Odd Girl Out

by Rachel Simmons

  Indeed, some girls describe a kind of exhilaration derived from excluding one of their own, which bears a disturbing similarity to the joy of close friendship. Michelle, profiled in chapter three, described the mesmerizing hold Erin had on her when they first met. Erin was like "a drug almost.... She says everything that you want her to say and she acts like she's such a good friend and acts like you're the best thing ever to happen to her, and you're kind of excited because you're like insecure and you're her everything. That's what people generally want to be. They want to be important to somebody else."

  Later, Michelle explained her clique's retaliation against Erin in nearly identical terms. "It was amazing to be able to let it go when everybody else was, so you weren't by yourself. It was like you had control over her, which was just like the best feeling." She added, "I know that it had to do with having a sense of power that I'd never felt before.... 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 have everything that she thought she had. It was just like a sense of empowerment. I didn't need anybody, like I had everything I needed."

  Both of Michelle's accounts emphasize the rush she felt when her connections to others seemed unbreakable, when the specter of isolation was at bay. In these moments, friendship feels pure, unthreatened, and free of insecurity.

  musical chairs

  Lisa was early, in time to watch me spill coffee on myself jiggering the key in the door to the room where we'd planned to meet. Athletic and dark-eyed, with a ponytail of raven hair that curled and frayed at the ends, she watched me quietly from beneath a thick arc of bangs. As we sat down to chat in a parlor on her college campus, her words were as spare and sharp as her looks.

  Lisa spent her first three years in school as the girl everyone pretended not to see. From the first days of kindergarten at a small Catholic school in New Jersey, she was alone on the playground. At recess she would tarry behind a large metal box and stare at her reflection, holding her coat at different angles. "If my coat touched the ground," she recalled to me, "I would be a princess, but if it didn't, I wasn't. That was my whole world. I was either a princess or nothing." Through the end of second grade, Lisa would go home after school and cry in her room. She performed poorly in class, and teachers warned her parents of possible developmental delays.

  Lisa convinced her parents to transfer her to a public school, where she got straight A's and found social respite. Two years later, she moved on to a large middle school, a feeder for several area public elementaries. Barely a day passed before Lisa's stomach tightened in that familiar knot. "I saw the same stuff happening. Girls being mean to other girls. But this time," she said evenly, eyes fixed on me, "I was going to be the one to be mean."

  Lisa met Karen the second week, when she successfully faked needing a tissue to pass Karen a note from Jason. Karen smiled gratefully and passed her a note. It said, "Thanks! What school are you from?" with a smiley face and bubble letters. When the girls sat together that day at lunch, it was clear Karen had been popular at her old school. You couldn't deny the special electricity she gave off. Lisa felt an uncomfortable sense of—what was it? luck? guilty pleasure?—whenever they were together.

  "I always thought she was cooler than me, and being mean was something we did together," Lisa told me. "It made us better than everyone else." The girls filled their lunches and study halls with notes, gossip, giggling, and furtive glances at other girls. They started the We All Hate Vicki Club, drafted a petition, and convinced the whole school to sign it. The chubby girl in chorus was next; they wrote a song about how she was fat and unloved, called her a prostitute, wouldn't look at her while she sang. The girl didn't come back to school after spring break.

  For Lisa, meanness was as much a part of middle school as meals and morning announcements, as basic and oppressive as the stale air and annoying tick of classroom clocks. Yet Lisa clung to Karen by gossamer threads at best. She could bet everything that others were talking about her, too. The constant hum of under-the-breath remarks and whispers and notes and nasty looks swirled together and filled the air around them. Even if she stopped being mean, it was clear there would always be someone to slide into her place. As Lisa explained, "Maybe there were twenty girls in the class, and all of them would be talking about each other behind their backs. Because you sort of felt like everyone was your friend, but if everyone else was like you, they were talking about you because you were talking about them. It was just terrible. I remember feeling terrible all the time. Because I knew my friends were talking about me, and I was talking about them."

