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  Friend Setup

  Think of it like a blind date without all the crippling fear of a strange tongue in your mouth or a reenactment of the date Rachel on Friends went on with that drug addict Steve. Did I go too far with this analogy? Have I scared you off? Let me reel you back in. A friend setup is probably one of the safest and most successful means to building a friendship. Obviously there is the convenience of the mutual friend card, when you get herded into a friend group based on one or two members you know—automatic and easy assimilation. Alternatively, there is the setup. I find this happens most often with moves and similar career paths. For example, let’s say a friend of mine moves to New York all on her lonesome. I’d offer to make the introduction to some friends I have in the city, ones I could see her hitting it off with. Not only do they have a friend in common (me), but they also have a reputable source (me) who knows them each pretty well and has a pretty clear idea whether they’d get along. If the common connection you have with somebody is a mutual friend, chances are you two would get along.

  how i ask people to hang out with me without sounding clingy

  Invite Them to Join In on an Existing Plan

  This is like the vanilla bean of invites. It’s not quite as bland as vanilla, but it’s just a hair above it without shooting for even white chocolate. It’s pretty self-explanatory. One of the major things that terrifies me about asking somebody to hang out is the chance that they’ll say no and be weirded out that I offered in the first place. Firstly, this has never happened, which should probably silence my irrational phobia. But of course it does no such thing. Inviting somebody along to an existing plan is like a pressure-free way to gauge the situation and get a feel for their thoughts on a potential friendship. It’s pretty easy to tell from this if somebody is only being nice to you to get an employee discount or if they’d actually enjoy spending time with you outside Nordstrom. The real plot twist here? You don’t even actually have to have an existing plan; just make it up. “Hey, a group of us were going to go see that new Diane Keaton movie on Friday. Wanna join? No biggie if not! Just thought I’d ask.” Easy as that! Now you just have to cast that “group” you referenced.…

  Plan Something Low-Maintenance

  So you’ve graduated from the invite to the tag-along, and you’re ready to get balls-deep into the real shit. Now, let’s not all get ahead of ourselves and start whittling monogrammed wooden plaques and brushing up on our friendship bracelet techniques—although, if that’s your instinctual reaction, I’m not going to judge you; I’m just going to ask for a bracelet in return. The early stages of a friendship can be just as awkward as the early stages of a romantic relationship. I go out of my way to prevent any uncomfortable situations, just as I do if I am dating somebody. I would never go on a first date to a candlelit dinner overlooking Malibu, partly because romantic gestures like that give me hives and cold sweats, but also because that forces us to rely 100 percent on our conversation without any activity to lean on for support. Same goes with friendships. Plan a group beach day, attend a school event, get ready for a dance together, get a round of drinks after work, agree to carpool together to a birthday party, plan to watch the premiere of The Bachelor together. Scheduling to hang out around a shared interest or a convenient occasion has the potential for serious bonding, but it also doesn’t put too much pressure on it to happen. If you become the next Snooki and JWoww, score. If you fizzle and fade like Paris and Nicole, well, that’s the simple life.

  chapter 11 “you can’t sit with us” is no longer a funny graphic t-shirt

  I was picked last for every PE game of kickball I didn’t weasel my way out of with a fake period. When we were left to form our own groups for class projects, I was never sought after. I brushed it off with humor, as I’ve always done in situations I feel uncomfortable in. No matter how self-aware we are, we don’t want our shortcomings to be common knowledge. When it came to lack of athleticism, it was impossible not to notice. Please don’t pity me for this or blame any of my classmates. It wasn’t their fault that I have zero hand-eye coordination and bruise like a peach. I was and still am well aware that I wouldn’t have brought too much to the table if an early pick had been wasted on me. Still, it never felt great. But I could deal with it, because it was based on very obvious facts. What I couldn’t deal with was being excluded for no apparent reason. It’s something we all go through, no matter how blessed we were in the gene pool. It starts young and fairly innocent. Someone won’t share a toy, or a kid on the playground will tell us to dig a hole somewhere else. When we’re that little, we don’t read too much into it. We bounce back quickly, mostly because when we’re that size, the sandbox really does fit us all. Until we reach an age where we form our own preferences and opinions on friends, our circles are pretty much determined by which parents our own parents will tolerate for playdates. Who we hang out with depends much more on convenience and proximity than our actual similarities or interests.

