Girl fight

Once upon a time in the sixth grade, I was eating a slice of pizza at the school canteen when one of my classmates, a quiet girl who sat at the back of the classroom, slipped me a folded note and said, “I found this on the floor.”

It was a crumpled sheet of those intermediate pads we used for long quizzes, and in loud capitals it said, “Marga Buenaventura is a bitch.”

This angry maxim was surrounded by tinier notes that basically said the same thing in varying degrees of meanness. While I can’t remember what they were specifically (God knows what it said; girls can be creative as hell when they want to be), I do remember running to the bathroom and crying in a cubicle for a solid two minutes.

The thing is, as devastated as I was, I wasn’t at all surprised. Getting that note was bound to happen. At that time I had been a social pariah in my own homeroom because a bunch of my classmates decided that they didn’t like me very much and managed to convince at least half of the class to ditch me as a friend.

And to think that it all started over something so stupid  which, in Girl World, means it was about a boy. I was so madly in love with my English teacher and everyone found it incredibly annoying that despite all the logical reasons anyone could come up with, I actually believed that he and I would end up together someday.

Seriously, that was it. Just that spark of annoyance prompted almost 20 girls to profess that they have never hated anyone as much as they hated me. It was horrible.

For a really long time, no one dared associate herself with me, and anyone who did was automatically doomed to suffer the same fate that I did. When I’d recite in class, no one would listen. When I’d present something in front of everyone, no one would dare clap without the teacher’s prompt.

I remember hating teachers who’d give my classmates the freedom to form their own groups on class projects, because I always ended up getting picked last. I’d dread lunch breaks because I had no one to talk to. Coming to class felt like a daily walk of shame because everyone would give me the stink-eye until I parked my bag and sat quietly in my seat.

At 12 years old, becoming an outcast and being called a bitch is probably the most terrible thing to hear about oneself. I’m a lot older now and I’ve certainly been called worse. I may have learned to shrug these insults off, but that doesn’t mean they hurt any less.

In fact, it kind of bums me out to realize that girl fights may change in form, but will always have one thing in common: each one is dirtier than the last.

It’s true what they say, that girls hardly ever get into physical confrontations with each other. I don’t know if it’s a sign of our gender’s natural state of civilization or maybe it’s because of a mutual understanding among women that we really just don’t want to mess up our hair.

Instead, girl fighting is the perfect cocktail of psychological and emotional torture. Half the time, you don’t even know it’s happening till you find yourself smack dab in a verbal sparring match with someone who told everyone that you went to the States on vacation because you’re secretly a teenage mom.

(And you wonder why girls always seem so uptight. We gotta keep up with these shenanigans while making sure we look cute. It is mega stressful.)

The development technology doesn’t help either. Thanks to the Internet, spreading lies and throwing backhanded compliments can not only be made public, but can also be archived for posterity purposes. Fifty years from now, you can still probably search for that Facebook status your “friend” posted saying that you look like a hippopotamus in your PE uniform.

And trust me, this kind of behavior doesn’t end after you receive your diploma. Girls will always use dirty tactics in a fight regardless of age and creed. It’s as if we’re biologically programmed to be horrible to each other.

I have seen professional women  not girls, women  who gossip about and backstab each other just because one did something the other didn’t particularly like. I’m talking about wives and mothers who still act like throwing in a mean word or two about someone they dislike is okay, because that’s what girls are supposed to do.

Young girls see their older sisters and sometimes, even their mothers acting that way, so they think it’s all right to treat their peers in the same manner. It’s a vicious cycle, made even more vicious by the fact that no one seems to be doing anything about it.

Thankfully, my days as a grade school pariah eventually ended. There weren’t any dramatic reconciliations; I guess my classmates just realized that it took so much more effort to be mean to me than just to be my friend.

I honestly don’t hold any bitterness towards these girls anymore, regardless of how painful that time of my life had been. I just know that I’m going to get my own brand of revenge someday, and let these girls realize that what they did was not cool at all. It was in fact, the complete opposite of cool.

How will I do that? I don’t know. Write about it in a newspaper, maybe.