The Girls from Ames Read Online Free PDF Page B

Kelly felt relieved that she didn’t pick that boy’s name. But she also felt great admiration for the girl who did. That was really something, how the girl just took the boy’s hand and off they went to make out. Even today, when Kelly gets together with the Ames girls, she tells them she still wonders: What would she have done if she had pulled that boy’s name? What would the other Ames girls have done? Kelly briefly dated a black man later in her life. But how would she and the other girls have responded with that slip of paper in their hands, in that junior-high moment, in a basement that was damp with sexual and racial tension?
     
     
    B y high school, the girls had coalesced firmly into that group of eleven. Not every girl was close to every other girl in the same way. There were definite pairings—Jane/Marilyn, Kelly/Diana, Cathy/ Sally, Jenny/Sheila—but like a corporate flow chart, all were linked to one another through someone else. Each girl had a distinct way of interacting with each of the other ten, meaning there were ninety-nine different one-on-one relationships between them. All sorts of variables played into how they got along: Who was irritable because of menstrual cramps? Who felt she’d been given short shrift by one of the others? Who had a boy at the moment?
    Still, what happened in the group almost always stayed in the group. Every time they confided in each other without spilling details to their families or acquaintances, they were laying the foundation for a deliberate loyalty that would serve them well in adulthood. Sure, when some of the eleven weren’t around, the others might talk about them—they still do—but they rarely bad-mouthed one another to those beyond their group.
    As a clique, they had a reputation for being flirts—more social than academic, and more apt to tease boys than to please them. In reality, though, most of the Ames girls were very good students. And a couple of them actually pleased more than they teased.
    They were mostly well liked at school—they were definitely one of the “popular” groups—but everyone knew they were a closed society. It was the eleven of them, period. If any of the 620 other girls at Ames High hoped for an invitation into the inner circle, the eleven girls were too wrapped up with each other to notice. In their recollections today, they swear that no other girls really wanted to join them. But they admit that they may have been clueless about the urges of outsiders. (Friendship researchers today would refer to them as a closed clique, as opposed to an open snowball group, which keeps growing as it welcomes members.)
    As a group, the girls sometimes seemed like they had an over-abundance of attitude and self-confidence. After Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” came out in 1979, their sophomore year, they loved to strut around singing it. But most of them, as individuals, were insecure. They didn’t really want to ask that question and they didn’t want to hear the answer.
    They were not stereotypical mean girls, except within the group a few times. Still, some fellow classmates found their cliquishness irritating. Other girls assumed that the eleven of them phoned each other every morning before school to see what they’d all wear that day. One outside observer, Nancy Derks, was a member of the female jock crowd. She would notice one of the eleven girls wearing a hat in the hallway, and she knew, she just knew, she’d soon see the rest of them meandering down the hallway in hats. Or if one was wearing sweatpants, they’d almost all be in sweats. Or if one was all dolled up in a dress, there’d be the ten others wearing dresses. “They’re conformists,” Nancy would say. (In the final days of high school, she and a friend would hatch a simple scheme to get back at the eleven girls for all their perceived prissiness and conformity.)
    The girls deny always moving in lockstep—in their own heads, they were very much