American Girls (17 page)

From the subway to the street to the block to her building, Edie listened to the song. Running up the stairs to Grand Army Plaza, she listened; tearing down Seventh Avenue, she played it. She was already imagining how it would feel, to become this other, secret self that no one knew was there; she was readying herself for what she was about to do—and the relief, the release from everything that had happened that day, and was happening every day, at school.

“I'm so fancy / You already knoooow—”

She slammed the front door and ran into her room, threw her backpack on the bed; peeled off her clothes and pulled on her shortest shorts, the ones she was not allowed to wear outside and would never even want to wear (she would be too “embarrassed”), and a crop top—ditto—and in her mother's medicine cabinet she found some lipstick, NARS Jungle Red, and, in the back of her mother's closet, the Steve Madden heels that her mother wore on dates.

Earbuds in, iPod on, she caught her breath, standing in front of the mirror hanging on the back of the bedroom door, seeing how incredibly hot she looked, how transformed. She was no longer that boring girl in sweatshirts, sneakers, and jeans. She looked like an Instagram girl, a Tumblr girl.

A star.

In real life, she was not one of the girls the boys called “hot.” She was a girl that a boy had put at the top of the list of “The Ugliest Girls.” The boys had a rating system of one to ten and Edie had gotten a “zero.” But she knew she didn't belong on that list. She could look around her and objectively see that she didn't look so very different from the girls boys said were “hot.” But in her eighth-grade class, she said, she was considered “ugly” because she was not white. “Or I'm not the ‘right kind' of black girl,” she said, doing air quotes. “I don't fit in with what they expect a black girl should be. I'm an outcast.”

She and Iggy Azalea roamed the halls, laughing at all the girls who couldn't walk with them. She danced.

What Edie didn't understand, she said, was that the “super popular” girls and the “not so popular” girls at her school could dress exactly the same—“like, really slutty”—and yet the super-popular girls would not get called names and the not-so-popular girls would get called “sluts.”

It was very confusing.

What she didn't understand was why a girl like Minerva, who wore short shorts and crop tops and got “dress coded” almost every day—that was when you got called into the office and told to change into your gym clothes or even sent home—was called a “thot,” or slut, by both girls and boys; but Savannah, who dressed almost exactly the same, in short shorts and halter tops that showed “side boob,” was popular and ruled the school and nobody ever called her anything. (“A little side boob never hurt nobody,” Kendall Jenner captioned a provocative picture on Instagram in 2014.) Minerva hooked up with boys and took nude pictures of herself and sent them to boys and boys showed them around the school, and everyone said she was a “slut.” But Savannah had a boyfriend who stayed over at her house all night sometimes and people thought she was cool.

It didn't seem fair.

Was it because Savannah's dad was famous? He was someone in the news. That probably had something to do with it, Edie thought. “In New York it's like if your mom or dad is someone famous, then everybody thinks you're cool.” And it seemed like famous people could do whatever they wanted. Savannah's mom and dad smoked pot with Savannah and didn't care if her boyfriend slept in the same bed with her at night. Savannah's parents said it was Savannah's “choice” to have him over, and they didn't want to “repress” her or “control her sexuality.” Or so Savannah claimed. People thought Savannah's parents were “cool.” They said Savannah was cool. Edie thought it was weird.

Savannah was so powerful now that her boyfriend, Sam, had groupies. They were some girls in the sixth grade who called themselves “Sluts for Sam,” and they followed Sam around and stalked him on social media. They had even started cutting for him—they said they were “cutting for Sam,” cutting themselves like how they heard those girls were “cutting for Bieber.” (In 2013, a hoax perpetrated by users of the Internet bulletin board 4Chan claimed that teenage girls were cutting themselves in order to get Justin Bieber to stop smoking marijuana. Fake Twitter accounts posted pictures of bleeding arms and wrists with the hashtag #cuttingforbieber. Despite its being a hoax, there was concern that #cuttingforbieber would inspire copycat behavior.)

