called her a copycat for buying the same Gap pants? Maybe she'd been trying too hard. Maybe she needed to back away from people so they didn't get mad at her so quickly.

  Soon Stephanie learned the truth. The whispers found her in the cafeteria as she sat alone behind a crowded table: At Lori's house she had flirted with Steve. Marissa had a crush on him and was furious. Stephanie was too stunned to move.

  She had not flirted with Steve. She'd never meant to, anyway. It was Josh she thought constantly about. They knew it! What did it mean that she had flirted? What had she done, and when? And if she didn't know the answer, how would she ever know if she was doing it again?

  No one would tell her. For the rest of the year, Marissa and Lori pummeled Stephanie with cruel, invisible abuse. On Valentine's Day, they sent her flowers from Josh. When Stephanie called to thank him, he was clueless and she died of embarrassment. The girls threatened to tell Stephanie's parents she smoked if she ever spoke to Steve again. When Stephanie did well on a test, they told people she cheated. They quietly advised the teacher to keep an eye on her. Lori wrote a letter to an enemy of Stephanie's, telling her Stephanie had called her ugly names, and the girl threw Stephanie against the wall, stuck her face up close, and threatened to kill her. Lori wrote a sexually explicit letter to Josh and signed Stephanie's name.

  Now twenty-nine, Stephanie was sitting on a couch in her Washington, D.C., apartment, her mitt-sized mutt, Buddy, next to her. Sensing as only dogs can that I was there to ask tough questions, Buddy had indicated we were not going to be friends. Perched on a barstool, my feet tucked as high as I could get them, I asked Stephanie how her parents had handled it. She sighed.

  "Do people get upset when they talk to you about this?" she asked.

  "Sometimes."

  "Okay. Because I'm getting upset." I offered her a tissue, which I had learned to carry with me. The dog growled. I curled my feet tighter around the stool as I told Stephanie that my closest friends waited years to confide their most painful stories. She continued.

  Stephanie told me that she waited until after college to tell anyone about her experience. I was only the second person to know, but if it would help another girl, she'd do it. "I wouldn't take any amount of money to be fifteen again. Ever," she said, settling cross-legged on her couch. "I'm ready. I'm totally ready." She continued her story.

  Over the next weeks and months, Stephanie refused to tell her parents. She didn't want them to worry or to see the punishment she was being forced through. Plus, she had friends from a nearby public school, so she never seemed as alone as she felt. Instead, she started dieting and exercising obsessively. "I thought if I lost twenty pounds it would all get better, you know?" It also seemed to Stephanie that if she could hide what was going on, it would all be less real. "If you handle this enough and if you just keep it inside, if you don't actually say out loud that everybody hates me, it's not true. You know what I mean? You build the armor around yourself."

  But slowly, Stephanie turned inward as her confidence and self-esteem withered. Since she didn't understand what she'd done, since there had been no fight, no moment of confrontation, she decided it could be only her fault, that her habit of saying anything on her mind was a mistake. She talked too much; she was a flirt. The answer, she decided, was to disappear.

  "I blamed myself for speaking. For confiding so much in them. For letting them know so much about me," she said. Stephanie no longer trusted people. "I saw the negative in everything people said to me." She stopped sleeping. She quit the swim team after she had an anxiety attack during a relay race. She left the house wearing her new team jacket and then tried to lose it at school. She didn't look anyone in the eye, a habit that would take years to unlearn. Fearing she'd be dissected by the other girls for wearing loafers, or a cheaper brand of sweater, or unmatched colors, it was all she could do to get dressed in the morning. When her mother bought sweaters for her uniform and Stephanie feared they were too loud, she wore them out the door and removed them in the school bathroom, shivering through the day.

  "I did anything and everything to just try to be [unobtrusive]," she told me. "I didn't want to have anything. I didn't want anything to draw attention to myself at all."

  If she found herself having feelings for a guy, Stephanie was terrified that someone would find out. "I didn't look twice at them," she told me. All she could think about was what people would say if they saw her. "I just closed down from people."

  During this period, Stephanie began remembering the month before her life changed. She had never thought twice when Marissa and Lori were being rude to her. One time, the two girls had given each other the names of girls in a popular band, but Stephanie didn't get one. The week before t
he sleepover, they'd chalked all over the homeroom blackboard that she loved Josh, humiliating her. "We're just playing with you," they'd said. "It was always, 'We're just playing with you,'" Stephanie told me. "'Don't be so uptight.' 'Don't be such a tight ass.'"