  I grew up in a house way up in the hills. Our neighbors consisted of a wealthy older couple who always bought out my magazine drives, a handsome gay couple who both bared a striking resemblance to a Disney prince, a liberal lesbian politician, and my dad’s ex-girlfriend. It was like a less wholesome and way more granola version of Stars Hollow. Being an only child, to me these neighbors were far less exciting, especially when the gay couple moved to Australia to open their own hair salon. Thankfully, farther down the hill lived the Johnson family. They had been friends with my parents for as long as I can remember, and by default their two sons became my best friends. Gabe was my age and he was my first love. As the story goes, I had that little boy wrapped around my finger. I don’t recall any specific examples, but I don’t doubt it. Gabe had an older brother, Adam, who I think was about three years older than us. Between the two of them, I was a spoiled, spoiled princess. When we got to kindergarten, Gabe opted for the more traditional K–5 route, while my parents enrolled me in the hippie-dippie “learning community” version. We drifted apart naturally, as most kids do at that age. Our days were now filled with geography in his case and felt sculpting in mine. We stopped playing wizards and witches in his backyard. I’d say that our elementary romance ended because of a transmission of “cooties,” but in reality I never believed in that shit. Plus I was all over Brad and his underbite. As Gabe and I grew apart, I grew closer and closer to the girl who lived at the bottom of the hill. Her name was Mia.

  Mia, her sister, Ruby, and I played together in the park across from their house. Our friendship stayed mostly contained to our encounters on the slide or the swings until Mia and I both began our first day of kindergarten in Tim’s class. I feel like I need to clarify that Tim was our teacher. In this weird alternative learning thing, we referred to all our teachers by their first name. I really don’t have a ton of memories of becoming friends with Mia and Ruby. For as long as I can remember, our moms have been best friends and they’ve always been more like my sisters. I think a large part of that has to do with how our school was set up. We had the same teacher for every course (except PE) and we stayed with the same group of ten kids all six years. It was a multi-age program, which basically meant that every year we’d always be with our grade (a whopping ten kids), but we’d alternate with filling the other ten or so seats with the grade above us or the grade below us. So while Mia and I had friends both younger and older than us, we, along with our friend Zoey, stayed together all through elementary school.

  When middle school rolled around, there was quite the debate over where we’d all end up. With such a liberal elementary experience, most parents were hell-bent on continuing a nontraditional route. Mia and I toured a school thirty minutes away, and while we both loved the idea of the middle school version of where we just came from, our parents did not love the idea of that commute. So instead we enrolled in White Hill Middle School, the least granola, most stereotypical middle school in our district. Out of our very small fifth-grade class, an even smaller number joi
ned us there. It was an adjustment, to say the least. I had spent my entire academic life in the same classroom with the same three teachers and the same dozen classmates. I had never received a grade, never taken a standardized test, never opened a textbook, was taught to refer to all my teachers by their first names, and for the life of me could not name how many stars were on the American flag or what they represented or what each state’s capital was. We had spent the last six years in this bubble of inclusion and creative energy. Suddenly it popped and it threw me for a loop. The changes started right off the bat. A few weeks before classes started, a pamphlet was sent to our house. It outlined my schedule for the “semester,” what teachers I had, what “periods” their classes were, what “room numbers” they’d be located in, and what “courses” I’d be taking. I called Mia up landline-style. We decoded these foreign packets and quickly realized that we didn’t have a single class together. I panicked. I begged my mom to fix it or to call somebody who could fix it. I couldn’t even comprehend being plopped into this massive pond without Mia by my side. Obviously my mom couldn’t do anything about it. Mia and I were already deemed the alternative learning “freaks” before the first day.

