Haley was still unsure. She veered between what she knew was true and what Lucia wanted her to believe. "Maybe she feels she spends too much time with me, and she needs to spend time with other people. I just don't wanna—I'm just—I'm just afraid—I don't want to try it—try risking a friendship outside. I'm just going to leave it because I've got other friends." She exhaled loudly, spluttering with frustration.
Like Haley, many girls describe their feelings in part-time friendships as simply "bad." There is a hint of resignation in their voices, a somber recognition that this is the way of their world. As Jessica told me, "Even though you feel like girls only want to be your friends for a few hours, they have to [do what it takes to] be popular."
the price of popularity
Some girls can't get popular unless they pay for it. Call it a dowry or hazing, a cover charge or a sacrificial offering of loyalty: however you look at it, sometimes a girl has to squash a friend to rise above the mortals. Girls told me two versions of this story: in the first, the supplicant, as I'll call her, publicly bullies her friend while she is nice to her in private. In the illustration to this story, I see the bully blowing on a single dandelion, her friend. Some wisps of friendship cling to the stem while others flutter to the ground, leaving parts of the core bald, bare, and struggling, yet still alive. In the second story, the target is offered up as booty to the popular clique, and the shroud of friendship falls away completely.
Now in her forties and living with her partner in the Northwest, Janet says her mind wanders often to the memory of Cheryl, her best and often only friend from third through eighth grade. Every day after school, the two girls talked on the phone or played together. They spent nights holding elaborate dance contests at each other's homes, which were only two blocks apart. In the winter, they ice-skated and drew maps of the sinewy streams that ran through their southern Illinois college town.
But when the homeroom bell rang, Janet never knew if Cheryl would be her friend. Cheryl wanted to be in the popular group, and Janet, short and awkward with thick glasses, was a liability. Cheryl was bigger and taller than Janet, a lightning-fast runner. At school, she always looked right in her clothes. Around the cool kids, Cheryl called Janet names and told her to get away. She nicknamed her "Bottle Eyes" and ordered the other girls to steal her glasses. She laughed the loudest while Janet, frightened and blinded, felt her way on bended knee along the black tar playground, searching for the school door. Whenever the cooler girls left Cheryl out, she would run back to Janet, who never protested.
Janet found comfort in academic success and relied on it to distract her through the rough days. Often the only one to raise her hand in class, Janet remembers a powerful intent to be good and do the right thing. Despite her success, Janet confided that "my doing better in school didn't count in my eyes that way. She dominated me. She wanted to be in control." When Cheryl asked Janet why she'd gotten a better grade on a test, Janet answered, "I think I'm more focused than you are." Cheryl teased her mercilessly about using the word "focused." In her junior high yearbook, Cheryl wrote, "To one of the dumbest people I know. Oh well, maybe you'll grow out of it. Your friend, Cheryl." Janet was crushed but remained silent.
Eventually, Cheryl's attacks moved beyond the perimeter of the school. Little was visible to others as she hollowed out the center of their friendship and filled it with meanness and hate. To anyone looking from the kitchen window into the backyard the girls were the picture of loving friendship, while outside on the grass Cheryl dominated Janet, demanding that she obey her every wish. The mur-mur behind Janet's door was the familiar hum of chattering girls, while on the rug Cheryl snarled that Janet's shoes were stupid and pushed her to wear her first bra, pantyhose, and other "cool" accessories. Janet was broken and quiet, attached to and abused by her only friend.
Today, in counseling, Janet feels certain that resolving her feelings about Cheryl will help her cope with lifelong feelings of low self-esteem. Not surprisingly, the hardest part has been renaming the friendship as the abuse that it truly was. "I'm still struggling to know that it was abusive," she told me. "At the time I thought there was something wrong with me, that I deserved this treatment. I thought of her as a real friend. I thought this is what friendship was. I'm still working on extracting myself from that point of view.