  She recalled how some weeks before, at a school dance, a hot guy from the boys' school had come up to her and asked if she wanted to dance. "All right," Stephanie had said. "Well, I don't," he sneered, laughing as he walked away. Earlier that week at a softball game, Stephanie had told Marissa and Lori she thought the guy was cute. She'd been so sure that letting it all slide would be easier than confronting them. She had forgiven them immediately. "I just never saw the signals," she explained.

  Marissa and Lori played down the prank at the dance, making light of it. "They were like, 'Oh, Stephanie, we just thought you'd laugh.'" Fifteen years later, Stephanie told me, "I remember what I was wearing. I remember what it smelled like. I remember what song was playing. I remember everything about that moment. I remember every single time I saw him after that I could not speak."

  Stephanie coped by creating what she calls an "alter personality." Monday through Friday she was tortured and afraid. Friday nights she went out with friends from another school and appeared to be having a blast. But the stress at school literally consumed her from within. At fifteen, she was diagnosed with an ulcer. Her parents were astonished. "So my mother's saying, 'What, doctor, why does she have an ulcer? She's fifteen years old,'" Stephanie recalled. "'Why is she puking and why is she throwing up food, and why [are] burps ... coming out of her body that smell like ninety-year-old eggs that have been cracked open?'"

  Someone suggested Stephanie see a psychologist. For twelve weeks, at the end of each forty-five-minute session, her mother thrust a wad of bills at the doctor as Stephanie watched. "She said she didn't want to write a check to a therapist, because she told me she didn't want it to come back and haunt me that I had seen someone." The weekly ritual did little to encourage Stephanie to talk about what was haunting her. Nor did it assure her that it was not her fault to begin with.

  It all ended as quickly as it began. One day, the girls simply lost interest. But in the eerie silence that lingered in their absence, Stephanie only intensified picking apart everything she'd ever done in an effort to understand what triggered the nightmare.

  Alone, Stephanie wandered through the halls at the beginning of sophomore year. The lockers and the rug were the same, but she knew she'd changed. "I didn't trust people at all ... if they were nice to me, I didn't trust them at all. If one of the popular girls said 'Stephanie, I like your hair,' I thought they were being, like taking pity on me, like 'Oh, she's the big loser,' and rather than just being, 'Yeah, you have cool pants on and they're nice and everybody likes them.'...I didn't trust anybody with any of my secrets. No one. No one knew anything that I thought, [it] like had to be kept close.... I remember kissing someone at a dance at the end of that year, like the last dance of the school year, and being literally petrified to the point where it wasn't even healthy, because like what are people going to say if they saw me kissing, and I don't even remember who it was. I closed down from people.... Even when you think it's over...."

  By the end of sophomore year, Stephanie convinced her parents that the school didn't challenge her academically. She asked to transfer to the other public school, and they agreed.

  At the new school, Stephanie became popular so swiftly that when she told me about it, she averted her eyes as though she thought I wouldn't believe her. By the end of October, she had half the junior class partying at her house on her birthday. The change was as instant as it was unbelievable. "I didn't understand it; I didn't try. I didn't know where it came from, and I was really, you know, becoming friends with people." Still guarded, she deflected her new friends' questions about transferring from her old school with the same answer: the classes had been a disappointment.

  When Stephanie was invited to a ten-year reunion at the school she'd left, she mulled it over. "There was a part of me that hoped... I could show up and be like, yeah, I'm a consultant and I live on my own and I have a great life and I feel fantastic, and I love every partof my body, I love every part of my skin, I love everything I do. And you know not because I'm faking it, not because I'm pretending, but because I'm genuinely, I'm like okay, everything's not perfect, but it ain't that bad. And that's how I feel right now. And I would love to, kind of like, show it to them, and that I can't believe it's still there. That the wounds were so deep fifteen years ago ... I still wanted to kind of like say, you know, fuck you, look how cool I am now. You were totally wrong. And you have no idea how deep the wounds were. I didn't."

