*Names have been changed.
It's that whole evolution thing, the whole 'I gotta find a man and ain't no one gonna get in my way' thing. Add to that the fact that most girls are incredibly insecure, and you have one hell of a lethal combination."
Guy or girl, it's hard to find anyone who hasn't both teased and been teased at some point in his or her life. From Heathers to Mean Girls, Hollywood has capitalized on the gossip phenomenon, lifting the curtain on the vicious world of high school cliques. At a school like Penn, it's easy to watch these cult classics and laugh; to turn to your friend and say, "I remember when..." But look a little closer, and you'll find that reminiscing isn't necessary. Cliques run rampant behind these ivory walls. Gossip and reputations are social diseases, infecting even the most brilliant minds with hyperbolic myths.
Karen Lewis* is friendly and out-going. A senior at Penn, she has navigated every social scene imaginable, ranging from beer-drenched frat parties to the swankiest of downtown events. If you would have asked Karen to predict her college experience four years ago, there's no doubt she would have described sleepless nights during finals, tiny dorm rooms and Spring Fling. Cliques, though? Probably not on the radar. A member of the most infamous girl group in her class? Completely out of the question.
But with or without Karen's consent, it happened.
"So freshman year, my very first day of school ... [I was in] my Peer Advisor Group," Karen explains. "They give you a long, sweaty, drawn-out tour of the campus, and we sit and eat while mutant squirrels try and devour our brown bagged lunches. I was crying in between the Quad and the Fine Arts building because I couldn't bear to leave my family." Her tone instantly brightens as she recounts meeting Amber:* "I met my best friend of college in this group. Amber and I hit it off right away. I had been set-up with a friend -- we all know how our Jewish geography does this to us -- but we were not really connecting, so to find Amber on day one of school was incredible."
The rest of Karen's account is about as standard as any college student's. She and Amber, through a series of parties and encounters, met four other like-minded girls with whom they instantly connected. "We all six ended up totally loving each other and had so much fun together, and ended up always hanging out together," she explains.
And then things got interesting.
Cliques, by any standard, are formed as much by outside perspectives as they are by internal conceptions. In Rosalind Wiseman's book Queen Bees and Wannabees she explains that gossip and reputations exist in a purely symbiotic relationship. Insecurities take hold, people begin whispering and rumors are created out of nowhere. Well into the first semester of their freshman year, Karen's group of friends learned this lesson firsthand.
"These two boys we were friends with ... well one is kind of a silly, awkward, great friend of ours who we love and hung out with all the time. He used to walk into a room and look at someone and go 'hiiiii pretttttyy' in, like, a flirty voice. Go ahead ... do it. Yeah, that's the tone. So he would always do that, and just like a certain phrase that your friend uses, or a gesture you pick up from a best friend, we would always make fun of him, and say that to him back. He would walk in and go 'hiii pretttty' and someone would say back 'heeeyyyyy prettttyy' and he would go, 'no, YOU'RE pretty' and we would go, 'no, YOU'RE pretty.' It was an endearing exchange that we used with this particular boy instead of hello and such nonsense. We would sometimes do it amongst ourselves, kind of mocking and joking with it ... get it ... got it ... good."
But people didn't get it. At all.
Before long, people started talking. News of the girls' mock title spread like wildfire, penetrating innumerable social circles and freshmen halls. Karen's joke became Penn's reality; her group had a name -- a cheesy, horrible, adolescent name. The Pretties.
"One day when a couple of us girls were going to lunch with a few boys," Karen recalls. "[Our friend] Staci* left an away message that read 'having a pretty lunch' ... now to ME, I would read that and be like, oh, ha, Staci is at lunch ... but apparently to others, this meant that we were now going to be called by everyone ... 'the Pretties.' Who decided that? I don't know."
At this point, though, it didn't matter. Rumors had already started, and actual origins were of secondary concern. The truth, as it turned out, didn't matter as much as juicy gossip. Whether she knew it or not, Karen had herself a clique. And incidentally, it wasn't exactly popular with the student body.
