Odd Girl Out (7 page)

Ridgewood is a blink-and-you-miss-it working-class town of 2,000 in northern Mississippi. Big enough to have its own Wal-Mart but too small for more than a few traffic lights, Ridgewood is bordered by dusty state roads dotted with service stations and fast-food chains. It is the largest town in a dry county where the mostly Baptist churches outnumber the restaurants. The majority of the town is white, although growing numbers of African American families, mostly poor, are beginning to gather around its edges. Families have long made comfortable livings at local factories here, but threats of an imminent recession have given way to layoffs and a thickening layer of anxiety.

Ridgewood is a fiercely tight-knit community that prides itself in its family-centered values and spirit of care for neighbors. When a tornado cuts a fatal mile-wide swath through town, everyone heads over to rebuild homes and comfort the displaced. Ridgewood is the kind of place where grown children make homes next to their parents and where teenagers safely scatter onto Main Street without looking both ways, drifting in and out of the ice-cream parlor and game room after school. Year-round, going "rolling," toilet papering an unsuspecting peer or teacher's home, is a favorite pastime, sometimes supervised by parents.

By ten o'clock one October morning in Ridgewood, it was already eighty-two degrees. The Mississippi sun was blindingly bright, and the earth was dry, cracked, and dusty. We were having a drought. I was late getting to school, although the truth is in Ridgewood it doesn't take longer than a song on the radio to drive anywhere.

I raced through the front door of the elementary school, sunglass frames in my mouth, spiral notebook in hand. Cassie Smith was waiting. Tall and big-boned, prepubescently round, she had blond hair that waved gently in strings toward her shoulders, kind green eyes, glossed pink lips, braces, and a soft, egg-shaped freckled face. She was missing sixth-grade band class to be with me. Cassie met my eyes squarely as I nodded to her—I'd been laying low here, trying not to expose the girls who volunteered to talk to me—and we headed silently down the long, blue-gray corridor, down the ramp, underneath a still, rusty red fan, and toward the plain, cluttered room I had been using for interviews. Children were mostly oblivious to us as they slammed lockers and whirled toward class in single motions, their teachers standing stiff as flagpoles in the doorways. We passed class projects in a blur: elaborate trees decorated with sunset-colored tissue paper to welcome the autumn, which had actually been more of a summer than anything.

I motioned for Cassie to sit. We made a little small talk. She was whispering so softly I could barely hear her.

"So," I said gently, leaning back in my chipped metal folding chair. "Why did you want to come talk with me today?"

Cassie inhaled deeply. "This is happening
right now,
okay?" she said, as though to admonish me that I was not just some archaeologist come here to sift through dirt and bones. "My best friend Becca," she began, staring fiercely at her fingers, which were playing an absentminded game of itsy-bitsy spider against the lead-smeared tabletop, "I trusted her and everything. She called me and asked if I liked Kelly, who is our good friend. Becca said that Kelly talks bad about me and everything." Cassie sounded nervous. "I really didn't want to say anything back about Kelly because I didn't want to go down to her level." On the phone, Cassie tried to change the subject.

But when Becca called, Kelly had been over at her house. When Becca hung up, she told Kelly that Cassie had called her names. Kelly called back and told Cassie off.

Now, at school, Kelly was teasing Cassie relentlessly—about what she was wearing (she wore that outfit last week) or not (she needs tennis shoes); about how stupid and poor she was. Cassie didn't know what to do.

Cassie and Becca had been best friends since first grade. Last summer, Kelly moved to Ridgewood from Texas, and this fall she'd started hanging around Becca. At first they were all three quite close, with some tension between Cassie and Kelly. And then, Cassie said quietly, over the last few weeks, "Kelly kind of forgot me. They started to get really close and they just forgot me. And then they started ganging up on me and stuff like that."

"How?" I asked.

"They ignored me. They just didn't want to talk with me or anything..." Her voice caught and her eyes filled with tears. I squeezed past some desks to the teacher's table and leaned over to grab a box of tissues.

"Did you try and talk with them about it?" I pulled out a tissue and handed it to her.

