Tough Titties

Deb Fishbone Likes This

Like most people who are “my people”—the former dweebs, bookworms, misfits who collected comics and wore sandals with floppy socks—I was bullied in sixth grade. We didn’t call it bullying then. But today’s definition easily applies to what Deb Fishbone did to me. Whenever I talk about Deb—in therapy, in my emails, on the stage (bullies are keynote gold!)—people ask, “So what happened to this buttmunch?” From her presence on social media, limited mostly to likes of major retailers, I can tell you this much: she grew up to be incredibly basic.

I’ve determined this, and seen her activity (Lululemon: Deb Fishbone likes this), because we’re “friends” on Facebook.

First, I know: Facebook is now less a social platform than an obit section for relatives, aging rockers, and pets. I also know Facebook friends doesn’t mean real friends. Lately, it seems to mean a green light to message me about my “health journey”—not on one, thanks!—so you can pitch me essential oils.

Still, it felt like a dork move to friend Deb Fishbone—who, if you were wondering, likes Zara, Saks, and Bed Bath & Beyond. Why friend someone who made my middle-school life pure hell? Someone whose year of organized cruelty had such lasting effects on my psyche, I credit her for all my shortcomings? I need outside validation because of Deb Fishbone. I get writer’s block and miss deadlines because of Deb Fishbone. I leave hair in the sink because of… you know it: Deb Fucking Fishbone—who likes The Container Store, and stole my best friend.

That best friend was Deb Yoveda, or Deb Y. In fifth grade, we’d been a unit. Sneaking off to seedy Times Square to play video games. Listening on repeat to Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” and screaming “Ewwww” at the part where she climaxed. When everyone was speaking a version of Pig Latin gibberish called “Idigoo Idigai,” we made up our own secret language, because fuck fads. We did everything together. And we had a pact: in sixth grade, we’d take Spanish together.

In assembly on the first day, the head of middle school told us, “If you’re taking French, sit on the left. If you’re taking Spanish, go to the right.”

I went to the right, claro. And Deb? She went to the left.

I looked around, confused, and saw her already sitting next to Deb Fishbone—or, as I called her, Mean Deb.

They clasped hands and raised them in the air like champions. “Yay, French!”

Looking right at me and cupping her hands around her mouth, Mean Deb called out, “Spanish is for losers!”

Como se dice what the fuck?

We’d been Laura and Deb. Now, they were Deb and Deb. Or, as one teacher called them, Deb Squared. (Adorbs!) I was booted from my friend group. No longer invited to Wednesdays at V&T pizza, to play Pac-Man at our hangout, Baronette Card Shoppe, not even to go buy leg warmers. I soon got a fake “secret admirer” letter that said I walked like a duck.

In chorus, two older girls pointed to the trash can and informed me, “You sing like that garbage.” Thinking it was a compliment, my sweet little sister reported the buzz from her second-grade classmates. “They said you’re a spazz!” Every day, kids snatched and tossed around my signature green felt hat—admittedly, a sorry fashion choice. As was the massive, metal-frame backpack I boasted was “for my slight scoliosis.” The lowest blow: Deb Squared spoke in Idigoo Idigai. “Didigon’t tidigell Lidigauridiga gidibabidigout thidige pidigartidigy.” (“Don’t tell Laura about the party.”)

I faked sick a lot. Hated school. At least once a day, I felt the “about to cry” sting in my nose like I’d walked into a plate glass door (something I’ve done many times).

Refusing to give up, I returned from our family trip to Mexico with little gifts for all my friends—and for Deb Fishbone. I’d had a vision of this gesture melting everyone’s hearts and possibly winning back Deb Y. As they walked away examining their souvenirs, I heard Deb F. say, “This is so stupid.”

Nothing, though, scarred thicker than the lunchroom incident. I’d just gotten back a short story I’d written for class called “Liddy and Me,” a purely fictional and NOT AT ALL autobiographical piece. It was about a New York sixth grader named “Liddy”—not Laura, because it totally wasn’t me—who’d become a social leper at school. Deb Fishbone could sniff out vulnerability like a truffle hog, and grabbed the story from me at lunch.

Over my protests—“Hey, that’s mine!”—she flipped through, selecting the perfect line to read aloud:

“‘I have good friends, but I feel like I’m losing them… slowly.’” She looked up, delighted. “Ohmigod, this is you!”

