Best Friends

2024

“Ummmmmm,” texted Fiona.

“Wtf,” Lana chimed in. 

I gaped at my phone in wounded astonishment. This couldn’t be real. This was some shit straight out of Mean Girls – people weren’t actually this terrible in real life, right? Right?

My middle school was very white. Extremely, aggressively white. It made sense, given that it was the only public middle school in an extremely, aggressively white town. There were, however, a handful of Asian kids, the offspring of parents who had crossed the ocean in the wake of newly loosened immigration restrictions in the purported land of the free. With their communist adversary sending men to outer space, America was forced to swallow the cold, bitter pill of diversity for the salutary glow of economic and technological growth. The Asian hordes were now welcome, provided that they arrived on these shores already skilled and educated, ready to become software engineers and physicians who would purchase homes in respectable white suburbs.

And then there were the Black kids, who were bussed in from Boston, because the town was so melanin-deficient it had to outsource its diversity. These Black kids had won a lottery, which they had likely been entered into by their parents during infancy, granting them the “privilege” of waking up every day at 5:00 a.m. to attend a “superior” school system, where their white peers would post Snapchat videos of themselves saying the N-word at least once per year. We minorities were mere sprinkles upon a giant churning vat of vanilla ice cream. 

It is no surprise, then, that all my friends in middle school were white. Blithely ignorant to such concepts as history and positionality, I didn’t think it strange at all. Of course my friends were white.

Sixth grade was a blissful year: the eight of us went to see the third Hunger Games movie together, went trick-or-treating together, heat-curled our hair before school dances together. “The Crew” is what we dubbed ourselves, our sense of self-importance inflated by pubescent youth. We had decent social standing, just a rung or two below The Popular Girls. It was my first time having a friend group, and I had never felt such belonging.

But then, disaster struck. Anna left for private school. Lily left for a different group she liked better. Hannah joined, and Kendall joined, and Samantha and Alexia and Jacey and Natalia and Nicole joined. As the group ballooned in size, its structural integrity was thrown into precarity. 

The Weston Middle School cafeteria: a potent case study demonstrating the power of built environments to shape behavior and social dynamics. The cafeteria consisted of an array of identical round tables, each with eight round seats equally spaced apart, which were attached by metal rods to the table itself. Fixed. Rigid. Immovable. This meant that, almost without exception, friend group size was constrained by an upper bound of eight. An aerial view of the cafeteria would reveal a topographical map of the social landscape. Each friend group had a designated table: the popular boys in the center front, the nerdy Asian girls in the back left, the theater kids in the rightmost corner. 

When my friend group inducted new members beyond the allotted quota, chaos descended. Every day, each of us raced to the cafeteria to claim a seat at the lunch table, often with sprinting and panting and pushing involved. Sometimes, two people would try to share a seat, but the diameter of those hard plastic disks was too small to comfortably fit one ass, let alone two. The hapless sharers would spend the next half hour angrily picking at their limp salads, one buttcheek sore and the other hanging off the seat in midair. Sometimes, people would sit on the unswept, food-littered tile floor beside the table, stooping dangerously close to literally licking the boots of those who had won seats. Desperate measures were called for – anything was better than ostracism, self-abasement included. 

Eventually, the situation became untenable. The most influential members of the group secretly convened, drafting a Notes app document to officially determine the eight who would remain in the friend group, and the rest who would be discarded. I didn’t make the cut. They didn’t even deign to tell us to our faces; the in-group simply coordinated a mass exodus from the iMessage groupchat, leaving us outcasts in the digital dust. 

Because friend groups at Weston Middle School were so firmly established, so deeply entrenched, one could not simply go sit with someone new. In a small class of a hundred fifty students, everyone was accounted for. The borders of these lunchroom nations were strictly enforced, and interlopers were rounded up and deported.

So after I lost all my friends, I avoided the cafeteria altogether, electing instead to spend my lunch block doing homework in the library or stairwell or hallway, drowning out the aching loneliness with trigonometry and plate tectonics. After starving myself all day, I would come home ravenous and empty, filling and filling myself until the moment I went to bed, stomach distended and eyes puffy. 

There had been plenty of warning signs that these “friendships” were toxic. The dynamic within the group had been so freighted by jealousy and competition. I always had to be vigilant, always had to prove myself, always had to earn my place. Everything was a calculation. Make sure to reference an inside joke with Mia in front of Phoebe, to prove the strength of your bond with Mia. Make sure to suck up extra to Sarah, because she’s the unspoken ringleader. Make sure to give Lena the cold shoulder, because nobody likes her, so you’re not allowed to. Make sure to ask people to hang out, but not too often, because you don’t want to seem desperate.

But I didn’t know any better – I thought this was simply what friendship was. I had no models for what it could be. When I was younger, I never saw my mom with any friends – her adult relationships were strictly professional, strictly instrumental. So I thought that “having friends” was a juvenile phenomenon that you eventually grew out of, like playing with stuffed animals or believing in Santa. I wouldn’t have my first taste of true friendship until high school – until Sofia and Mimi and Miki, to whom I was already enough.

After I got kicked out of my friend group (or more accurately, after my friend group seceded from me), I grasped desperately for an explanation. Why had I been rejected? Was it because they wore real Uggs, while I wore Bearpaws on clearance from TJ Maxx? Was it because they loved gossiping about boys, while I was still repelled by their cooties? Was it because they spent their Wednesday afternoons at the mall, while I spent mine at Math Team? Was it because they came from stable nuclear families, while mine was in shambles? Was it because they were pretty and white, while I was neither?