"No," she said. "Like, after lunch we have a place where we meet and stuff. We have to line up and go to class. That's when everybody starts talking. We get in a circle and just talk. And they'd put their shoulders together and they wouldn't let me, you know, in the circle or whatever. They would never talk to me, and they would never listen to what I had to say. Stuff like that." She was whispering again.

"I don't think I've ever done anything to them." Her voice shook. "I've always been nice to them."

Lately, it had only gotten worse. Kelly, by now no stranger in the school, had been warning other girls to stay away from Cassie. Becca was saying that Cassie was insulting Kelly behind her back, and Kelly was passing notes that said Cassie lived in a shack and was too poor to buy Sunday clothes.

"So how are you feeling?" I asked.

"Like I don't want to go to school," she whispered, sinking into her red fleece vest.

"Why not?"

"Because I don't know what they'll do every day."

"What have they done so far?" I asked.

"They'll be like, 'Cassie, get back, we're going to talk about you now.'"

"They'll say that?"

"No, they'll just"—she was getting frustrated with me—"I
can tell.
They don't have to say anything. They'll whisper and look at me, and I know they're talking about me."

"Have you talked to your mom?" I asked.

"I talk to my mom but it just ... I don't really want to worry her a lot." She began to cry again.

"Does it worry her?"

"It kind of makes her mad because—she says I should ignore them. But I
can't.
They just keep on."

"Why is it hard to ignore them?"

"Because they're like, running over you, you know? And I can't concentrate. They're like—they look at me and stuff like that. They stare at me. I can hear them saying stuff and whispering and they look right at me."

Cassie struggled with the absence of a language to articulate her victimization. As the silent meanness of her friends attracted no teacher's attention, Cassie was filled with a helplessness that was slowly turning into self-blame. Without rules or a public consciousness of this behavior, Cassie's only sense that what was happening was real (or wrong) was her own perspective. For a ten-year-old, that would not be enough.

***

Relational aggression starts in preschool, and so do the first signs of sex differences.
¹⁶
The behavior is thought to begin as soon as children become capable of meaningful relationships. By age three, more girls than boys are relationally aggressive, a schism that only widens as children mature. In a series of studies, children cited relational aggression as the "most common angry, hurtful ... behavior enacted in girls' peer groups," regardless of the target's sex. By middle childhood, the leading researchers in the field report that "physical aggressors are mostly boys, relational aggressors mostly girls."

Relational aggression harms others "through damage (or the threat of damage) to relationships or feelings of acceptance, friendships, or group inclusion."
¹⁷
It includes any act in which relationship is used as a weapon, including manipulation. First identified in 1992, it is the heart of the alternative aggressions, and for many girls an emotionally wrenching experience.

Relational aggression can include indirect aggression, in which the target is not directly confronted (such as the silent treatment), and some social aggression, which targets the target's self-esteem or social status (such as rumor spreading). Among the most common forms of relational aggression are "do this or I won't be your friend anymore," ganging up against a girl, the silent treatment, and nonverbal gesturing, or body language.
¹⁸

The lifeblood of relational aggression is relationship. As a result, most relational aggression occurs within intimate social or friendship networks. The closer the target to the aggressor, the more cutting the loss. As one Linden freshman put it, "Your friends know you and how to hurt you. They know what your real weaknesses are. They know exactly what to do to destroy someone's self-worth. They try to destroy you from the inside." Such pointed meanness, an eighth grader explained to me, "can stay with you for your entire life. It can define who you are."

Where relationships are weapons, friendship itself can become a tool of anger. You can, one Ridgewood sixth grader explained, "have a friend, and then go over there and become friends with somebody else, just to make them jealous." Nor must the relationship be withdrawn or even directly threatened: the mere suggestion of loss may be enough. One girl may stand among a group, turn to two friends and sigh, "Wow, I can't
wait
for this weekend!" One girl may pull another away from a group "and tell them secrets, right in front of us," a Mississippi sixth grader said. "When she comes back, people ask her what she said, [and] she's always like, 'Oh, nothing. It's none of your business.'" No rule has been broken here, yet it takes little more than this for a girl to inflict pain on her peers.