“Uh, no it’s not!” I said in a “duh” voice. “It’s fiction!” I felt panicked and exposed—like when someone opens the bathroom door on you right when you’re wiping. SOMEONE’S IN HERE!

This is why creating art is so risky! You couldn’t pick a more literal way to infect someone with the twin beliefs—those gleaming pillars of self-doubt—that “It’s not safe to be me” and “It’s deadly to be disliked.” I’m sure not all my insecurity comes from one line of my story being read out loud at lunch. But of all Deb’s offenses, this was the crown jewel.

So why, again, would I friend her on Facebook? Because a friend request said, “I’m the bigger person. Sixth grade? Don’t remember it.” As opposed to what it really meant: “I want you to see that I’m thriving and super cool, someone you should’ve been nicer to—and, most of all, I’m here to feed my revenge fantasy that your life turned out, if not a total shit-show, at least wildly unexceptional.”

There’s not much to go on, but I make do. Deb Fishbone rarely posts anything besides pics of her kid, winning at lacrosse. She’s tagged in the occasional girls’-night-out photo: angled three-quarters to camera (red-carpet style), one knee bent like everyone else’s in bachelorette-party formation; frizzy hair pulled back; workish glasses that make her look every bit the corporate stiff she became. She’s in insurance—something with auto accidents and trip-and-falls. She’s probably the one who trips you.

Mostly, all I’ve seen of her in my feed is her name—atop retail ads.

J.Crew: Deb Fishbone likes this.

Macy’s: Deb Fishbone likes this.

Shopbop, Revolve Clothing, Nordstrom’s: Deb Fishbone likes them all—as well as Eileen Fisher, H&M, Club Monaco, Gap, ASOS, and Sephora.

Deb Fishbone likes Starbucks and anything you can find at a mall. Money says she also likes dish towels that say “wine o’clock.”

I bet Deb Fishbone would like to go back in time and click Like on the things from when she was large and in charge. Deb Fishbone likes Reggie! Bars. Deb Fishbone likes ice-cream-cone shoelaces, satin jackets, the song “Jessie’s Girl,” and exclusive roller-skating parties. Deb Fishbone likes ribbon barrettes, aka friendship barrettes, but she’s not trading any with you, because Deb Fishbone likes everyone but you. Deb Fishbone likes ruining your life.

I like to picture a split screen: On one side of it, I’m with my husband and friends at an impossible-to-get-into restaurant, being sent a procession of off-menu dishes we didn’t order, “compliments of the chef.” By day, I’m under a sun umbrella, comfily propped on outdoor throw pillows, sipping a frosty summer drink and typing something that will earn abundant money, fame, and accolades. It’s a fantasy, go with it. And, by the way, if this fantasy sounds “girlboss” basic bitch, well, yeah, I’m a little basic, too. But is it basic if you’re aware of it?

Back in my vision, I smile at the laptop. A private joke to myself. The joke is about how good it feels to get paid for the exact thing I was bullied for: being me! Splice this imagery with scenes of me on stage in front of thousands, making them cry-pee-laugh with my signature talk. It opens with a story of how I stopped giving a shit about Deb Fishbone. Which, as you can tell, I totally did.

On the other side of the split screen is Deb Fishbone, sitting in a harshly lit office, in a depressing office park. She’s neck-deep in reports she was supposed to look at weeks ago, staring into a bleak Dell computer. Botox keeps her brow from furrowing, but it’s bad Botox, which makes her face look like a melting candle. (I saw this on a former boss who fired me. The schadenfreude is too delicious not to graft the same cosmetic mishap onto Deb Fishbone.) She abandons a work email to browse for a jewel-toned cardigan that will look good with her nondescript black pants on Casual Friday. A popup tells her, “Like us on Facebook.” And so she does.

Liking things on Facebook: Deb Fishbone likes this.

It’s not the things she likes that make her basic. (I myself order way too often from Shopbop: easy returns, peel-and-stick label.) It’s more the constant, robotic liking. The bland, unoriginal obedience. One day, you’re the alpha of sixth grade, deciding everyone’s fates. Who’s invited to the birthday party, who stays home in loserville watching reruns of Diff’rent Strokes. Next, you’re clicking a thumbs-up button because a department store told you to.

