New Personal Essay: “Not With the In-Crowd”
I have never understood the appeal of being part of any in-crowd. Maybe it’s the herd mentality aspect that sticks in my craw or the exclusivity I find especially odious.
My aversion has its roots in childhood.
When I was 12 years old, I was friends with a girl, whom I’ll call Diane. Like me, Diane was Jewish, middle-class, bookish and extremely unpopular at school. Sadly, unlike me, her mother had died several years before, a loss she was still grieving when we met. In the interval, her father remarried and uprooted the family to my hometown where his new wife and stepson lived.
Understandably, those milestone changes disoriented Diane, making her feel more emotionally unmoored than before. In light of what later transpired between us, it was obvious to me as I matured (although not so much back then) that Diane’s susceptibility to being part of an in-crowd was related to her need to fill an emotional void left gaping by the loss of her mother. Yes, it all sounds like a platitude plucked from one of those self-help books from the 1970s, the era of my childhood; but when you consider that most of us, no matter how cranky, want love in the end, human nature is not so complex.
Through another friend whom I’ll call Terri, Diane and I met and instantly bonded. That entire year of 7th grade Diane, Terri and I were an inseparable threesome, always having sleepovers, hanging out at local malls and constantly on the phone exchanging cathartic confessionals and pubescent yearnings.
The big thing that year for us was getting our period. I was the last one in our trio to start menstruating—it happened when I was in sleepaway camp the summer I turned 13. I went to that camp because of Diane, who had been going there for several years.
When she found out that my parents wanted to send me to camp that summer so I would have something to do, Diane piped in, suggesting her summer camp.
“You’re going to be so popular there, Iris,” she gushed to me. “You’re going to have so many boyfriends.”
Apparently, this camp was not like our junior high where we were socially invisible. The way Diane effused about this camp you would swear it was like a “Fantasy Island” microcosm come true for the ostracized. Her excitement about this nirvana was infectious. I had to go there!
After hearing me sing this camp’s virtues ad nauseam, my parents decided to comply with my request and send me to that camp. I had never been to a sleepaway camp, only day camps. But my parents’ worries eased with the knowledge that Diane would be there. However, unlike Diane, I would only be there for one month—August—while Diane would be there for the entire summer.
In the end, that one month was enough to destroy a friendship. Unbeknownst to me, Diane ran around with a group of “fast” girls whose sole distinguishing characteristic was to get to third base (the parlance for heavy petting) with as many boys as possible. In hindsight, I’m not quite sure if any of them, including Diane, had actual intercourse. But based on the number of boys they “dated” that summer, coupled with the numerous hickeys they sported on their necks, which they’d brandish, like Dracula’s underaged brides, as tokens of their coolness, they certainly got very close.
I was a virgin who hadn’t even turned 13 yet (although I would the month I joined Diane at camp where I finally got my period). Except for a silly game of spin the bottle when I was 10, in which I blew air kisses at another boy, I had never been kissed before. Diane pretty much knew I was inexperienced but perhaps she thought my trip to the Valhalla in the Poconos that morphed her gawky self into a popular albeit sexually compliant swan every summer would do the same for me.
Unfortunately, for Diane, I wasn’t anywhere near at becoming an early-adolescent Anais Nin. My purity was unshakeable. As soon as I arrived at camp, Diane, thrilled to see me, began introducing me to her so-called cool friends. The result was less than auspicious.
When one of them, a boy who was otherwise known as the camp’s fledgling Don Juan, put his arm around me, I blushed like the innocent I was. My babe-in-the-woods reaction appalled Diane.
“She’ll never be popular with the boys,” Diane complained to Terri in a letter she wrote her that summer after my unforgivable faux pas. Following my unpardonable breach of sophistication, Diane stopped taking me around to meet her friends. I was shut out, relegated with the other camp rejects, while she and her gang went through the boys the way someone goes through a bag of pretzels.
By the time I got to 8th grade, my friendship with Diane (and with Terri by association) was a memory. Since then, it’s always irritated me when I see people whom I respect and revere for their intelligence and accomplishments debase themselves just to win a questionable seal of approval from a individual or social circle that frankly doesn’t deserve all that effort and will surely be the first to eject them as soon as their status changes for the worse.
At least, Diane and her crowd of fast girls had an excuse—they were kids and Diane herself was especially vulnerable to peer acceptance having lost a mother at such a tender age.
What excuse do adults have?
Image courtesy of Pixiebay/ZibalMedia
