Me and the Girls

On shows like Gilmore Girls and The OC, high school girls talk like teenage Woody Allens, with every decision grounded in hours of garrulous overanalysis before and after the fact. I suspected this was just out-of-touch TV writers voicing their own neuroses via pretty little mouths, so I followed a pair of 17-year-old girls, Helen and Jacque, around their Connecticut boarding school for two days to see what the real deal is.

The Talking
Do you know how they make homeopathic medicine? They put one drop of the “active ingredient” into 100 drops of an inert solution. Then they take a drop of that new solution, and add 100 drops of inert solution. They do that again and again and again, until nothing but the “vibe” of the active ingredient is left. That’s how girls talk. Example: Our first night we had a quiet Chinese dinner with their pal Furman. The moment he left the car and was out of earshot, they set to work. They began with his interest in music. That took them to the fake DJ voice he uses on his radio show, which led them to speculate that his interest in music is designed to impress girls, which brought them to the time he disavowed their friendship in front of the school hockey team and how they took their revenge via mass email (which landed them in shit for its reference to Jacque’s car as a “Vulva”). The bunny hole of girl talk went on and on and on until I couldn’t even bring myself to pay attention. But basically, they were just sort of vibing on the boy scene in general. Boys were the inert solution.


Crushes
I’d gone into this assignment assuming it would take every second of effort to dredge up the identities of my hosts’ secret loves, but within minutes of arrival all cards were on the table. Helen’s teacher-crush is her bearded English intructor who she’s determined through extensive MySpace snooping is very “genuine.” Her main crush at the moment is Furman, as it turns out. And then she has a deeper, slightly darker crush on an awkward kid a couple grades down with whom she’s never spoken. Whereas with Furman she’s content to keep a secret portrait of him in a sketchbook he may someday flip through and otherwise play the waiting game, the level of covert infatuation with the underclassmen has warranted far more obsessive treatment. On her computer is her file on him, a folder full of scans of his IDs, several pictures of his relatives, and a rap he wrote, in which he declares his intent to put more “Torque in his drillin’.”


Bracketology
“Bracketology” is the schematic the girls of the school use to delineate the hotness of the male student body. While Helen has yet to be an active participant, she has sat in on the graph sessions and was so able to bear witness to its working. Every couple of months, the girls of each dorm come together with the school facebook to identify the hottest boy. They work in pairings, one-on-one, so like they’ll go “Charlie X vs. Daniel K” and then vote by a show of hands and gag-faces. The winner of the vote moves on to the next round, until only one boy prevails. He is their god. For two months.


Dating
Guys may act like they care what their buds think about who they hook up with, but when it comes down to it, if they’re into somebody they go for her. Girls on the other hand pursue their targets almost solely to impress and outdo their gal-pals. A guy could be the most puppy-eyed, stubble-having boy who was ever sweet and he’d still get turned down for some schmoe who’d help the girl’s “status.” This was girldom’s most safely guarded secret until Jacque betrayed it.


Slut-Limit
According to two sqawky voices outside Helen’s dorm room, the school’s current slut-limit is two weeks of dating before doing it.


That Weird Primal Cawing Sound
You know that noise you’ll sometimes hear a girl make from another room that’s either a really loud laugh or a really loud sob? Girls can’t tell which it is either.


Speaking of Which
Helen’s pretty bookish and reserved, but that doesn’t prevent her from harboring a ravenous appetite for some good old-fashioned schadenfreude. “This dorm’s actually really good for gossip because you can hear everything that’s going on,” she told me. “Last year during exams this really put-together-type girl started wigging out and you could hear her screaming, ‘I can’t take this anymore, I want to kill myself!’ from across the hall.”

But this little min-eruption was small beans compared to the nuclear meltdown one girl had Helen’s freshman year. “She was already sort of ‘off’ in a dumb way,” Helen told me. “Like she thought ham came from its own separate animal instead of the pig, some sort of big flightless ‘ham bird’. One night during mid-terms she lost her shit and barfed all over somebody else’s front door, then just left it there and went back to bed. There was this big to-do in the morning, because nobody knew who it was, but eventually she admitted it and they sent her home. Nowadays we use her name as a by-word for psychosis.”


Primping
Compared with her classmates’ level of primping Helen is practically a Mennonite. Still, she had an arsenal of products two rows thick. This is her non-showering morning routine: Face cleanser, eye lotion, moisturizer, eye liner, Garnier Fructis Anti-Frizz Serum and Deep Conditioning Masque. She used to set aside three to four minutes of mirror-time to silently rehearse her reactions to important conversations that might occur during the day until they involuntarily became unsilent.


The CD Situation
Each of the 15 pages of Jacque’s CD case was occupied by a rainbow-colored CD-R (except for one, which held a regular CD-R) with a title like “Party Mix” or “Summer Mix” or “Doin Homework” written on it in Sharpie. I found a larger CD book in the car which I assumed would have actual CDs, but it was page after pages of “Sleep Mix” and “Driving Tunes.”


Uh-oh Men
Right outside a pizza place we went to, we passed a trio of middle-aged guys and the skeeze was so heavy I was almost knocked over. I asked the girls if that was typical and they said it was nothing compared with what it’s like when they’re alone. “I remember one of the first times I walked downtown alone,” Helen said. “I got catcalls and honks from something like 20 guys passing in cars or on the sidewalk. One old guy ran all the way out of a gas station just to flick his tongue at me.”

“It’s so much worse when they’re old,” Jacque said. “There are two principal types of gross guys: The ones who do it from their cars and would probably never say anything to you in person, and the guys who don’t care who sees them being creepy and will come right up to you.”


And It Comes Back to: The Talking
The talk of old men turned to talk of young men, turned to more vibing on boys in general. It bears mention that neither of the girls come across as your typical chataholic—they were both busting with interesting elements to be seized on like their semi-secret “troll” language (high-pitched gibberish), fervent listenership to that “Delilah” radio show, and matching set of aviator goggles, but all of it slipped by under the hypnotic pall of boy-talk. I tried my best not to zone out in case they suddenly exposed something of worth, but finally my strength wore out and I slipped into the same foggy glaze of oblivion I fall into when someone has on the WB. So I guess they were right all along. Girls are TV.