Free Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons Page A

friend, whom she has handed a now-empty Drano cocktail.
    "I just killed my best friend!" gasps the heroine of the film
Heathers.
    "And your worst enemy," purrs her accomplice boyfriend.
    "Same difference," she moans.
    The word
bully
evokes the image of an enemy, not an intimate, and yet it is often the closest girlfriends who are caught in protracted episodes of emotional abuse. The meanness can unfold secretly under a cover of intimacy and play. Young and ignorant of the signs of relationship abuse, targets struggle to reconcile their circumstances with what they have learned about friendship. Aggressors tend to be equally unaware that their "possessiveness" or "bossiness" is crossing a line. To the contrary, they are often deeply attached to their targets. In the course of these relationships, both target and aggressor often assimilate their behaviors into their concept of friendship. These stories of girl bullying are seldom told. They are a singular alchemy of love and fear, and they defy many of our assumptions about female friendship.
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    VANESSA'S STORY
    Even in the first grade, Vanessa recalled, Stacy was popular and funny. Vanessa was instantly awed by her, and when Stacy asked her to be best friends, she was overjoyed to become part of her clique. Throughout elementary school, Vanessa would relish her status, and especially her power over Nicki and Zoe, who let Vanessa be second-in-command to Stacy. Not long after they became friends, Stacy started asking Vanessa to do things for her. At first, Vanessa felt important when Stacy singled her out, saying she'd like Vanessa if she did whatever it was she wanted at the time. Stacy seemed to leave Nicki and Zoe alone.
    "I was very attracted to that," Vanessa, now twenty-seven, told me. Under this arrangement, Vanessa could look tough and still allow herself to be controlled. "I was an insecure kid, but I was confident on the outside," she explained. "And I wanted to be accepted by her, to be her. I wanted to be her second, you know. I wanted to be her right-hand girl."
    One night during their frequent sleepovers, when they were nine, Stacy asked Vanessa if they could play dress-up. "I'll be the man, and you'll be the woman," she told Vanessa. That night Stacy kissed Vanessa, and Vanessa enjoyed it. Their sleepovers always included some dress-up for a while after that, and they never told anyone about the game.
    In fifth grade, dress-up stopped. The game was never mentioned again, though Vanessa didn't forget about it. The memory became hers instead of theirs; for Vanessa it was strange to have a secret that only she thought about.
    That year, Stacy's popularity skyrocketed. Not only was she the first girl in the grade to get MTV, but her parents were cool and let her and her friends eat junk food whenever they wanted. Stacy had the best bike, too. Over at her house, Vanessa told me, "We'd make crank calls. She was always really good and really vicious, and she knew exactly what to do to get the person really upset."
    Most of all, though, Stacy was fun, and she had a lot of it by controlling her friends. "She had this way with the other girls," Vanessa recalled. "In a minute, she could make them do anything she wanted. She was the one who always had crushes on boys, and she would tell her friends to go up and tell them something so she didn't have to do anything." She made Vanessa steal candy for her from a local store. "Of course I did it," Vanessa said. "All I wanted to do was make her happy. And of course there was the underlying fear of being rejected by her."
    One day, on the bus to school in sixth grade, Vanessa mentioned their old dress-up game. Stacy stared darkly at Vanessa. "What are you talking about?" she snapped. Vanessa stiffened as she watched Stacy turn away.
    "Was she afraid?" Vanessa wondered years later. "I think that's when she felt I was a threat. I had this information on her. And that was the beginning of the end."
    Stacy began writing songs about