Friendships and fall outs. Growing up in an all-girls school is a recipe for drama
Whoever came up with the idea of single sex schools must have had some kind of hunger for drama and whoever decided to put a lot of single sex schools in the same area must have been at least a little sadistic. Seriously, putting hundreds of teenage girls together is a recipe for drama, if not disaster. We have to spend time with the same people almost every single day of our somewhat mundane school years. As someone who has gone to school with just girls since the age of seven, I can say that I have had my fair share of falling out and I’m the sort of person who rarely makes up with someone once I’ve fallen out with them. Plus, I know like no boys so there is no release from girly criticism, competitiveness and other petty, b****y stuff that most girls do without even noticing that they are doing it.

Maybe I’m one of those people with a hunger for drama because I’m not lying when I say that I think b****y stuff started going down when I was five or six. Things that I would look back on and think were silly but hell; it was serious and important to me at the time. The day that I officially called ‘the worst day of my life’ for most of my life was when I was five or six and my sort of enemy ganged up on me with all the other five or six years old girls (the boys were just like who gives a f***? Let’s play football) and they chased me round the playground until they caught me, grabbed me and forced me to listen to some stupid poem about me that said silly and entirely impersonal things like I’m a smelly witch or something stupid like that. Whilst this was stupid and immature, it is sad and quite frankly scary that girls so young can be b****es.

Hell, I fought back, I’m not going to act the victim here because every girl is a b**** and so am I. When I was seven I got in a lot of big (mostly non physical) fights. I have always been self conscious about the fact that I always have a runny nose (it’s a dust allergy or something like that) and one girl kept making nasty comments about it until one day she called me ‘snotty nose’ on the playground and I walked towards her and blew my nose on her coat; one of my favourite comebacks of mine to this day! That year I had a teacher who I was convinced hated me; to this day I still don’t think she liked me and she lives opposite my house. That was also the year I had the biggest frenemy I’ve ever had. I’m sure some people would call all the teasing that went on bullying but, like I said, I fought back so it was more like an ongoing argument.

When I was nine or ten there was this other girl who I was sort of friends with but we didn’t always get on. Something I found her selfish and thought she couldn’t take a joke. I felt like I was sticking up for my whole class when she wouldn’t share the art materials so I stuck a piece of paper to the back of her apron. This girl also used to slap me and other people in the face a lot. I spoke to my mum about this girl (I confide in my mum about everything to this day) and she said that the next time she slapped me in the face I should tell my teacher. So, I did. Big mistake. This led to another perfect example of b****iness mixed in with a bit of a badly handled situation and slightly unprofessional approach from the teacher. I was the one that got into trouble as the teacher brought it up with the whole class and whilst at the beginning things were going in my favour soon everyone started putting their hands up and telling the teacher things that I had done to this girl and maybe I was more horrible than I realised or maybe this proves how much people like to be a part of something once it has started because as soon as it did start no one stuck up for me at all and the teacher called me a bully. But this isn’t a story from a bully’s point of view. This is from the point of view of a girl who, five years ago, sat crying hysterically in the class room whilst her so-called ‘peers’ humiliated her. I’m crying now as I write this. Worse things have happened to people; much worse but I’ve had a pretty mediocre life so everything that I have written here and will write in the next few paragraphs are some of the biggest things that have happened to me. Some of the girls actually apologised to me once we were out of the classroom but they had done nothing to stop anything in there. Perhaps some of them were even more drama hungry than I am.

I had a lot of frenemies the whole way through primary school (I’m from England by the way, so primary school is like elementary school) and I haven’t really stayed in touch with any of those people. However, saying that, the girl in the first paragraph contacted me the other day saying that she had found my blog and she loved it, the girl in the second paragraph came to my eleventh birthday party and I saw her last summer and sometimes I travel to and from school with the girl in the third paragraph. People change and they grow but it’s when you get to the age I am now that you worry that people are no longer changing; just growing and they will never go back to how they used to be.
By Easter of my first year at secondary school (middle school) I had already had a major falling out with a best friend and we haven’t been close since although we speak now because this happened almost four years ago. With secondary school came a phone and later Facebook and of course a mountain of hormones. I fell out with my first friend via text because she texted me saying ‘Do you like me?’ Again I confided in my mum and she told me to text back saying, ‘I find it hard to like you because you’re mean to my other friend and you show off too much.’ It continued from there until the next day at school we ignored each other but I was at a dentist appointment that day and I arrived late. I entered the science classroom where someone whispered to me, “Why were you horrible to Hannah?” Great.
The next fall out came under a year later. Once I had fallen out with the first friend it was just me and another girl and we had gotten ourselves into one of those toxic friendship where we were too close. I always thought I could never invite people round without inviting her so I didn’t. But she did. And the twelve year old me found this really out of order so I wrote her a note and got someone else to give it to her. We ignored each other for the next six months.