"My very first day at Penn, I was friendly with Staci, we sat on separate stoops in the Upper Quad smoking cigarettes until it became obvious that we should sit together," one female Penn senior explains. "As the semester progressed, I noticed she'd made other friends, and I had too. I remember reading her away messages and cringing when they said 'Lunch with the Pretties,' 'Pretty night out' or something similarly embarrassing. One of these so-called Pretties lived a hall down from me and her room was a tacky homage to a spoiled princess -- lots of pink faux fur. The Pretties were a laughing stock from the very first time their group name became public knowledge. First of all, only one or two of them could actually be classified as 'pretty.'"
"Frankly I don't really care how the name got started," another classmate adds. "Who came up with it, or whatever. The fact is that they adopted and embraced it. I mean, come on. My daddy tells me I'm wonderful, but you don't see me going around referring to myself 'the wonderful.'"
Bitter remarks started peppering conversations at parties and in the stacks of Van Pelt. The Pretties became a Penn social phenomenon, attracting resentful attention from 2005's chief gossips. But it wasn't until second semester that Karen and her friends began to realize the true impact vicious rumors can have.
"When it came time to rush sororities, it was hell. Whoever leaked this fake info screwed us but big time," Karen says. "Every girl in the sorority that we liked got wind from inside sources that we called ourselves 'the Pretties.' Apparently there were emails that went around about us on their listservs, shit was talked about us, it was actually really, really awful. We were actually kinda worried that people wouldn't want us in their sororities because we had been labeled this awful name that made us sound totally conceited and retarded none the less ... but we got in and then the pledging began."
Still, the bonds supposedly inspired within a pledge class did little for the Pretties. Seen as exclusive and bitchy, their presence was a divisive factor among their sisters. "Some girls in the pledge class felt that cliques excluded them, but I don't know if people were personally rebuffed, intentional or not," a sister in their sorority explains. "And in my point of view, there are insecurities on both sides that inhibit friendships. Incidents that happened during my time as a pledge influenced my opinion of them -- not having to do with personal interactions, which have been pretty pleasant."
Karen, though, has a different story. Pigeon-holed as bitches from the get-go, her pledging experience can be summed up in one word: defense. "Tara* was actually made to cry because people asked why we called ourselves this and when we said we really didn't they called us liars. It actually made us feel really bad, as well as look bad."
Frankly, it didn't matter. These girls had a reputation that the rest of the school was dead-set on maintaining. It's easy to see the Pretties as victims; innocent girls hurt by the residue of some high school angst. Cliques and popularity, after all, are supposed to be things of the past. Queen Bees author Wiseman argues that reputations are generally more rigidly prescribed by early teens. By the time someone is 20 years-old, it is expected that people will rise above such catty social classifications. "Honestly, I don't know why this particular group attracted so much attention," a Penn senior adds. "Perhaps it's because they're the only ones who have a name, and you know how much Penn kids like labels."
Like any clique, the Pretties sowed the seeds of their own destruction. "It's not surprising," one of their sorority sisters explains. "Cliques generally tend to fall apart. Girls aren't good at protecting the feelings of other girls, from themselves or others. The closer you are or the more interaction you have, the more opportunity there is to hurt their feelings."
Another senior isn't so understanding. "I know some of them have split off into smaller factions of the Pretties and some have been altogether alienated for no good reason," she says. "My closest friend out of the original group detests her ex-Pretty friends ... I guess she figured out what frauds they were, and how quickly they'd backstab."
Karen, though, clings to her story. "People still believe that we called ourselves the Pretties. I still hear it and it drives me CRAZY. The fact that I was even asked to recount this means that people really thought this is what we labeled ourselves. What do you people think...we sat around one night over carrot sticks and spray butter and thought long and hard of the best name to call ourselves? No. We watched TV, and got fucked up, and partied, and ate and went to class, like the rest of you. We didn't need a name to do that. You fools." And the backstabbing? The spiteful lies and classic double-crossing?
"Some wanted to go out and meet more people and experience living with other people and try new things, some just moved; some went willingly ... others, well, that's for a whole other article, now, isn't it? I can't go into some details, I'll get in trouble for telling the truth. And for as of now ... I can't really speak for the status of all of our relationships. It's not for me to comment on"