  I swallowed my instinctual terror and vowed to maintain an optimistic attitude about middle school. So, in the last week of August, I packed my purple JanSport covered in political pins and patches and threw on my thigh-high rainbow toe socks, a pair of platform flip-flops, a sparkly red dress, a leather trench coat lined with pink cheetah-print fur, and finally my signature piece, an inconspicuous and slightly eerie Princess Diana replica tiara. I probably should have just worn a “Pick on Me, I’m Not Normal” sign to save myself the pit stains, but let’s move on. As I’m sure you can assume, my getup did not go unnoticed by my new classmates. I naively took their wide-eyed stares as looks of admiration and sheer envy of my lewk. It only took a few minutes into homeroom for me to assess my classmates and realize just how much I stuck out. I don’t know if I immediately registered that as a negative thing, but I don’t think there was any way I took it as a good way to start the year, either. To complete the American school movie stereotype, our seating assignments were up for grabs. Mrs. Wells’s only instruction to limit the chaos was that each section of desks must consist of three boys and three girls. I immediately looked to Michael, the only one from my elementary school in this sixth-grade classroom. All the girls in denim miniskirts and Etnies sat at one table with all the guys in Heelys. All the girls in low-rise skinny jeans sat with the guys with sagging jeans, and all the girls in soccer shorts sat with the guys in track pants. I sat with Michael, with his long, curly hair and rolly backpack; another boy with long hair named Brandon (who would later attempt to bomb the music classroom with a homemade Molotov cocktail); Cody, whose resemblance to Ryan Atwood spanned both looks and delinquent demeanor; some other girl who I’m forgetting; and finally, the most important member of our table group: a girl with lime-green braces, a frizzy low ponytail tucked behind her ears, and a multicolored Lucky Brand hoodie covered in butterflies, zipped all the way up to her neck. Her name was Sydney.

  To this day, when Sydney and I tell the story of our friendship, we attribute it to us bonding over the fact that we were the two ugliest girls in Mrs. Wells’s sixth-grade class. We were both completely aware of it. We also say this without fishing for any sort of affirmations or skepticism at our ugly duckling stages. We’re both pretty fucking glad they happened; otherwise we’d be just as dull and devoid of personality as the kids who were always pretty. Ugly builds character. Ugly kids have to work twice as hard for people to like them. We had to be twice as smart (in Sydney’s case) or twice as funny (in my case). So while some of our classmates peaked before their sweet sixteens, Sydney and I constantly remind each other that we in fact were the lucky ones. Plus, as far as we’re concerned, we grew out of that stage. The realization is summed up by seventeen-year-old Sydney: “At this rate I’ll be a fucking supermodel by the time I’m thirty.” Beyond our backward, shallow way of becoming friends, it turned out that Sydney and I had way more in common than just our unfortunate appearances. We were both bookworms, had an embarrassingly unwavering love of show tunes, and spent all our free moments discussing how much better life would have been if we hadn’t been born muggles. By our first recess bell, Sydney and I had already bonded over clementines and Capri Sun. We were also excited to introduce each other to our elementary school friends at lunch. When Mrs. Wells excused us, Sydney and I ventured toward the blacktop to merge our circles together into one big happy loser family. We met up with Sydney’s friend Jamie, who happened to be with Mia, whom she had befriended in their homeroom. I looked for our friend Zoey, but she had played club soccer that summer. She traded in her hippie-kid freak status for a pair of Soffe shorts and an Adidas bag with her team name on it. I don’t really remember a lot about my falling-out with Zoey, but I do remember that it wasn’t mutual. I remember crying on the bus and being really sad and asking my mom if she could ask Zoey’s mom to convince her to be friends with me again. Whatever memories I blocked out from that left some scars, because even into high school I couldn’t shake the feeling of betrayal.

