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Girls gone vicious

By Barbara Brotman

July 25, 2008

I'll have a large Earl Grey tea, an almond biscotto and a vicious display of female teenage cruelty, please. With a side order of anguish over the moral obligations of an onlooker.

I didn't really order all that when I went to a coffeehouse recently to meet a friend. But sometimes you get something you didn't order. And what unfolded at the table next to me was definitely not on the menu.

There was something hinky about the body language of the three high school girls sitting there. Two girls sat on one side, one across from them. They were pretty, their hair long and swingy, their arms bearing bracelets and cell phones. But no one was smiling.

One of the twosome was leading the charge against the girl facing them.

"Why did you join our choir?" she asked in a voice too loud to avoid hearing. "You could have joined any choir. Why did you join ours?

"Do you really think we're friends now?"

Girl One had done something bad. The Tormenting Twosome had been hurt. How dare she try to hang out with them now?

Further charges were leveled. What was with the clothes she was wearing these days? Wasn't she copying the Tormenting Twosome? And what about Girl One's friendship with a certain group?

Girl One's response?

She begged for her social life.

What she had done had been terrible, she acknowledged. She was sorry. She was different now.

"I don't know what you want," she said. "I want to be friends. Do you want to be friends?"

My biscotto suddenly tasted like sawdust.

I felt like slapping them. I felt like going out, getting hold of a copy of "Queen Bees and Wannabes" and the movie "Mean Girls" and throwing them down on their table.

If you witness child abuse, you are supposed to step forward and stop it. What are you supposed to do if you witness teenage girl viciousness?

In my head, I raged at the girls. You know all the talk about how cruel girls can be? The debate over what, if anything, can be done to relegate girlhood cliquishness and brutishness to a benighted past? The anguished testimonies of the tormented, and the equally anguished reports from their horrified but helpless parents?

They're talking about you. Take out your purse mirrors and take a good look.

It wasn't just the tag team I wanted to shake. I wanted a word with Girl One too.

Namely, what could these two girls offer that could possibly be worth this abject crawling? Why was she asking if they wanted to be friends? Were they acting like they wanted to be friends? Were they acting like anyone you would want as a friend? Where was her self-respect?