  The constant manipulation and ganging up, the uneasy sense that no one was who she seemed or said she was, was dizzying. In her frenzy of betrayal and insincerity, Lisa constantly wondered who her real friends were and at times, if she had any at all.

  Meanness was Lisa's social amulet. Still, she said, "the only thing I wanted was for somebody to be my friend. Someone I could depend on. And there wasn't anyone like that." In spite of her efforts, her relationships felt increasingly unsteady. "It was a time," she explained, "when I didn't really feel like I had anybody except the girls that I was being mean to someone else with." She couldn't win. No matter what, "I always thought there was something wrong with me. I felt like a bad person. I was either a dork for being the target or a mean, horrible bitch for being the bully." And anyone could beat up the dork. Her mother had begged her not to be the girl who bullied. "But I couldn't do that," she said simply. "I didn't want to be the dork."

  When she graduated eighth grade, Lisa felt worn and beaten. She was convinced she was, as she put it, "a dork and a loser and a bitch." As a joke, her class voted her most likely to become a nun, but she was crushed by the prude label.

  Two years later it all began again. When she'd turned down some boys who asked her out, they called her a lesbian. News spread, and Lisa felt her sorrow relapse. She found solace in writing poetry and was asked that spring to read an original piece at assembly. The next day, she was pegged a feminist, at her school the equivalent of being a lesbian. It was the last poem she wrote.

  Today, Lisa describes herself as "really defensive. It's made me not willing to share myself with other people. It's made me hard to become friends with." Her first year at college, most people called her "Ice Queen" because she never told anyone anything about herself. At the end of freshman year, she met someone who encouraged her to trust others: her boyfriend. "I hate to say that," she told me. "It isn't true that it was him who saved me. It was me that saved me. He loved me for who I am and it didn't matter that in school I was a bitch or a dork. I am who I am now."

  ***

  There is a kind of musical-chairs quality to Lisa's middle-school ex- perience. Winners and losers are easily interchangeable, and for no compelling reason. Some women and girls I spoke with described weeks when they were the odd girl out, only to be on top the following week when it was someone else's turn. "It was all about having somebody be 'out,'" Maggie recalled. "If there were three of you hanging out, two of you would make a plan to 'go off' and just have inside jokes and tease the other person and just make them feel bad." Just who rotates into the odd-girl position is arbitrary. As one guidance counselor remarked to me, "The same girls who are ostensibly the doers will be in here crying about what others are doing to them."

  Lisa's story is about the intense hunger for retaliation. The desire to take an eye for an eye is a common fantasy for many victimized girls. "For all the times I'd been excluded and cried, I wanted her to know what it felt like to cry," Emily, a ninth grader, told me. "I was so angry at this person. I got joy from seeing her upset because she had gotten joy from seeing me upset." Said sixth-grader Jessica: "I want to get back at them. I want them to experience what it's like not being wanted." Again, the punishment envisioned is isolation and the loss of human connection.

  Research indicates that girls who are victimized are significantly more likely to become bullies them
selves.56 Indeed, memories of being the odd girl out figured prominently in the stories of girls willing to identify themselves to me as bullies or mean.57 Like Lisa, these girls framed their behavior in terms of avoiding injury and maximizing security. In other words, they bullied because they felt threatened, because in their minds there was no other choice.

  memories of betrayal

  It was Thursday, and Kathy Liu had forgotten about our interview. Again. Clearly she had me on her to-do list between "alphabetize canned foods" and "start stamp collection." I took this as a good sign.

  When she finally answered the door to her Washington home, she was clutching tissues and wearing flannels. Aha, I thought. Too sick to ditch me. Kathy let me in, smiling and apologizing. A senior at Georgetown University, she was living in what can best be described as a girl frat house. Indie movie posters plastered the walls. I'd like to say the carpet was once green, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. It was furry, an inadvertent shag, closer to brown now. The kitchen was gnarled with hanging rusted pots and piles of bottles and dishes and spice jars. An errant Hoyas sweatshirt was draped on an easy chair that was leaking stuffing. "Sorry about the mess," she said sheepishly. "Oh no!" I told her, remembering my apartment in college, "I feel right at home."