"I don't remember ever thinking she shouldn't be treating me like this, that this is not what a friend does. I really didn't know that," she said. "I took whatever friend was willing to play with me. When she was mean to me I thought I deserved it because somewhere down in there I believed I was a bad person who hurt people, so if someone was angry at me or hurting me, that was what I deserved."
As a child, Janet was sexually abused. Now, looking back, she sees shadows of her friendship with Cheryl in her experience as a survivor of sexual abuse. Both episodes, she told me, deprived her of power and control. "Someone has the right to do whatever they want to me and it doesn't occur to me to say no. There is the feeling that it must be right for this to happen to me just because someone else is doing it," she said.
Janet cannot explain why she endured Cheryl's treatment in the first place. "That's still a mystery to me." Thinking of Cheryl today, she remembers "a very vivid image of her looking at me, her eyes hard and slitted." Yet she also remembers a best friend that she loved.
Janet surrendered her version of reality to her tormentor. Her need to remain in the relationship became destructive as she steeled herself at the greatest costs to know this relationship as friendly. The impulse of some girls to cling to a damaged relationship at any cost demands our attention. Its link to the trials of bullying remains largely unexplored.
Elizabeth had no trouble telling me that Deirdre was no friend, that she ruined fifth and sixth grade. Elizabeth e-mailed me that she'd like to talk, so I called her one day in Indiana, where she was in graduate school for psychology. Elizabeth said she became an outcast in third grade, though it was really only the popular girls who disliked her. Although she had always been well-liked at summer camp and during afterschool activities, she became the main target at school. Every September, Elizabeth prayed for a new girl to come to school. "It was my only hope," she said, laughing ruefully. "Anytime there was a new girl in school I would try my damnedest to sit next to her and talk to her and get to her before they did, because then I might be able to prove that I was worthy of being her friend before she found out I wasn't cool to be friends with."
In sixth grade Elizabeth had her chance with Deirdre, who slid behind a desk next to Elizabeth on the first day. It was friends at first sight, and they had a blissful month of busy sleepovers and lunchtimes and recesses. On the day of the Oktoberfest festival, Deirdre signed up to sit at a table during lunch selling baked goods with two popular girls, and their friendship was over as quickly as it started.
"She must have realized she was jeopardizing any chance she had of being popular by hanging out with me," Elizabeth told me. "She found out it just wasn't cool. She began to realize this would not bode well for her future. All of a sudden, she just switched, like night and day, and she was in with the popular girls and torturing me. She became the ringleader of the girls who did this."
Deirdre carried out flashy demonstrations of cruelty to show off to her new friends. She pointed and laughed from the lunch table and insulted Elizabeth at recess, often using what she knew intimately of Elizabeth to sharpen her barbs. The popular girls circled Deirdre like the petals on a single flower, and Elizabeth watched, stunned and silent. She steeled herself at school, refusing to let the girls see her break down, and collapsed on the couch at home to cry to her mother every night. "I had no self-esteem. I didn't trust anybody. I cried myself to sleep most nights," she said.
Once she was safely ensconced in the folds of the clique, Deirdre let up, but their group's disdain vibrated around them like a force-field. By the time Elizabeth graduated eighth grade, she said, "I had a wall a mile thick around me. I was the most defensive li
ttle ball, no one could get into me. Everyone had hurt me. Everyone I had trusted had abandoned me and made me feel like shit. I would trust people and think they were my friends, and then they would turn around and stab me in the back." Elizabeth began viewing herself as her own twin, inventing stories about her other life to new kids in the neighborhood. "I thought that maybe if I didn't tell them anything about who I really was, they might like me."
Like many women I spoke with, Elizabeth is certain the experience permanently altered her development as a person. "I had always been mellow and easygoing and all of a sudden I was hostile and sarcastic and bitter," she said. I can almost see her shrugging resignedly through the phone. "I had never been that before." Today Elizabeth studies psychology in part to understand how she was changed and how, as she put it, "could someone do this? It's just so wrong. It just didn't work in my head. It didn't compute."
