Odd Girl Out (9 page)

"That was when I stopped trusting my parents," she recalled, "because I knew they just didn't get it. And if I had actually broken down and told my parents what was going on at that point, that no one was talking to me, that I was already having suicidal thoughts because I just thought I was totally ugly and fat and disgusting, absolutely uninteresting and so weak, and no one wanted to be friends with me, I don't know what would have happened to me."

***

From the earliest moments of their friendship, Stacy meted out love and acceptance only when Vanessa obeyed her. The purposeful control over the terms of a relationship is a signal aspect of relational aggression. At age six Stacy threatened her friendship over Vanessa's failure to play a game; a few years later, she would use it to make her steal. The style of coercion also evolved. Stacy controlled Vanessa for herself, but she soon graduated to making Vanessa perform acts that affected others. Stacy grew to use Vanessa and others as tools to express her own aggression without suffering the responsibility for it.

Vanessa was a valuable pawn in the collection of followers. "I wasn't a wimp and I wasn't quiet and I wasn't meekish and I wasn't stupid. I was funny, really witty, and I always had these comebacks." Stacy's cruel practical joke, Vanessa concluded, was her way of affirming that "I was just a pawn. I was simply like a representation of her power."

Vanessa's compliance with her bully's demands reveals a distinctive element of girls' bullying. Like most bullied children, Vanessa feared reprisal if she fought Stacy's control. But because she continued to associate with these girls as friends, she chose a damaged relationship over no relationship at all.

More and more, Vanessa's conception of her situation was unrealistic, hankering back to the sunnier days of their friendship. After the faked death of Stacy's mother, Vanessa could hardly contain her excitement and sense of relief that "finally, she needs me. She needs me.... She needs me as emotional support...." For Vanessa, fear of being alone was an invisible hand keeping a corroded relationship alive, in spite of her intense pain.

Then, one day, Vanessa was filled with a peculiar sense of certainty about what she had to do. "The bottom dropped out," she recalled. "Either I was going to, like, kill myself or I was going to have to claim my space back." The next day, she walked straight up to Stacy and ordered her to be outside at lunch. Word got out, and by noon there was a big crowd assembled. Stacy was waiting.

"I said to her, 'I don't fucking care anymore. I have nothing to lose and I hate you and I hate everything you've done to me, and I think you're a totally evil person and I don't want to have anything to do with you. You can make as much fun of me as you want, but you know what?, like, it doesn't matter anymore.'"

Stacy snarled. She wasn't having any of it. "She pulled out every single insult. She said, 'Vanessa, you're going to regret this for the rest of your life, and no one's ever going to forgive you.'"

When Vanessa didn't flinch, Stacy followed up with a reply that exemplifies the bizarre union of love and cruelty in bullying among friends. She shouted, "Do you know what you're throwing away? You know I could have been the best thing for you forever. We could have been so good together. And yet you just throw it all away."

Vanessa was shocked. She said, "What are you talking about? There's nothing left." And after that, "I just didn't even look back." The spell was broken.

 

Today, Vanessa believes her relationship with Stacy had a major impact on her social and intimate life. After Stacy, she turned away from girls and became friends with mostly guys. When I asked why, I heard a response that was echoed repeatedly by women who were targets of girl bullies. "I think in a way it's because I don't trust women," Vanessa said. "I don't trust them with my fears." Vanessa believes that women criticize each other more than men do, and more frequently than men criticize women. And for Vanessa, as with countless others, it's not solely a matter of how often women criticize. Vanessa put it succinctly: "When a girl says something, for some reason, it's like it gets deeper. You take it personally. You can't just write it off."

Even when she has resolved her problems with other women, Vanessa can't shake the feeling that "they're going to get you again. And you've got your defenses up at all times." She added, "I'm so scared of their underlying motive and the potential breakdown of [the relationship]. Because the potential breakdown is what, you know, my real fear is. It's like, are they going to hate me? Are they going to make my life miserable? Are they going to just consistently call and write letters and tell me how awful I am and how awful I have been to them? And that my life will never again be happy?"

