Free Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons

followed by a quick exit. The supplicant has to take the girl at her word, but she knows the score. As one ninth grader explained, "Last week, I asked my friend why she was mad—I had no idea why—and she said, 'I'm not mad at you.' Right then I knew she was mad at me." To survive in the social jungle, friends learn to doubt what they see and hear and instead search for a second layer of real feeling beneath a false exterior, a quality that comes to dominate girls' interactions.
    Mean looks and the silent treatment are the ultimate undercover aggression. The least visible of the alternative aggressions, nonverbal gesturing slips easily beneath teacher radar, allowing girls to remain "good girls." Debbi Canter, a sixth-grade teacher in Ridgewood, said, "I see those looks flying around the room. I call them on it. And they look at me with those big, innocent eyes. 'What are you talking about?'" Indeed, some teachers justify their hands-off attitude toward girls' aggression because they can't confirm it. Middle-school assistant principal Pam Bank explained, "If I see a boy tapping his pen, I'll say, 'Stop that tapping.' But if I see a girl giving another girl the evil eye, I might say, 'Eyes on me.' I knew the boy was thumping on his pen, but I might not know for sure what the girl was doing."
    Girls understand the futility of exposing nonverbal gesturing. Maggie, a Ridgewood sixth grader, said, "Teachers, most of the time, they're like, 'Don't worry, it will be okay, just ignore them.' But it's hard to ignore them. If they do it on purpose and they're right in front of you and they do something to make you really mad, it's hard to ignore them. And it hurts your feelings." Her classmate Emily told me, "If they're whispering, the teacher thinks it's going to be all right because they're not hitting people. She might think they're not hurting her, but if they're punching she might get on them and send them to the office." Kenni added, "Most teachers think, 'Oh, well, she's not hurting you. Don't worry about it.' But really they are hurting you. They're hurting your feelings."
    In a social world where anger is not spoken, reading body language becomes an important way for girls to know each others' feelings. Yet the practice can have grave consequences. Bodies at rest are always in motion: no matter how hard a girl tries, it's impossible to be in conscious charge of every move she makes. Misunderstandings happen all the time. A girl passes her friend in the hallway, and her friend doesn't say hello. The girl is certain her friend is angry. Actually, the friend was deep in thought and never even saw the girl. It doesn't matter: a fight begins.
    "People look at you and don't mean to, and you think something bad, and it starts something," a Mississippi freshman said. "If girls were more like guys and came out and said what they thought, a lot of stuff wouldn't get started." A Sackler sixth grader remarked, "If you, like, ignore me and don't talk to me so I don't know what's wrong, then maybe I'll turn against you."
    Confusing body language can indeed lead to confrontations, albeit bewildering ones. Sixth grader Reena told me, "Last year, in my English class, there was this girl, and I wasn't that good friends with her, but one night she called me up and said, 'You've been mean to me and I want an apology.' And I didn't know what she was talking about because I never really was friends with her so I just said I apologized to her but I never really knew what it was for."
    Silence deepens conflict intensity, as each side wonders what the other is thinking. As is often the case when girls avoid confrontations, there may be a long list of possible reasons and past squabbles to plumb. "You each have different ideas about what's going on," a sixth grader at Arden explained. "When you finally do talk, it's worse than when it started."
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    intimate enemies
    Eyes frozen wide in horror, Veronica is gaping at the corpse of her best