  Despite what happened, Stephanie told me she is most grateful for the women in her life. "Women," she said, "are the strongest people in the world. Everything we do is harder and I really believe that. I think women are incredible creatures." Stephanie credits the women in her childhood for teaching her to hold fast to her own self-worth, no matter the obstacles. Thinking often of what she "owe[s] to the girls coming after me," she volunteers frequently with children. "I feel," she said, "like I have to always work with some connection to children for the rest of my life, simply because I think it's so important to tell them our stories and to witness what they're talking about and really make them feel comfortable talking about whatever they think is important." And it's women, she reminded me, who gave her back the strength to trust again. About her best friends, she said, "I know that I could give them my wallet and car keys and my dog and my boyfriend and I would get everything back."

  As I discovered with the girls I interviewed, every clique can draw its own invisible lines. Not surprisingly, it is often the new girl in class who unwittingly crosses them, triggering resentment in her peers. Listen to Megan and Taylor, two ninth-grade classmates talking about their best friend Jenny when she first switched schools.

  "Remember," Megan said, "when Jenny first came from [the school] where she was, like, the shit? And she came and before she made any other friends she had already gotten this cocky attitude. People didn't even know her. We were just talking about this—remember what a bitch she was?"

  "Yeah." Taylor nodded. "She had so much confidence, too. And you come to a new situation, it's just like, why is she doing that? She has no place—"

  "No right!" Megan interjected.

  "—to be doing that. I remember before Jenny came she was telling me that she knew so many people. She acted like she knew everything. I don't know. That made me feel like, gosh, I don't know anybody. I don't have any friends. It's like, excuse me, what do you think you're doing?"

  Or listen to a group of ninth graders in Mississippi, where I asked, "How do we feel about a girl who walks into the room who we don't know and who's pretty?"

  "We automatically feel a hate towards her," Keisha said immediately.

  "We feel offended," Toya offered.

  "She's the most attractive person—," said Melissa.

  "And she's new and she's going to be getting all the attention," Torie finished.

  "We want her to be less confident so she won't talk to our boys," Keisha said. "Somebody new come in, they threatened by what they are. Look at her, this and that. She's going to take my friends, she's going to take my man."

  I asked, "Do girls want other girls to be confident in general?"

  "No," came a chorus.

  "No." It was Keisha.

  Why not?

  "Girls don't because they're threatened by what they are."

  Every class, every school, pieces together its own definition of the girl who thinks she's all that. "All that" changes meaning depending on the events of the week. The school culture plays a role: in poorer schools, "all that" is often about luxury items like acrylic nails, hair extensions, and new sneakers. In wealthier schools, it may be more about flirtatiousness or conceit. The label cuts a wide swath across lines of class and race; no matter where I went, whether or not I brought it up, it always found i
ts way into our discussions, and to great gusts of enthusiasm.

  In spite of the legion definitions of "all that," there is one bottom line. There are rules, and the girl who thinks she's all that breaks them. They are the rules of femininity: girls must be modest, self-abnegating, and demure; girls must be nice and put others before themselves; girls get power by who likes them, who approves, who they know, but not by their own hand. Break these rules, and "all that" looms on the horizon.

  Here is the common denominator for "all that," the one that never changes: The girl who thinks she's all that is the girl who expresses or projects an aura of assertiveness or self-confidence. She may assert her sexuality, her independence, her body, or her speech. She has appetite and desire. The girl who thinks she's all that is generally the one who resists the self-sacrifice and restraint that define "good girls." Her speech and body, even her clothes, suggest others are not foremost on her mind.

  The "all that" label flummoxes girls. On the one hand, they know it's not cool to be conceited, to think you're better than others. On the other hand, they sometimes find themselves jealous of the ones who do. "It's bad if you think you're skinny because then you're full of yourself. But if you're fat? Then you're bad," said Sarah, a Marymount eighth grader.

  Our culture has girls playing a perverse game of Twister, pushing and tangling themselves into increasingly strained, unnatural positions. We are telling girls to be bold and timid, voracious and slight, sexual and demure. We are telling them to hurry up and wait. But in the game of Twister, players eventually wind up in impossible positions and collapse.

  Game over. In a culture that cannot decide who it wants them to be, girls are being asked to become the sum of our confUsion. Girls make sense of our mixed messages by deciding to behave indirectly, deducing that manipulation—the sum of power and passivity—is the best route to power. The media reinforces this culture of indirection, prompting duplicity and evasion in girls.