I know: I’m still not over this shit? My life is great! Deb Fishbone’s is irrelevant. So is what she did when we were tweens collecting Hello Kitty erasers.

The key to creativity, business, art, self-expression, any kind of success I value, is to remind yourself that life is not sixth grade. In fact, it’s the opposite. Standing out is where it’s at. Samey and “normal” are the kiss of death, and only the weird survive. And once you’re a grown-up, one person disliking you can’t destroy you. Unless they sue you. Which is why I’d never use Deb Fishbone’s real name. Except, of course, in my private daydreams of her dull, dopey existence… which are totally sixth-grade-bitch of me, but hey: it’s my turn.

And while it’s my turn, how fun is it to imagine that, this very moment, someone who once tortured you for so much as wearing the wrong jeans is probably Googling “How to be more unique”?

Obviously, the evolved thing is to stop scrolling. Unfollow. Have compassion for the miserable child Deb F. must have been to deliberately cause me pain. I should wish her love and light. Bless and release. Stop giving energy to people who’ve wronged me.

Biiitch, what fun is that? My pettiness gives me energy.

Sure, it’s helpful to drop our ancient stories of why we’re so needy/guarded/people-pleasing/controlling/cheap/unemployable/slovenly, or selfish. Why we’re addicted to Häagen-Dazs, bad with money, bad at relationships, or bad at follow-through and social skills, or can’t figure out the cable remote. No one wants to be the bore saying, “I wish I had the courage to live my dreams and be my best self, but I’m emotionally hobbled from being picked on in 1980.” At the same time, there’s joy in privately creeping on someone who once made you feel less-than and now looks to be a big nothing-sandwich of a human. I say, troll away. Hate-follow all the fuckheads: bosses who fired you, posers who trigger you, flings who never called. My hope for you is that their lives look every bit as unremarkable as you dreamed, and that the occasional scroll through their blah beach vacation at a timeshare—one they were probably suckered into and now regret—is as satisfying as successfully plucking a barely surfaced chin hair. Especially if it’s some dodo who once made your life hell and now likes Jennifer Fucking Convertibles.

Nope, I’m still not over this shit.

And Deb Fishbone likes this.

How to Be Popular

A few weeks into ninth grade, to fit in better, I went out and bought a wood file (as one does). The guy at the hardware store asked if I was going to bake it into a cake and help spring someone out of prison. Ha ha, no. I mumbled something about a woodwork thing. A dollhouse for my sister? I didn’t want to explain it was for my shoes. I know—file? For shoes? To fit in? I’ll get there.

For context, I had just switched schools, from the relaxed, progressive, Upper West Side school I’d been at since preschool to a traditional, more academic all-girls school on the Upper East Side. They were as far apart as you could get, both in city blocks and vibe.

My parents had switched my sister the year before. She cried for days. Lots of slamming doors and wailing about her friends. They wanted to get her into a more focused environment before it was too late. For me, I guess they figured the damage had been done. I was in seventh grade, might as well finish out middle school.

When the time came, I went willingly. Deb Fishbone had lifted the ban on me in seventh grade when she’d discovered that my home, across the street from school, was the perfect place to catch General Hospital. Even so, I had no solid friend group to be torn about leaving behind.

I was part of a small exodus of high-school-bound nerds who wanted to go where it was cool to be smart. At my old school, where I had gone upstairs to take advanced algebra with the juniors and seniors, the popular girls only talked to me when they wanted help with their homework. And then they’d go back to demonstrating how to apply eyeshadow that matched a feather earring.

I started touring more academically rigorous schools, most of them on the ritzy, polished Upper East Side. In my first interview, the admissions officer asked me what I liked to do after school. “Besides homework,” she winked. I told her I liked art museums. I hated them. They made me tired, and still do. I get a thing I call “museum feet.” But when you’re trying to get into a fiercely competitive school, you don’t tell them your primary extracurricular is “hours and hours of Donkey Kong.”

“Wonderful,” she said, crossing her legs. We sat in opposite-facing stuffed armchairs. “New York has such terrific art museums. Who’s your favorite artist?” This was like when you lie to someone that you were in the Marines, and they ask, “What platoon?”