In high school, Elizabeth's sudden popularity shocked her. She was amazed that people could like her just for who she was. Nevertheless, she said drily, "I'm still reaping the benefits of all this." She has only now, in her late twenties, begun to reconnect with women. Elizabeth felt safer around guys because, as she put it—echoing countless women I spoke with—"there was no bullshit, there was no cattiness, there was no competitiveness, there was nothing." She attended a women's college to avoid fraternities, only then realizing how fearful she still was of other women. "I put myself at a distance. I wouldn't trust them right off the bat. I always felt like there was a hidden agenda." Even now she can never shake the feeling of being an "outsider, feeling like I will never truly belong and also feeling like not wanting to."
secrets and lies
The popularity race shines a harsh, relentless spotlight on its contenders, raising the stakes on everything they say and do, making every utterance and outfit subject to peer punishment, reward, or worse, indifference. A girl at Linden explained, "Girls are judging me every second, examining me and thinking if they want to be my friend or not." A classmate added, "You don't see girls for who they are. You see girls for what they wear, who they hang out with. It's a package." The feeling of constant scrutiny creates an unpredictable social landscape that frequently causes sudden changes in behavior, so that many girls become different people depending on who they're with.
Chloe Kaplan, a fifth grader at Sackler Day School, and I were hanging out one afternoon on her tall twin canopy bed, white ruffles and stuffed animals spilling out beneath us. The wall above her desk was plastered with gummy, curling magazine cutouts of *NSYNC and Backstreet Boys, and a wicker dresser was scattered with tubes of glitter cream and disks of lip gloss. We sat cross-legged, shoes off, facing each other and unwrapping sticks of bubble gum.
For a ten-year-old, Chloe had an astonishing grasp of the politics of popularity and betrayal. She learned the hard way. In the first weeks of third grade, Alisa had approached and asked to be best friends. Delighted, Chloe said yes. At the time, she told me, "I didn't have the most friends in the third grade and I was making as many friends as I could." Chloe and Alisa played and spent recess together every day, chatting, playing jacks, trading stickers, and—their favorite—having upside-down contests on the monkey bars.
Some months later, Chloe found out that Alisa had been making up lies about her and telling her secrets to the popular girls. Chloe said she felt "really bad. It was like if you write in a diary, and someone reads it and they tell their friends what was in it and they tell their friends." When you've trusted someone that way, it hurts a lot. Chloe was afraid to say anything about it, she said, because "most of the friends I had came from her. If I lost her, I lost the rest."
Two years later, Chloe was still sad and perplexed that someone who seemed to care for her so much could also coldly violate her trust. But in the time she'd had to think about it, she'd figured out a couple of things.
For one thing, Chloe said, she notices now that some girls can change themselves depending on whom they're with. When her mom, who's president of the PTA, takes her to ice-cream socials, there are popular girls there who "act totally different—like they've been friends with you for a long time," and when they see her at school, "act like they don't know you and don't care about you." She told me about a popular classmate who's cruel and critical in school, but at sleepaway camp becomes a "whole different person ... so much more nicer there."
The other thing, Chloe told me, is that she knows now that everything she did and said was being assessed and reported by Alisa. That it was, above all, currency to be traded with more popular girls. This year, she could sense the feeling of being judged following her around like a shadow, and it made her uncomfortable. The other girls watch and talk about everything: what she eats and wears, whom she plays with. "They care about everything but your personality," she said glumly. I asked what she meant. Well, she said, there was a girl in her class who wore capri pants with hearts and a matching shirt. "Everyone's gonna remember that," she explained, "because that's like baby and everything. Everyone will know that came from Kids 'R' Us. Everyone popular will be embarrassed to be her friend because they wear the updated clothes."
