When I was in high school, I was on our drill team, the Lanier Vikettes (our mascot was the Viking, so naturally, we were Vikettes).
It was a Big. Damn. Deal. in my school. Our football team was pathetic, so the highlight of football games was half time and baby, we were it.
Our instructor, Ms. King, was a pivotal figure in many girls' lives. Imagine Sue Silvester with a big infusion of Southern drawl and religion. She called the drill team girls her "kids." Many adored her. She wore white sneakers with those little footie socks with the colored pompoms on the heels.
When I was a sophomore, we traveled to California to win the national championship. Seriously, this part of drill team was cool. We did incredible routines on full-size ladders, we tap danced--imagine 70-some-odd girls primly marching out to the middle of a Texas football field, each girl carrying a 3-foot square of painted plywood we placed on the turf so that we could tap dance...we did a chair routine with the standard high kicking and so on, that ended in a crescendo of our chorus lines standing one foot on the chair back, one foot on the chair seat, arms locked, tipping the chairs over in perfect unison. Ta-Da!
There was only one problem with this.
Vikettes were mean girls.
They were a clique, and there were cliques within cliques. The insiders and the outsiders. The favorites and the non-favorites. Ms. King had her favorites, and then there were the rest of us.
I suppose all of high school is like this. And, all of adult life, too. But, Vikettes, you see, we were supposed to be some kind of role model. Examples. You could get kicked out for smoking. Cigarettes. There was a lot of high-minded moralizing about "making this world a better place" in Vikettes.
So, as much as I liked the tap dancing and the clambering up on 6-foot ladders to dangle off of them, gracefully, mind you, I never fit in. I could not find even an outsiders clique to fit into.
It was very lonely.
One day, before a dress rehearsal, we were all changing clothes behind the big curtain on the school gym stage. There was one girl, one of the "insiders," the special group that Ms. King liked best of all, and this girl was one of the quieter, shyer members of the elites. I can still see her now, big brown eyes, very pale skin, dark hair with bangs. She was a skinny girl except for her very large breasts and she was self-conscious about them. One of her pack, one of her "friends" snatched her bra away from her and started hooting and pointing. She was making a big scene and cracking jokes, while holding her "friend's" bra just out of reach.
As the poor skinny girl tried to cover her outsized chest with one arm and flail out with the other hand, trying to grab at her bra and hide herself at the same time, her tormentor found this hilarious. And the rest of her pack did too.
Tears were running down the humiliated girl's face. The "popular girls" found this just uproariously funny.
I was horrified. I felt ashamed of myself for not stepping in to stop it. Nope, I just gawked, like I do at car wrecks. I watched in dumb, sick paralysis at this vicious attack on a sensitive person's tender self-image.
I went to Ms. King and snitched on these girls, reporting the incident with all the moral outrage and indignation a 15-year-old can muster.
And you know what I got? A lecture. On being judgmental. I was told that I did not know what other people were dealing with and I could not judge if I did not walk in their shoes.
Now, it's true that my real motivation might just have been to tarnish some of the shine of these favorite girls, rather than a desire to right a wrong and defend the victim. Maybe I really was hoping that Ms. King would favor me, defender of all that is right and true. She would recognize MY effort to "make this world a better place," and I could bask in the sunshine of her approval, instead of those mean, undeserving girls.
That didn't happen.
Not long after this, we had try-outs for Vikette officers. The election favored a popular girl who forgot her own routine and stood in the middle of the gym, kind of pantomiming "oopsie, silly me!" while her music played on...well, that was really the last straw for me. It's one thing to have pretty teacher's pets who are vicious and ugly on the inside. It's another to have a national championship-caliber drill team electing officers who cannot even remember their own dance routines.
I quit Vikettes. My mother was devastated. There was more than a little bit of living vicariously through the glory of the daughter in drill team.
I had the weird distinction of being the only girl in my high school who had ever quit Vikettes who was not pregnant. I felt people watching me for a while, wondering when the bump would start to show.
But I wasn't pregnant. I was just over it.
And, as a result, I got to do so many other fun things. Act in plays with the drama club. Edit the school's literary magazine. Sing in varsity choir and write for the yearbook.
Leaving Vikettes allowed me to release my inner nerd, and it was a very good thing.
Oh, and the girl standing next to me in this photo of our Vikette's initiation was my one-time best bud, Vicky. Vicky, who was very sweet and not even a little bit mean, didn't finish her tenure in Vikettes, either. She committed some minor infraction and was deemed unfit to exemplify the sterling character expected of Vikettes, so she was booted. I stopped being her friend after that.
Why?
Because I was a mean girl.
