Yesterday I linked a piece from Cecily Carver’s substack. While there I found my way to a piece of fiction she wrote for the Kenyon Review (free registration required). It’s called The Good Sport and it’s about mean girls, basically. Here’s how it starts:

In any social group of women, there is often one member whom the others dislike, not because she has done anything wrong or caused offense but simply for her inability to camouflage her weakness. If she is lonely and makes her loneliness known, that will be a mark against her; if she is afraid of rejection and does not hide it, then that fear will be fortified by experience, for she will be rejected again and again. Her friends may speak reassuring words to her for a time. But then, after a while, one of the friends says something to another: Have you noticed that she always — ? It seems to me that she —  I don’t understand why she doesn’t —  and then it’s all over for her. 

It’s not a long story, and the tension, awkwardness and discomfort slowly ratchets up, in ways that are familiar, both because I’ve known women who’ve told me stories like this before, and because a lot of it is not gendered. Here’s another bit that stuck out to me:

Being a good sport means joining in when others are singing Happy Birthday, even if you detest the sound of your own voice, and it means letting a child teach you how to play their favorite game, even if you feel every moment like your brain is turning soapy and pearlescent with boredom. It means bringing something homemade to the potluck, even if you hate cooking, doing the wave and the time warp, and saying Thank you when someone brings you yogurt, even if you hate the stuff and intend to dispose of it in secret later. It means tolerating and welcoming the ordinary frustrations of life as best one can, and accepting that not every situation will allow us to be shown at our most capable and beautiful. 

The story is full of moments of clarity about how we relate to each other, how we perceive others and the tightrope we walk when around a new group. The post that links to that story is called “Things Lonely People Do”. You should read that too.

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