“I like… Calder?” My parents had bought a bunch of his lithographs when he died. The walls of our Upper West Side apartment were splashed with red, yellow, blue, and orange blobs. “And, um… Rothko and Picasso, I like?” I had a framed Rothko poster in my bedroom, and in the foyer hung a “Picasso,” a far-fetched copy my dad had painted for my mom to focus on when she was in labor with me. The interviewer asked what I liked about those artists, and I guessed: The colors? And fun shapes?

I didn’t get in. Lesson learned: If you’re going to lie, you have to be super specific.

I also spent a day at one of the big, smart schools up in Riverdale, with a campus, and found it intimidating. A girl from my old school, who’d gotten skinny, pretty, and outgoing since switching to this one, was bent over with nothing but a towel around her waist, disingenuously yelling “Look at my fat rolls” when I toured the locker room. In classes, while the boys raised their hands to answer questions, the girls twirled their hair, the way flirty females did on TV.

At the school I ended up going to, I saw blond hair and thin, prim lips on girls studying in the library. At the other all-girls schools I’d visited, the students paired their kilts with tauntingly perfect Ralph Lauren button-downs, sleeves rolled up their hairless arms just so, along with jewelry and makeup. Even in their uniforms, they were too glam for me. At my new school, however, the girls were refreshingly bookish and plain—true to a very-last-century saying I would later hear: “School X and School Y girls grow up to marry doctors and lawyers. School Z girls (that was my new school) grow up to be them.” These girls raised their hands in class. They bounced with anticipation at the elevator, which I found overly school-eager, if also comforting. At a place like this, even if I was The Jew, I wouldn’t be The Nerd. I spent a day and felt at ease. But when I got there, I had some adjusting to do.

My old school had been informal and wacky, a 1970s experiment made of concrete, glass, and leniency. Because it looked like a TV, people called it “The TV School,” but officially, it wasn’t even called a school. It was a “Learning Center.” Homerooms were “clusters,” homeroom teachers were “cluster advisers,” and classrooms were “areas,” as there were no walls to separate them. We called teachers by their first names: Eva, Jim, Suki, George, Jodi, Shelley. As in, This year, I’m in Shelley’s cluster. Or, George yelled at me in health ed. He’s a dick!

When our communications teacher announced an assignment, the hot girl, Carney, would let her striped boatneck tee slip to show her bra strap as she raised her hand and protested in a breathy purr. “Um, Larry, I don’t think it’s fair that you gave us so much homework.”

“Uh, okay,” Larry would agree. At my old school, education was a dialogue.

At my new school (established 1883), you started French in fourth grade and Latin in sixth, wore uniforms through eighth, couldn’t talk in the elevator if there were more than six people, and had the same gym teachers who’d taught my mother in the 1950s. Those gym teachers were over seventy, and their names started with “Miss.” I’d never even called a parent “Mr.” or “Mrs.” I was nervous about calling teachers by their last names. Or getting a feminist teacher and forgetting it was “Ms.”

At my old school, there had been no cafeteria. Just a lunchroom, where we’d eat sandwiches our parents had packed into our Fonzie, Charlie’s Angels, or Muppets lunchboxes, which later gave way to more mature brown paper bags, which we dispensed with as soon as we hit seventh grade. That’s when we were allowed to leave the building to score bagels at H&H. At my new school, the cafeteria offered individual Cornish game hens, a salad bar that included a very good Oriental sesame beef, goose liver pâté, triple-cream cheeses left over from the Thursday trustees meeting, and a thing called “Joey rolls.” These were addictive, croissant-like rolls made by the assistant chef, Joey. We clustered around him like pigeons when he put out a fresh bowl.

The mascot of both of my schools: the Beaver. Take that in: ALL-GIRLS SCHOOL. BEAVER. And they were all about the beaver. For the centennial year, they handed out pins: “100 Years of Eager Beavers.” The school’s crest had beavers. The literary magazine was called The Beaver. At an assembly, the magazine’s editor in chief famously announced a “big Beaver meeting after school.” In the earnest spirit typical of our school, she added, “All Beavers welcome!”

My old school—to use a term that wasn’t yet un-PC or un-woke because neither had been invented—was what we’d then call jappy (meaning, Jewish American Princess-y). My new school was preppy. Not that my old school wasn’t, also. This was the age of the flipped-up polo collar. The perfect white tee under a Benetton sweater vest. But my new school embodied prep in the old-money, drive-a-beat-up-Volvo-in-the-Hamptons-and-don’t-show-how-rich-you-are way.