And yet, Vanessa said, she'll tell a man her deep secrets, even men she doesn't know that well, because she feels safer. Because girls had made her feel so sexually unattractive, she made sure to let me know she has made a point of sleeping with men on the first date, to silence the haunting feeling, instilled by Stacy, that she would never be "girlfriend material."

 

ANNIE'S STORY

When meanness and friendship become inextricable, girls lose the ability to distinguish between them. They may come to understand meanness as a component of friendship, learning to explain it away and even justify it. When abuse permeates friendship, some girls lose their ability to defend themselves against it.

Annie Wexler's long legs were flexing off the couch she was sharing with her mother, Petra. At fourteen, she looked every bit the girl athlete in white high-tops, blue mesh shorts, and a long, worn Adidas T-shirt. Her long hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and though her eyes looked tired on this dewy Sunday morning, she smiled cheerfully when I apologized for the hour of my visit. The house was still and large, blending into an affluent suburban bouquet of other still and large homes, the only sound the yellow lab clicking his tail insistently against the dark wood floor.

Annie's story began in the third grade, a time when there were already strict social rules. You were in a group—the nerdy one, the cool kids, the "okay" crowd—but you weren't friends with everyone. Annie was, as she put it, "kind of in between this one group of girls and this other group." She had two best friends, one from each clique. Samantha was a small, scrappy girl on the margins of one group in Annie's math class. "Rapunzel" was Samantha's favorite fairy tale, and she had refused to cut her straight brown hair since she was four. Annie loved to brush and braid it. Samantha sat happily for whole recesses at a time as Annie tried different hairstyles and then went running with Samantha inside to look in the girls' bathroom mirror.

Alison was popular and pretty, the center of her clique's attention. Her friends called her "Glitter Girl." Alison had just gotten her ears pierced, but she had been collecting earrings since she was six. Every day, something different sparkled in her ears. Alison's friends played foursquare in the same corner of the playground every day, and it was a game Annie loved. At recess, Alison brought a maroon ball out of her locker, which she had decorated with glitter and glow-in-the-dark stickers.

Samantha usually asked Annie to play at recess just after they arrived at school, and Annie usually said yes. Once, when she replied, "Well, I was going to play with Alison today," Samantha suddenly shot back, "Then I don't want to be your friend anymore."

Samantha's threats triggered intense arguments between the girls. Annie didn't want to lose Samantha, so she would run over to Alison and tell her that she couldn't play after all. Sometimes Annie insisted on playing with Alison. Samantha would say, "Well, you obviously don't like me, so I guess you don't want to be my friend. You can just go play with her. I don't care." And then, Annie recalled, "she'd go off crying." Afraid, Annie would gingerly approach Alison. The very next day, Samantha would come up to play with Annie as though nothing had happened.

Alison responded competitively to Samantha's behavior. She began to want Annie exclusively, so that if Annie was playing with her, and someone else approached, the request to play was always denied. "It always had to be one on one," Annie said. "Samantha and me. Or Alison and me. And I'd feel flattered that people wanted me."

Alison, powerful and charismatic, disliked Samantha. She and her friends started excluding Annie when she played with Samantha. Eventually, Alison started making the same threats. "If you don't play with me at recess," she warned Annie, "I don't want to be your friend anymore."

On the couch, Annie tucked her legs under her and sat up on her knees. "I always felt in the middle," she said. "Who was I going to play with? I might lose them both." She made the first of a few self-deprecating excuses that would be sprinkled throughout our conversation. "It's kind of hard for you to imagine," she began. "I mean, Samantha is not a big person. It's not like she came up to me and was like 'Grrr! You have to play with me!' She's this big!" Annie thrust two fingers stuck together at her mother, who nodded in agreement. "I'm not kidding. I was bigger than her and a full year older than her."

But, Annie said, "you'd always feel intimidated by her because she was this loudmouthed girl. She wasn't afraid to talk. She was gonna say what she thinks. She was always going to have her way. The right way was her way."