A combination of nonphysical, often furtive aggression is extremely dangerous, in large part because it is impossible to detect. Relational aggression has remained invisible because the behavior resists the typical displays that we normally associate with bullying. Two girls playing quietly together in the corner might be two girls playing quietly in the corner—or they might be one girl slowly wearing down the other.

Teachers and parents may not be looking or listening for signs of a problem behind the facade of friendship and play. Who can blame them? Nothing
looks
wrong. It is tempting to interpret signs of trouble as the passing "issues" that afflict all normal childhood relationships, but in some cases, turning the other way can be a terrible mistake.

"Nonverbal gesturing," a fancy word for body language, is a hallmark of relational aggression. Denied the use of their voices by rules against female anger, girls like Becca and Kelly have instead learned to use their bodies. Nonverbal gesturing includes mean looks, certain forms of exclusion, and the silent treatment. It also drives girls to distraction. For one thing, body language is at once infuriatingly empty of detail and bluntly clear. It cuts deep precisely because a girl will know someone is angry at her, but she doesn't get to find out why and sometimes with whom it's happening. In girls' worlds, the worst aggression is the most opaque, creating a sort of emotional poison ivy that makes it hard to concentrate on anything else. Teachers become characters in "Peanuts" cartoons, their lecturing unintelligible. Words swim on the page. The target of this silent campaign looks around the room and everything—a look exchanged, someone writing a note—has crooked, wildly irrational new significance, like reflections in a funhouse mirror.

The day after I met Cassie, I spoke with some of her fifth and sixth-grade classmates about ways girls can be mean without saying a word. Kayla, chubby with sparkling blue eyes, was nearly falling out of her seat hopping and waving and making pleading, wordless noises. I smiled inwardly: This was always my "problem" in class.

"Yes?" I asked.

"Girls can look at you, and you know they're mad!" she exclaimed. "They don't have to say anything. You look at them and they roll their eyes and they have little slits in them."

Miranda, sitting primly with an arrow-straight arm in the air, added that girls "whisper and you get jealous. They look at you while they're whispering. They might point and start laughing. You see their lips moving."

"So," I said, scanning their faces, "how do you feel when you think you're being whispered about?"

A tiny, tinny voice rose up from a chair in the corner of the room. "It's a funny feeling," Cerise said.

"What do you mean?"

"Like they don't care about you or what you do."

"See, girls don't tease," Tammy explained. "They talk behind [your] backs, they giggle and point at [you]. They start rumors and they totally ignore [you]. Even if they're not teasing, it's still obvious that they don't like you."

As I moved from class to class, from school to school, I learned that the worst kind of silent meanness is the only one with a name: the silent treatment. In this, the most pointed kind of relational aggression, one girl ceases speaking to another and, with little or no warning, revokes her friendship. The target, often unaware of why her friend is angry, is consumed by panic and the fear of permanently losing the friendship.

"When you ignore," an Arden eleven-year-old explained, "they"—meaning the target—"get scared over every little thing. They don't understand what's going on."

"Oh, yeah," a classmate chimed in. It's the worst thing you can do. You gain a lot of power and they come crawling back." A twelve-year-old remarked, "Giving someone a look makes [the targets] paranoid. [They] overanalyze it." A Ridgewood eighth grader explained, "You try to find out why they're mad at you and they just kind of laugh at you. They toss their hair and look away." "When someone glares at you," a Linden freshman told me, "it makes you feel lower and deteriorates your insides. Oh God, you think, what are they doing? You ask them why they're mad and they don't say anything. You have no control. It gives them power."

One of the more chilling messages conveyed through silence and staring is that, in eleven-year-old Mary's words, "you're telling them you're not worth my time or me talking to you. It's the worst thing. You're saying, 'I don't want to argue it out.'" Silence throws up an impenetrable wall, shutting down the chance for self-expression and more importantly, the opportunity to play a proactive role in one's conflicts.