Meanwhile, I made a new friend. We were friends for just under a year before I posted a Facebook status and didn’t write about her in it. Seriously, what the f***? I know. I even thought it was stupid at the time and I told her that which clearly wasn’t the right thing to say because then she deleted me on Facebook which, foolishly on my part, made me so angry that I looked at everything she had commented on after our fall out and commented saying something along the lines of, “Oh, I can see you’re really upset” which was meant in a sarcastic way because she seemed happy in the comments. Wow, this sparked a staying-up-until-half-past-two-in-the-morning scale argument with the sort of language that twelve year olds really shouldn’t be using. We insulted each other in personal and impersonal ways and used every insult in the book. It was all done publicly in the comments of one of my photos and on a mutual friend’s status. I was new to Facebook so didn’t know that you could message people who weren’t your friends but she knew and still decided to argue in the comments but, oh well, that’s a two year old argument now although we still avoid each other.

I became friends again with secondary school fall out number two for about a year before her and her friend started to ignore me so I had a go at her on Facebook and we haven’t spoken since. I would have been fine to get over it but this year I wasn’t taking part in PE so had to hold on to all of the earrings. I accidently dropped them and couldn’t find one of hers. She thought I stole them. Really? I didn’t even have my ears pierced at that point. I found them after a lot of digging in the dirt.

Last December came the bitterest fall out for me. It wasn’t the one with the most drama or the worst words or the longest strung out. In fact it was the most civil of the lot but every time I think of it I cry. Because it was the girl I had been best friends with for three and a half years; the only friend that had always been there for me. Me, her and another friend had been planning a sleepover on the last day of term for over three months but earlier that week she had told me that she couldn’t come because she had eaten all the pasta sauce so was grounded. She showed me the train times and told me that she could come for a coffee with us after school but then had to go home. I was gutted but there was nothing that could be done. I planned to eat lunch with her on the day of the Christmas lunch but I discovered she had a new group of friends to the ones she had the previous year. My best friend and I weren’t in the same classes so we each had our own friends but I was sort of shocked to find out how close she had come to this new group of girls who she had never liked before. I stood with them for a while but they weren’t my kind of people and it felt super awkward so I went to hang out with her old friends and sat with them. They included the girl who was also coming round my house at the end of that week. She said that she thought my best friend was lying and really she going round her new friends’ house on Friday instead of mine. I said no, she wouldn’t do that me; not after all we’d been through. I said that if it was true I wouldn’t be friends with her anymore and I would confront her about it. But I was certain it wasn’t true. It was the penultimate day of term before Christmas. I overheard my best friend saying to one of her new friends that she didn’t know what to wear tomorrow; but we wear school uniform and tomorrow wasn’t an own clothes day. I immediately wrote out a long text to send to the other friend who was coming over, telling her that I thought she was right but I accidently sent it to my best friend instead. I rang her later on and we both cried but we still talk now but like I said, I wouldn’t be her friend anymore. When it came down to it I wanted to still be her friend but I fear she’s in one of those toxic relationships where the clique don’t let you have other friends. They really are as cliquey as cliques come and they go out drinking every weekend. Perhaps I was boring compared to them. I miss her so much; we got on so well. Although she is a selfish b**** who has treated me like s***, I still want to be friends with her again.

I fell out with another friend last month. It had been leading up to it for a while but after agreeing with the rest of my friends that we shouldn’t invite her to my end of term party, we didn’t and she found out. Why did I do such a vindictive thing? Because she was forever criticising and patronising everything my friends and I did on top of other things.

Like I said, there are people who have been through a lot more than me. I haven’t lived through a war or a drug addiction or a life threatening ordeal with bullies but I think I have had a more than adequate introduction to b****iness and I’m glad. I feel prepared for life. I want to work in fashion so fashion industry; come at me bro!