Chloe told me that fifth grade was a minefield: one misstep and you were done for. "If you do one stupid thing," she explained, "people will never forget that. Then they know you could not ever be a cool person. If you change, they don't realize it because they think of that stupid thing you did before." It's not worth it.
I asked her for an example of a "stupid thing."
"Like if you say a dumb comment," she said, blowing a bubble. "Such as?"
"Such as if we're out telling jokes in school and everything, and you make a stupid joke, like why did the chicken cross the road, when they're making mean jokes. Or we're all in music [class], and the teacher leaves the room, and everyone's like, 'Oh, that's a really stupid song,' and you're like, 'Some parts of it are nice,' and they're like, 'Well, we're all saying it's stupid and you're talking about it being nice.' And everyone will say that together.
"It's just weird," she explained, squeezing a Beanie Baby, "because the quieter you are, the better off you are, because no one's going to find out or have rumors about you or anything. And the quieter you are, no one's gonna find out who you like and everything. And then you're better off because you're quiet and no one's going to find anything out about you. You don't tell. So no rumors about you and they only think of you as a quiet, nice person."
She placed her palms in back of her and dropped her head back, staring at the ceiling. "It's like each girl has a file, and everything you wear—if you wear like one off thing—goes in it," she said. "They don't even care about you anymore. And they throw the file away."
Chloe told me that her best friend's duplicity had changed everything for her. At the moment her capacity for emotional intimacy was deepening, as she shared the first quiet feelings of her heart, she was betrayed. What she shared with Alisa was laid bare to be dissected and mocked by everyone else. She could no longer completely trust that a friend was a friend, even if she appeared that way.
There is a movement within feminism that believes the female orientation to relationship and connection—to nurturing and caregiving—gives women a uniquely wise approach to their world. Popularity, however, turns this phenomenon on its head. In the race to be cool, some girls transform friendship into a series of deals and calculations, using relationship as much to destroy as to build. Relationship is no longer simply an end; it is also a means. If popularity is a competition for relationships, getting ahead so- cially means new relationships must be targeted and formed, old ones dismissed and shed. Juliet, a ninth grader from Linden, explained why she and her two best friends used code names to describe the peers they ridiculed in fifth grade. "We wanted to be with our friends. We didn't want anybody to get in the way. We didn't want other people we didn't like hanging out with us. There were three of us and we knew so much about each other, and we didn't want that to break up or something. We didn't get pleasure o
ut of making people feel bad. But we had to protect ourselves."
If girls' relationships are distinguished by secret telling and intimacy, the popularity seeker—or in girlspeak, the "wanna-be"—will use the accoutrements of relationship to her advantage. In a relational race, the winner will use intimacy as the mortar to wedge herself most tightly among the "right" people. She will communicate in words or actions that she can be depended on and trusted. To signal her loyalty, she may appear to abandon other relationships in her life; hence the mean-in-public, nice-in-private behavior. To shore up her position or edge out another girl, the wanna-be may have to minimize, even eliminate, the relationships of someone else; hence the tormenting and secret telling in the presence of popular girls. In the typically tangled parlance of a teenager, a Mississippi ninth grader explained, "A lot of people may really like Melissa, but maybe the person [a girl is] talking to doesn't like [her]. To keep friends with both of them, she talks bad to the one who doesn't like [Melissa]."
In friendship, girls share secrets to grow closer. Relational competitions corrupt this process, transforming secrets into social currency and, later, ammunition. These girls spread gossip: they tell other people's secrets. They spread rumors: they invent other people's secrets. They gain calculated access to each other using intimate information.
Despite their dreams of glory, plenty of wanna-bes still fear direct conflict. A girl who, like Plunkett of Tammany Hall, "seen her opportunities and took 'em" is equally likely to abandon her lower status friends without explanation. Rather than face an uncomfortable conflict where she has to announce her intention to move up and on, the wanna-be may assure her old friends that nothing at all is wrong; hence, Lucia's repeated assurances and Haley's feeling of craziness.
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