  A first-generation Korean American, Kathy was twenty-three. "So," she said, raising an eyebrow. "Do I get to quit school if I make it into your book? Make lots of money?" We laughed. She pulled out a cigarette.

  Kathy grew up in South Carolina. Her parents, Korean-born, emigrated to New York following their wedding. Kathy's father was accepted to study engineering in South Carolina and upon graduation was hired locally.

  Theirs was the only Asian family in the small community, and they were among the first Asians many there had ever seen. At age three and four in the grocery store with her mother, Kathy noticed the pointing fingers, eyes pulling back, nudging elbows, and whispering. By middle school, people saw no problem with making "chink" jokes in her presence. She was even nicknamed Suzy Wan at school. In the hallways, she was often trailed by high-pitched "ching chong" noises. Most people, including her friends, thought this was hilarious.

  Kathy did not. Fitting in meant everything to her. She felt something was wrong with her, that she looked funny and wasn't normal. She loved going over to friends' houses and begged her mom not to cook Korean food when her friends were around. They thought the kitchen smelled funny, that the food looked weird. She hated it. Kathy was stylish and cute, able to wear, as she put it, the "right brands." She spent a great deal of time on her hair and makeup (no small expenditure in the late-1980s South). She was second-tier popular, B-level: a hair's breadth from the top. In other words, she had potential.

  By eighth grade, Kathy had been best friends with Nancy for three years. They were passionately close and spent class time writing long notes to each other, folding them in funky shapes and squeezing them in each other's lockers throughout the day.

  One afternoon, Nancy wrote a letter about one of the popular girls being snotty. "I agree," Kathy started to scribble, then stopped midsentence, pen in the air. "I realized," she told me, "that wait, I could win favor with the popular kids if I told them what Nancy had said." Kathy gave them Nancy's notes. The popular girls promised not to tell.

  The next morning, in the auditorium where everyone hung out before the bell, Nancy walked in holding a few wrinkled pieces of paper. Her face was red, her eyes swollen. Kathy asked what was wrong, "even though," she told me, "I knew exactly what was wrong, why she would be crying, why she would be upset." Nancy looked at her with blank, defeated eyes.

  "How did they get these?" she asked.

  "I don't know."

  "How did they get these?" she repeated.

  Over the thin sound of her own voice, Kathy suddenly felt the weight of the damage she had caused. "I couldn't bear to assume that responsibility," she told me, curling her legs under her, sucking hard on her second cigarette. "I couldn't bear to say, 'I did this to you. This is what I did.'" All day long, people bombarded her in the hallways, pumping her for information. She pleaded ignorance. "I kept trying to get the blame off me, to create this phantom third party so I could get out of it," she said, blowing her nose.

  Their friendship was over, of course. "It was a complete betrayal." Kathy sighed. "It's almost unimaginable why the desire to be popular and accepted would make me do something that's so malicious. To betray someone so close to me." She cleared her throat, her voice deeper. "I was—I'm sure that—I'm sure that it has significantly scarred her." Kathy said she wants to forget what happened. "But you can't forget when you've caused so much hurt to someone."

  She grew quiet. Her cigarette smoke hung in the air before us. "It is a little hard to talk about." She flicked her ash into a chipped bowl overflowing with butts. This was the second time she had ever spoken of what happened. I asked her why popularity was so important.

  "I guess I thought that it kind of represented acceptance and belonging and desirability," she said. "I was feeling degraded from other instances of being bullied. If I were to be accepted by them, it would be to kind of get myself out of the degraded position. It wasn't really so much that I wanted to be friends with them. I felt like, then it wouldn't matter that I was Asian."