Then somebody started a Facebook page called “We Hate the Sluts for Sam” and made death threats against them and said they wanted them to die. But then it turned out that it was the Sluts for Sam themselves who had made the page. They just wanted the attention.

Some girls wanted attention so bad, Edie said, it was like they would do anything for it. Anything for the likes. Minerva would post a picture of herself in a bikini and people would make fun of her and call her names, but she would still get like 100 likes—mostly from boys. Girls would post comments making fun of Savannah and her weight and the shape of her body and stuff like that (“Diet much?”). And then Savannah would post a picture of herself in a bikini lying by her parents' pool in the Hamptons—“Just chillaxing,” it would say, or something “stupid” like that—and she would get like 300 likes on that picture. “Literally, like three hundred likes.”

Edie and Savannah used to be best friends when they were small. They used to play in Prospect Park. Their nannies were friends. They would swing on swings and run around the playground, push baby dolls in their strollers side by side. They were best friends through fifth and sixth grade…and then in seventh grade something had happened. Savannah became cool. And Edie did not become cool. She was a black girl growing up in a mostly white neighborhood—Park Slope—so it wasn't as if no one had ever made her aware of her race. They did, she said, “like, every day.” People had always said things to her and her mother—strange things, like, “What are you?” as if Edie were not in fact a human but some other type of being. She had learned early on that she was “light-skinned.” “People have asked me if I'm like Spanish or Turkish,” she said. “Why do they even need to know?”

But the one person who had never seemed to notice her color or said anything about it one way or the other was Savannah. Edie was always just Edie to her. “You're my Edie,” Savannah would tell her, grabbing her and hugging her. They used to pretend they were sisters. And then one day in seventh grade, after Savannah had started getting cool, she suddenly turned to Edie and said, “You don't really act black, you know?”

“What do you mean?” Edie had said, annoyed. Savannah had been doing a lot of things to annoy her around that time, but this “literally made me feel nauseous.” “How do ‘black people act'?” she asked her.

Savannah had just shrugged in that cool girl way she had been developing. “I don't know,” she said, “like, black people are cool.”

Edie was aghast. How did Savannah suppose that she had any idea what black people were like—or, for that matter, what was cool? Most of the things that white people called cool
came
from black culture, but that didn't mean that black people stopped being black if they weren't rappers or Samuel L. Jackson. Did Savannah actually think she had the right to tell Edie whether or not she was “black enough”?

Edie wasn't cool. She knew she wasn't cool. She liked things uncool people liked: Taylor Swift and
Doctor Who
and
Drake & Josh.
She didn't like the crude and vulgar media fare that kids her age had started liking as far back as second and third grade—
Spongebob SquarePants, Adventure Time,
and
Family Guy
(cartoons with obnoxious jokes); and then, in the sixth and seventh grades,
Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars,
and
Degrassi
(dramas about high schools where kids are mean and sexually active). “It's all so inappropriate,” Edie complained. “It should not be for our age.” She had very definite ideas about what kids “should” and “should not” see. She guessed she learned it from her mom and her grandmother, who was from the Caribbean and “really strict” and said that kids today were “too grown up.”

But the epic, friendship-ending fight Edie and Savannah got into in seventh grade was not about any comment regarding her race, but about the fact that Savannah told some other girls in the school that Edie “liked” a boy named Harrison. Harrison was a boy with lustrous brown hair that wafted above his forehead like an ocean wave. Edie had liked him since the beginning of the year, and when she confided this to Savannah, Savannah just giggled and said, “No way.”

Soon the whole school knew—even Harrison. “Like I would ever like you,” he said to Edie in the hallway one day, with some girls standing around, suppressing laughter. “You're, like, the ugliest girl in the school,” he declared. It stuck. Now Edie was on the top of “the lists.”

“They keep lists of, like, who is the hottest and who is the ugliest,” she said. “The boys do it.”