  It didn’t take long before Mia followed suit. I mean, I don’t blame her. I can’t sit here and say that if I had looked like she did at that age I wouldn’t have swooped up that popularity on a silver platter. Mia was (and still is, I might add) drop-dead gorgeous. If Facebook existed back then, she would have been on one of those fake news articles that says, like, “World’s most beautiful girl—and SHOCKER she’s only 12!” In addition to being way too pretty to be in middle school, Mia was also incredibly good at anything she tried. Soccer? Great—wanna join the club? Music? Oh, yeah, lemme just learn guitar and write songs and sing them at open-mic nights. She was a preteen manic pixie dream girl, and I was the best friend’s body double. Before anyone gets the wrong idea or I get a screaming phone call from Mia, let me state that she didn’t ditch me or exclude me. I was still invited to every birthday party, every Friday night sleepover, and everything in between. But for the first time since we befriended each other in our neighborhood park, I didn’t feel like I belonged. I sat next to her as we blew out our candles on our joint birthday cake, but I still felt like an outsider. I wondered how much of the reason we remained so close was because of our obligation to our mothers. I wondered if Mia wished I was athletic and popular like her or if she was happy she didn’t have to share the spotlight. I wondered if she liked her more “normal” friends better than me. I wondered if she was ashamed of our upbringing when she stopped wearing tie-dye and pants with bells on them and started wearing eyeliner and PacSun jeans. Before long I retired my tiara (mostly because the principal had called my parents and said it was a distraction to the other students) and started wearing white peds socks with low-top Converse sneakers and bootcut jeans with velour hoodies. While I am not upset at all at this style change, there’s still a part of me that feels a pang of sadness knowing it came from that desire to fit in. I was so terrified of losing Mia to the middle school social scene that I molded myself into that image. As far as I know, Mia had no intentions of ghosting me as a friend. Reflecting on it now, I realize that I was the only one building up and perpetuating that worry.

  Middle school turned into high school. Our friend groups expanded, and Mia and my interests in after-school activities changed. I kept up with theater and dance, while Mia continued music and started photography. We made new friends in different classes, and our weekly group sleepovers were rain checked and rain checked again. My instinctual reaction was to feel jaded and abandoned when I saw Mia laughing with new classmates and flirting with guys I didn’t know the pro-con lists of. All the while, I was doing the same thing. She wasn’t leaving me behind, and I wasn’t leaving her behind. We were growing up—maybe not side by side as we had in the past, but we were still doing it together. So instead of associating that change and growth with exclusion, I let it happen. I let myself gr
ow too. We’ve known each other for over twenty years, and Mia, Ruby, and I still consider each other sisters more than friends. They’re among the few people who have ever seen me fully break down, and they’re still the ones who I can count on for absolutely anything. Though we reference our younger years with ears reddened by embarrassment and pleas to silence the anecdotes recounted at our own personal expense, I think we’re grateful not only that we had that space to grow up to be such different women but that we did it judgment-free. Except for my darkening transition lenses and some of Mia’s ex-boyfriends… those we will never live down.

  In addition to school, I faced cliques in summer camp, but that’s nothing to really write home about (pun intended). When it comes to things that honor seniority or involve reputation or repertoire, a hierarchy is pretty much unavoidable. There will always be somebody with more experience who is more comfortable than you are. We all endure that freshman first-day-of-school feeling whenever we enter a situation in which we’re the new kid. While I don’t think this happens any less as you get older, I will say that I think you care a little less—or at least I like to think I’m caring a little less. But who knows, that might be bullshit. I’ve accepted the fact that a little bit of Regina George exists in everybody. Because there aren’t enough buses in the world to solve that problem, I’ve compiled what I think to be the most helpful and constructive advice when it comes to cliques.