Annie sank down into the couch. "Yet I felt so taken over. If I didn't do this I would lose that friendship, and if I did go I would lose this friendship. They wouldn't allow me to be myself. If I would have just mentioned the slightest thing about getting sick of it, they would drop me. I thought I was kind of like getting smaller and smaller to them, not as a friend but just as a person."

Practically every day, either Samantha or Alison would end her friendship with Annie. In her journal every night, Annie said, "I would always write, 'I broke up with Samantha today,' 'I broke up with Alison today.' I know I used the wrong term for it." She laughed.

Annie was quiet for a moment, eyes fixed on her dog. "It feels really bad when someone says, 'I don't want to be your friend,' because then I would wonder, did I do something wrong? Am I just not a person you want to like, and just stuff like that. It's just so powerful in my mind. So many things go through my mind. Did I do something wrong? Am I just not likable?"

"I know it's kind of weird," she insisted (and of course it wasn't, but I wondered for the first time if Annie was anxious about what I might think of her), "I mean, you want to say, 'Why were you friends with this girl?' But it was hard for me to say 'I won't be your friend if you treat me like this' because I really wanted to keep both friendships."

Petra was shifting on the couch, crossing and uncrossing her legs, and had been for the last twenty minutes. She was eager for her daughter to finish. Above all, Petra told me, she was upset about Samantha. For nearly three years, Samantha smothered Annie. In between her threats she showered Annie with gifts brought to school: bracelets, rings, hair clips, stickers, souvenirs from trips to foreign countries. Samantha would make crafts and draw pictures, even take things from her mother (with permission) for Annie.

"But," Petra said, "if Annie crossed her and said I can't play with you today, or I'm playing with somebody else, then she would give her hate notes. 'You're a bitch.' 'I hate you.' And she'd write long notes asking why Annie wasn't her friend anymore."

At school right before winter vacation, helping Annie clean out her locker, Petra was shocked less by the mess than the contents. "We would haul out—I mean, a bagful of gifts and a bagful of hate notes." Petra threw all the gifts away. "I didn't want them in this house," she said bitterly.

Her voice rose in anger. "Every spare moment of school Samantha was on her—play with me, sit with me, sit with me at lunch, play with me after school. Annie would walk in the house after school at 3:30, and the phone would be ringing. It would be Samantha.

"What I thought was sick," she continued, "was the extreme of the I love you-I hate you thing. And I have to be honest. I saw it as potentially the ingredients for a stalker. I kid you not. I use that word. That's what it felt like. It felt victimizing to me, on Annie's behalf, that this girl was a stalker. Had the situation not faded away, I would have been concerned for her safety. Annie would get in the car upset, Samantha this and Samantha that, and we would no sooner walk in the house and there'd be either a message on the machine or Samantha was calling."

There were times, Petra recalled, when Annie would refuse to answer the phone. Or, Petra said, "when I needed to protect her, and I'd say, you know what Annie, I am not letting you talk on the phone today." Annie would agree happily.

Every day as she pulled into the school car-pool lane to pick Annie up, Petra was filled with anxiety. "I could almost tell by her face. It's like, 'Oh God, what was it today?' She would get in the car and be so upset. And it was frustrating for me because I knew as an adult what was going on. As much as we would say to her, 'Oh just tell her to shut up!' that's not who Annie was. She would say to me, 'I can't, I can't be mean.' That part was so frustrating because I thought, 'Nobody's going to treat my kid like that!'"

Approaching Samantha's mother seemed daunting. She was not a friend of Petra's, and Petra dreaded her response to the so-called problem. Imagining the conversation, Petra grimaced: "Who the hell are you to say this! My daughter is giving your daughter gifts! How can you say that's not a nice thing!"

Annie stepped in. "I don't have a weak personality. I'm very strong and I have good leadership qualities. I'm not just going to be sitting there. But it's so hard for me to say, I don't want you to do this anymore, and I don't like the fact that you're doing this to someone who's my friend."

As she became more isolated, Annie was more vulnerable to Samantha's suffocating attention. Annie was folding into herself in other ways, too. She became fearful of crying or showing emotions in front of her peers.