circa 1983. First month of Junior High. I’m wearing a pair of gray corduroy pants, gray and pink argyle socks, and a matching gray and pink argyle sweater. My hair is too short for my face, and it has the remnants of a bad perm hanging on to it. I haven’t rocked my braces yet, so I’ve got a mouthful of teeth and a too-big smile. I walk to the end of the bus ramp and see my friend from elementary and middle school, standing with a group of girls I recognize, but don’t know.
My friend, E, has long blond hair, bright blue eyes and is wearing acid-washed jeans and a tight, neon-colored sweater. She has a scarf draped casually around her neck, but no coat, because only nerds and dweebs wear coats, even in Northern Michigan, even in October.
I walk up to her, anxious to catch up. Since we started here, I rarely see E. She’s got a new group of friends. They all chew a lot of gum, have large, teased bangs, and need lubrication to slide into their jeans every morning. They are my age, but they look like they are 10 years older. They’re a little mean, too. Even the one that needs a nose job was sneering at a nerdy girl earlier that week in the bathroom for not wearing lipstick.
E sees me out of the corner of her eye, and she starts to panic. I nearly stop walking. I can see her breathing increasing, her eyes darting around the group of gum-snapping girls. I say hello, and she recoils like I slapped her. She moves out of the circle and talks briefly with me, tells me she’ll call me, tell me she’s been busy. If it wouldn’t be too obvious, she’d be making those shooing hand motions my mom makes at the dog when she’s underfoot. I nod my head, my big, toothy smile way out of whack with my eyes. Before I know it, E is back in the fold, and like a wave, the circle of Juicy Fruit-scented girls closes peacefully in front of me.
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circa 2009. Junior High has followed me into my late 30’s. The groups are different, the jeans are much the same. The teased bangs have given way to coiffed blonde bobs and cute exercise gear. There is a lot of Vera Wang instead of Gasoline. There is 7 instead of Gloria Vanderbilt. The legs are longer, the lips fuller, the jewelry much better, more expensive. The big diamonds have a glittering fist-fight with each other whenever the sun comes out on the street. And even now, sometimes there is still rapid eye-movement, hair-flicking, and nervous breathing when I approach the “popular girls”. Sometimes the look in their eyes makes me feel like speaking to me is painful. I pull out my big grin again and act completely clueless about it. I ask how their kids are, by name. I remember who had a game last week, and what the name of her team was. I ask for the results. Someone asks about weekend weather, I whip out my iPhone and look it up for them. On the days when even their most basic manners are not functioning, and they stand across the street from me in a big gaggle of Popular Girl Version 2.0, I still smile. I read my mail and I wait for my task to be completed. I wait, and refuse to be cowed like I was in Junior High. There is no bathroom to hide during breaks, there is no uncool table of people in the cafeteria. There is just me, at 37, really quite irritated that these old feelings still can be brought up. Could I still be wearing the wrong thing, asking the wrong questions, and could I still really even give a shit?
It is a grand testimony to the meanness of girls, and the trauma that we all do to each other growing up, that years later we are still chafing under that uncomfortable stare. I think back at my past - I try to see clearly - and I can remember all the mean things I did to girls that were my friends, and the mean things I did to those that weren’t. For me, it was justified. It was vindication. To finally have my own gum-snapping posse of like-minded individuals, well, that was just too good to pass up. After years of mental beatings from girls wearing too much Love’s Baby Soft, I was ready to beat back. Shifting BFFs every other Monday, isolating or ridiculing the person in the group that had fallen out of favor - hoping that this month, the falling-out-of-favor would happen to someone else. Usually it did.
It’s the Chicken or the Egg. Was I mean to other girls because so many had been mean to me prior? How can groups of women do two totally different things to me? First thought, my groups of friends now are the warm landing spot in my life, the place I go when I need laughter or support or a drink. Second thought, those “other” women, who are just as bad (if not worse, because they should SO know better by now) who flick their moods off and on like a light switch, say mean things, posture and strut, and laugh when you fall down.
There is one difference. I handle the big bad girls differently. I chirp cheerfully in the street, or the hallways of the Y. I smile even when I feel like kicking them in their bobbed heads. I ask polite questions even if I don’t care to hear the answers. And I politely ignore their discomfort at my close proximity to them, as if by standing near me, they will end up with my body, or my fashion sense, or god forbid, my non-Vera-Wang purse-carrying hand.
