NEWSLETTER

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.

THOMAS MORTON


CONTINUED:
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