My old school was children of orthodontists; my new school was children of the Pilgrims. At my old school we came back from summer camp; at my new school they returned from Switzerland. On my first day, I heard one classmate say of yogurt, “All summer in Europe, I ate nothing but.”

At the new school you dressed to show how long you’d been there. Starting in ninth grade, there was no real dress code. Those who’d attended elementary and middle school had waited years to ditch their uniforms and wear jeans, cords, any pants. East End Avenue, right by the East River, could be a cold, windy place. Still, some girls in my class voluntarily came to school in their old uniforms. Not the recent one, that wasn’t cool. Cool was a collector’s item you owned if you’d been there forever: a navy, pleated skirt that had been discontinued. You wore it really short, a little frayed and beaten up, dotted with a mix of Adam Ant and Duran Duran pins or just plain safety pins for rebellious flair. A look you might call “legacy punk.”

I couldn’t do the uniform, but I could work on my shoes. Having learned the perils of not fitting in at my old school, I was determined to sew myself into the social fabric of this one. The most urgent place to start was on my feet. The real mark of status in this prepster motherland was, How scuffed are your boat shoes? Beat-up brown leather boat shoes were it. Even better if they were handed down from your older sibling who was now off at Choate. You could wear Docksiders, or you could wear L.L. Bean Bluchers, pronounced BLUE-kers. If you called them “BLUE-chers,” you were someone’s embarrassing mom. And if you wore them, you had to have the leather laces curled up on the ends in a spiral dongle thingy I had no idea how to make.

I bought Docksiders, and realized as soon as I got them home that they looked wrong. They were too new, just like my Danish Schoolbag. You didn’t call it that. You called it a “Chocolate Soup Bag,” after the Upper East Side store where most kids bought theirs. Those of us on the West Side, the crosstown bus girls, bought ours at a Columbus Avenue store called Mythology. No one called it a Mythology Bag, though. The scrappy, less-posh Upper West Side wasn’t a point of reference. Since these had been “in” for at least a year, everyone else’s Chocolate Soup Bag was threadbare and floppy. Mine was factory fresh, to match my glaringly virginal shoes.

Their leather was bright, stiff, unblemished, and a little orangey? I didn’t have a summer to acquire a patina by wearing them around my dad’s sailboat on Cape Cod. I didn’t have a dad’s sailboat, or the kind of dad who sailed, or a family cottage on Cape Cod, the Hamptons, or any place with sand dunes. Our country house was a suburban ranch home in Stamford, Connecticut, where my mother’s parents had retired and died. The spare rooms were occupied by surgical-store, flesh-colored old-people gear. Crutches, walker, folding cot, a terrifying commode. The kids at the swim club were all local and on the diving team. Their hair was bleached not by sun and surf, but by chlorine, and anyway, I didn’t know them. I can hardly whine about growing up with the wrong weekend home, but I envied my new classmates’ access to chumminess and salt-air corrosion.

I coveted the weather-beaten luster of belonging. Of having put in your years, and being comfortable in your skin—or in your leather, leather which was impossibly soft and broken in. It was the look of not trying. You don’t have to try when you’ve had sunny afternoons riding rusted bikes to get ice cream at a wharf, with kids you’ve known since preschool. The question was, how to fast-track the process.

My efforting was transparent. I was the picture of wanting and pushing. That’s the picture you put behind the other pictures, because trying too hard is not pretty. But then, most of us are trying too hard. Especially to look like we’re not trying at all. Not trying is a multibillion-dollar industry. We have warring best sellers about not giving a fuck. Every morning, we who make a living on the Internet scroll through our camera rolls faced with a riddle: How can I be extra-authentic today? How can I be the poster child for ease? How can I express, in a fun, fresh way, my fucks are all gone, come back tomorrow, we’re fresh out of fucks? I believe zero of the people who claim they give zero fucks. Announcing it means you give at least a partial fuck. Me, I’ve always given more of a fuck than I’d like.

Here are some ways I fucked up at not giving a fuck at my new school, in the form of handy dos and don’ts I’d like to hand thirteen-year-old me for this adventure (they’re all don’ts) and to you, too, because, P.S., we’re all still thirteen.

DON’T Be a Grind

There were two things you didn’t want to be called in our class. The first was a grind, someone seen as doing too much homework. Yes, you were supposed to be smart, but effortlessly so.