  Nancy was one of several girls Kathy bullied. In one instance, she demeaned a close friend constantly out of jealousy over the attention she was getting. "I remember thinking, 'Why can't I stop this? Why can't I just sit back and let her have her time in the spotlight?'" Looking back at that time, she said, "I felt like there were so many people above me, to know that there was someone below me was comforting."

  Kathy asked me again if I would definitely change her name in the book, and I said, yes, of course. "Well," she muttered, "if somebody can learn from my experience..."

  "What would you like them to learn?" I asked.

  "I guess to make them understand the impact that they're having potentially on another person's life," Kathy replied. "I can tell them for years and years I couldn't be friends with that person anymore. I was questioning my own loyalties to people. I was kind of like, 'Wow, if I'm capable of doing this, I'm capable of completely betraying somebody close to me for the possible favor of someone that doesn't really care about me at all.' I basically sold her out. You're giving up what's real for something that you see as more desirable, a higher social status or something."

  The knowledge that she could so coldly hurt her friend, in spite of her values, was "very disturbing. I was old enough to know what's right and wrong. It was almost like I felt I wasn't really in control," she said.

  "I can barely explain how much guilt I feel from this one situation," Kathy continued. "I don't know where to begin to make up for what I did. I always hoped that maybe my feelings of guilt would subside as time went on, but I don't feel like they have. I feel like on some level I can identify with soldiers that go back to villages that twenty years ago they had completely destroyed and ransacked, those soldiers that go back and apologize to the people they harmed, their kids and grandkids. And maybe in the future I will do something like that and talk to her about it."

  A few months after we spoke, she did. Nancy was surprised to hear from her. Kathy e-mailed me:

  I lost the friendship and trust of the one person who meant the most to me. We are now friends again, but we lost the level of trust that we once had, in addition to the time that we weren't friends. What I lost through the thoughtlessness of my actions can never be regained, and if I could have understood that the state of our relationship today is the consequence of my actions, I think things would have been different. I never realized that I could potentially destroy my friendship with my best friend, and if I could have realized that, I would never have imagined that it would bear this much influence on my life these years later.

  Kathy believes the experience has made her more compassionate and empathetic. Nevertheless, the memory of her betrayal has never faded. "What good does it do
to say I'm sorry?" she asked me.

  in control

  Like Samantha, whose relationship with Annie is described in chapter two, some girls may be unaware of their cruel behavior. When I first started interviewing people for my book, I began speaking with my friends. Roma, whom I met in college, told me about being abused by one of her best childhood friends. Jane's aggression ranged from telling Roma she hoped she died in a fire to forming elaborate clubs that Roma wasn't allowed to join. Jane prank-called her, called her clothes cheap and her mother a hippie, frequently exercised her ability to turn her other friends against her, and ridiculed Roma's intense affection for friends. At the same time, Roma remembered, "She was a charmer. That was the other part of her. When you were in her favor, it was so great. She was fun and silly and just really sweet." The torment lasted eight years. It was ninth grade when the two finally let go of each other.

  When Roma was twenty-three, Jane's mom called Roma's mom, Ellen, searching for Roma's number. Jane wanted to talk to Roma. Ellen explained that her daughter was not interested. "What do you mean?" Jane's mom asked incredulously. "They were such good friends." When Ellen told Jane's mother about her daughter's behavior, she was astonished.

  Shortly afterward, Roma and her best friend Sally were home for the holidays and hanging out in a café when Jane came in. Roma remembered, "She started talking to Sally like I wasn't there, saying things like, 'I live in San Francisco now. Doesn't your best friend live in San Francisco?'" Finally, Roma asked Jane if she had something to say. Jane turned to Roma and said, "Why did you tell your mother that we were never friends?" She began to weep. "If we were never friends," Jane cried, "how do I know that you like to sleep with your feet above the blanket and that you don't like peanut butter?" Jane ran through a list of personal facts about Roma as Roma listened stiffly. The two women recalled such vastly different stories of their friendship that Roma didn't know how to respond.