It became Team Edie and Team Savannah after that. Girls who had been friends with both of them were forced to choose. Savannah easily brought almost everyone over to her side. She had so much more to offer them than Edie did. Now there were parties at Savannah's house where kids played Spin the Bottle and Seven Minutes in Heaven, parties where kids drank and smoked weed. “They would be like, I'm sorry, Edie, we can no longer associate with you. I'll see you later,” Edie said. Everyone stopped talking to her, “pretty much.” She was alone in the lunchroom. People who had been very close to her all her life, “they were like, Well, I hope you understand.”

In exile, she became even more of a target; and somehow now the taunts became tinged with allusions to her race. Kids said that she had “ramen-noodle hair.”

After that went on for a while, Edie's mother suggested she get her hair cut off, “just to try a new style”; but Edie knew it was to make the kids stop saying mean things to her, and it hurt her to know her mother had to worry about that. But she did. Edie got a pixie cut and dyed it blond. And after that, kids said she looked like Chris Brown. “Yo, Chris, where Rihanna at?” boys would say—a reference to the troubled relationship of pop stars Chris Brown and Rihanna, which effectively ended in 2009 when Brown was charged with felony assault of Rihanna.

Subsequently, comedians and social media users made light of the abuse. “Chris Brown beating Rihanna jokes” turns up nearly 250,000 results on Google. More than twenty years after the passage of the Violence Against Women Act, which imposed federal penalties for acts of domestic violence, it “continues to be normalized through its comedic portrayal via news outlets, magazines, advertisements, and television shows,” according to a 2014 study by researchers at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology
;
and you could add to that list social media. The average American girl or boy is likely to have seen one of the domestic violence jokes and memes which crop up regularly online, such as the one of a smirking man saying, “WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOUR DISHWASHER STOPS WORKING? HIT HER.”

Meanwhile, domestic violence continues to be a national problem. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that about 1.3 million women in the United States experience domestic violence every year. In 2011, the CDC found that nearly 10 percent of high school students reported experiencing some form of physical violence by the person they were dating within the previous year. And now there is a new kind of domestic violence in teenage dating, via cell phone. In a 2007 study by Teenage Research Unlimited, teens identified “digital dating abuse” as a “serious problem.” Examples include when abusers try to control their partners through constant texting and phoning, or try to control and intimidate them through texting and posting on social media. Sometimes abusers enlist friends to check on their partners and stalk them with social media and phones. Boys and girls have created fake Facebook accounts in order to check whether their partner would carry on an inappropriate conversation or cheat. “Social media breeds obsession,” says Jenna, the nineteen-year-old Hunter College student.

Edie said that one boy in school had laughed and said she was “a ghetto baby” and didn't have a dad. In fact, Edie's mother was a highly successful professional woman who was a single mother by choice.

There was one girl who would still talk to her, one girl who was still nice to her; that is, when no one else was around. “We were in the bathroom,” Edie said, “and we were talking about how crazy it was that all this stuff was happening, and she said, Well, if you would wear a little bit of a lower-cut shirt one day, it might help people like you more. And I was like, But why? And she was like, Well, if you just start dressing sexy you'll ‘move up in the ranking.' If the boys notice you, it'll affect how the girls act. And I told her, You shouldn't dress for boys.

“The thing is,” Edie said, “if you asked most of these girls if they were feminists, they would say yes, because that's a cool thing to be now and so they would say they were. But they're not feminist, because they're objectifying themselves.”

Edie tried to go to the school guidance counselor and talk to her about all these things that were happening to her; but there was only one guidance counselor for more than 350 kids and “she seemed overwhelmed. She asked me if I was cutting or anorexic or bulimic or anything like that, and when I said no, she didn't seem worried about me anymore. It's like she didn't really have to listen.”

One night, Edie called a suicide-prevention hotline.

It was the night she got into a fight on Instagram with some of the girls from Team Savannah. Some girls had posted mean things about Edie, and so Edie then filmed a video of herself saying what she really thought of the girls. “Being mean is
not
cool,” she said in her video, which she posted on the app. “Being
mean
is the ugliest thing in the world.” It quickly spread. Within minutes, there were no likes on her video, but many “horrible” comments. “They said things about the way I look and how I act.”