One of last weekend’s movies was Mean Girls (the original, not the musical). I’m not sure why I was drawn to it. I think part of it was that I was looking for movies that contained Christmas elements but that weren’t “Christmas” movies, and I remembered the talent show scene.

I saw this movie in the theater when it was originally released, though I think I caught it later in the run at the dollar theater. My agent had suggested I consider writing young adult, and since it had been a long time since I was a young adult, I was doing research. I read the non-fiction book the movie was based on, then decided to go see the movie. The book was a bit uncomfortable to read because it brought back a lot of memories. I’d seen and experienced so many of the things the author mentioned about how girls treat each other, and I had a similar reaction to the movie, though I was lucky to be a teen before three-way calling was common (and I can only imagine how social media comes into play).

Though one big difference for me was that my Mean Girls experience came in elementary school, not high school. The popular girl in my high school class was popular because she was really sweet and nice. She was also very shy and introverted, so she just hung around with her best friend. There was no entourage, no group of wannabes. I was sort of in the tertiary level of friends with her, since we had most of our classes together and were in the same Sunday school class at church, so we were “school” and “church” friends, though we never hung out together away from school. I wasn’t really included or welcomed in high school, since I was the new kid in a place where most of the kids had been there at least since elementary school, but I wasn’t bullied. I was just left alone. I think it did help that for my freshman year I had some bully protection from the senior girl I sat with in band who was the queen bee of the school that year. If you’ve ever watched that reality show about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, I shared a music stand with Kelli (the director of the cheerleaders) as a freshman, and although we didn’t really talk and I wouldn’t have considered us friends, I also got the sense that I’d been put in the “don’t mess with her” category, and the older guys kind of watched over me while the senior girls were fairly nice, and no one younger went against that.

But my elementary school experience could have been a case study in that book, not at school, but at home. We moved to a small, isolated neighborhood on an army post the summer before second grade. There weren’t enough girls for there to be multiple cliques, so everyone from first through third grade hung out together, with maybe eight girls at the most. I was the only girl in my grade most of the time, so it was the third graders, me, and a few select first graders. There was very much a queen bee who ruled the group and decided who was in or out, and she was a mini Regina George. She dictated what TV shows everyone watched (there was no point in looking for anyone to play outside with while the Bewitched rerun was on every evening), what clothes everyone should wear, what foods were in and out, etc. I remember that the worst thing anyone could say about you was that you were “conceited,” and it didn’t take much to be considered conceited. Just having confidence or thinking you were at all good was being conceited. She loved to set up traps. One of her favorite things for us to play was beauty pageant, where you had to show confidence and be willing to show off a talent to win (she was the judge), but if you acted like you thought you were any good you were conceited.

I think most of the power she held was because there were so few girls, so if she didn’t let you in the group, your only option for friends would be the boys or whoever was also an outcast at that time, mostly the one girl a year younger than I was who was never really in the group because she was considered weird. The queen bee mostly let me in the group, but I didn’t fit in well since I was younger than most of them. It was most stressful in the summers. During the school year I had friends at school and was involved in activities after school, so I didn’t need friends at home so much. It was during the summer when she really flexed her power. I remember a bit of angst especially the second summer, when I went in and out of favor. That was when I learned I didn’t mind playing with the boys or with the weird girl, and when the queen bee thought she was losing power over me, she really doubled down. I came in last for all the beauty pageants. She moved away sometime when I was in third grade, and all the girls in the neighborhood felt like we’d had a weight lifted. We didn’t have another mean girl like that, and the girl group was a lot less cohesive, more smaller groups of girls or else blending with the boys.

That experience inoculated me against the whole mean girl routine. I learned that they don’t have power over you if you don’t care what they think about you. I was bullied during the second half of sixth grade and seventh grade but I didn’t notice until they escalated to the point of getting physical because those girls weren’t even on my radar for noticing they existed, let alone caring, and that frustrated them enough to lead them to physically attack me so I had to notice them. I don’t recall them being particularly popular, and I don’t think anyone cared all that much about being friends with them (though it’s possible I was oblivious since none of my friends cared about them, but other girls might have wanted their favor). They didn’t have power and were trying to get it.

In the town where I used to live, they had a bad mean girl issue in elementary school. It got so bad they brought in counselors to try to deal with it, and it didn’t do any good. The son of one of my friends was in that class, and my friend said the boys in that class didn’t start dating until they were in college because they were so turned off by the girls they were in school with. They didn’t realize until they got to college that girls could be fun and nice instead of hateful bitches. That fits with my experience that it was less of an issue once we hit the teens. But I guess a movie about 8-10 year-old mean girls wouldn’t have had the same box office appeal. I don’t know if that crop of girls retained power in high school, but that school was so big that it would have been hard to have a core clique. It’s a lot easier to take over a class in elementary school and rule over who gets invited to birthday parties, etc.