Mean Girls

Dear Daphne,

It’s time to talk about Mean Girls.

I don’t know what makes teenage girls tear each other down so viciously. Maybe it’s hormones, or that they’re all feeling insecure. Maybe some of them actually enjoy making other people feel like shit. The sad fact is that if you’re not one (and you better not be one), you’re going to meet one. She will probably make you cry, and there will be nothing I can do to stop it, even though, more than anything in the world, I will want to.

As you probably already know, your cousin Jordan died when she was just nine days old. She would have turned 20 last month. I was thirteen when this happened, and though I already knew what it was to lose someone (the first was Grandpa Clint, then Grandpa Drake a few years later), losing my first niece was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I had a hard time processing her death, making sense of it, understanding why it had happened.

I talked about Jordan a lot. I told people about her, about what had happened in our family. I wrote about her, I dreamed about her, I thought about her all the time. Looking back, Jordan’s birth and death were some of the defining events of my teenage years. It’s not surprising that a Mean Girl used that against me.

In high school, I was friends with a girl I’ll call L. She was confident, worldly, with exotically tilted eyes and beautiful hair. We had sleepovers, went shopping, saw movies, experimented with makeup, talked about boys. I don’t remember when or why L decided that she didn’t like me anymore. Maybe I did something, or maybe I didn’t do anything at all. The affections of teenage girls are fleeting, and really the when and why don’t matter.

One day, sitting outside the AMC Willowbrook waiting for a ride home, my friend K (who, by the way, I still consider a friend all these years later) told me that L had been talking about me behind my back. We had already fallen out by then, so I wasn’t exactly surprised. It was what she said that really hurt.

“L says that you talk about Jordan too much. She says it’s stupid that you care, because she was only nine days old, so it’s not like you knew her. She says it really doesn’t matter that Jordan died, because your sister can have more babies. She says you make a big deal of it because you want attention.”

I was crushed. I cried for days.

I couldn’t believe that someone would say such a thing. Worse, some of my other friends seemed to agree with her. That was the year I made a new group of friends. L’s words cut me deeper than any insult thrown my way (and trust me, there were plenty of those. I was nerdy and insecure with no fashion sense). I averted my eyes when I passed her in the hall. Some days, I turned the other way if I saw her coming. When she moved away, it was like every muscle in my body relaxed at once.

But the damage was done. That was also the year that my defenses went up. I developed a sarcastic streak, and started keeping people at arm’s length. I’d say harsh or insulting things so that people wouldn’t think I liked them too much. I did my best not to give anyone anything they could use against me. I figured that if I acted like I was unbreakable, then people wouldn’t be able to hurt me.

This did not work.

No matter how hard you try to protect yourself, someone can always hurt your feelings. Senior year, after the Homecoming dance, I heard the rumor that I’d given Cary a blowjob in his daddy’s Lexus while we were stopped at a red light. Never mind that Cary’s daddy’s Lexus had tinted windows, and it would have been difficult to see this. Never mind that it would have been an impossibly quick blowjob. Never mind that any guy I ever dated in high school would attest to the fact that I was far too prude for that. Never mind that it absolutely did not happen (though I did make out with him for a while in a car parked by some train tracks out in the country). People wanted to believe it, so they did. People wanted to talk about it, so they did. Though I never found out who started the rumor, it’s a pretty safe bet that it was a Mean Girl.

Mean Girls aren't always mean to everyone--sometimes they're only mean to you. I don’t know what makes a nice girl into a Mean Girl, but sooner or later, someone you trust will turn on you, and it will hurt. She will be your friend one day, and then like turning off a light, she’ll stop, and you won’t know why. You'll try to make things okay again, but she won't listen to you. She won't let you back in. She’ll say terrible things about you to anyone who will listen. She will go out of her way to make you feel awful. She will be happy to see you cry.

Remember that the things you say can hurt other people. Think about what you say before you speak, and be careful who you speak to, because Mean Girls will twist your words and repeat them in ways you did not intend for them to be repeated.

I hope that you will stand by your girlfriends when a Mean Girl is awful to one of them. And I hope that when you become the target of a Mean Girl, you won’t let it hurt you as much as I let it hurt me. But most of all, I hope that you will not be a Mean Girl.

Be nice.

Love,
Mom