Cool Girl

this is a rough draft of a piece for my creative nonfiction class. I had a ton of fun writing it. pleaaseeeee not too much on the grammar of content or anything i have my first workshop friday where i will hopefully get feedback to turn this from my mental chronicles to a well rounded story. Some experiences have been changed slightly for the sake of the story. enjoy!

 

                      COOL GIRL.
                 (Warning for mentions of suicide)
                    Maggie Dullea

cool girl
    /ko͞ol/ /ɡərl/
    noun
         cool girl; plural noun: cool girls

Pretty, thin, and (relatively) fashionable. Ideally, blonde, ideally plays 2-5 sports. Avid Instagram user.
2.  Female who knows how to talk to others face to face without getting so embarrassed she cries.
        - “I wish I was a cool girl, but unfortunately, I do theatre.”

    Antonyms
        Weirdo, theatre freak, Faggie Dullea, that one girl high-key smells weird.


                        TO BE.
    I’ve never been a cool girl. I’ve never had the suave attitude, the effortlessly endearing quirks, the unbridled confidence that supersedes any physical imperfections. Middle school, as it is for many, was a constant struggle between desperately trying to be cool, and knowing “cool” was something I could never be. When my mom handed me her old iPhone 5 right after my fifth-grade graduation, things changed.
    

                    INSTAGRAM.
    Instagram was my weapon of choice in the beginning. I had one friend, Allison, a girl I occasionally sat next with at lunch, who had nails so sharp and pristine that the nubs on my fingers throbbed with jealousy. She had a new set every week, pink to blue gradients, neon pink with minuscule yellow flowers on the tips, teal zebra stripes. You could tell it was done at home, there was always a small pool of excess polish that flooded the cuticle, but it was as perfect as it needed to be. Every day, I furiously googled at-home nail care treatments, watched dozens of YouTube videos on the most effective way to create intricate nail patterns, and spent all of my allowance on tools and nail polish to have nails as exquisite as hers.
    I began coming into school with nails as detailed as hers, once the bitten ones grew out enough and their jagged edges smoothed. She took interest quickly, as I used largely neons. It was hard not to notice. The skin around my nails was dry and flaking from my constant acetone use, but my nails were not an accessory, something people I never spoke to complimented me on.
    The first thing she said to me after my initial self-made manicure was “Cool nails.”
    We kept sitting next to each other, chatting about our favorite nail artists, showing each other time lapses of our nail painting. After a few weeks of chatting, she suggested we make a joint Instagram account where we could post our nail art. I was in.
    @AM.nails, an account filled with amateur nail art, painting time lapses, nail-related challenges, nail care tips, and anything we could think of. We followed everyone at school, and we were known for a short time as “the girls with the nail thing.” Nevertheless, we kept at it. We’d get compliments for our nails, we sat next to each other at lunch every day. We cried when my index nail broke.
    One video I posted got more attention than the rest. I put 99 layers of nail polish on a single nail, creating a mountainous mess of polymers and chemical fumes that weighed my nail down so far I could barely lift it. We got 10,000 views on that video.
    I started biting my nails again three months after we began the account. It fizzled out. I haven't spoken to Allison in years.



                       TWITTER.
    I first joined Twitter at age 12. Technically, I wasn’t allowed to, the terms and conditions require users to be 13+, but I always knew how to lie. My first account was for lurking, for watching Katy Perry make snide remarks about Taylor Swift, for checking what the election results would be, and fearmongering to anyone who’d listen. I began posting when Tucker Carlson tweeted something so foolish that I (now 13 years old) needed to school him with my cliche liberalism, using slogans like “science is real” and “build bridges, not walls.”  I got tired of being nice, though. My first permanent suspension was because I told Tucker Carlson I hoped his house would burn down.

    I created a new account. Two new accounts, actually. One for my personal scrolling needs, and one with the username “bullyingterfs,” created for doing just that. I went to JK Rowling’s Twitter, scoured her replies for the most egregious transphobia, and harassed them until they deleted their accounts. It worked twice, and then I got permanently banned.
    My other account lasted longer. It kept me busy from age 14 to age 18. Until September 8th, 2022. The first thing I did in the morning was check Twitter. Feeling especially full of morning anger, I thought of the most malicious tweet that would get me the most attention. I tweeted, “die bitch @queenelizabeth” I put my phone down.
    Queen Elizabeth died at 3:10 pm that day. My Twitter account was forever gone.

                    KIK. HOLY FUCK.
    I met Miles on Kik, an app that has only ever brought turmoil into the lives of queer 13-year-old girls. We were the same age, which rarely happened, we were both used to talking to people years older than us. Miles was confident, smart, kind, and most importantly, thought I was cool. Coolness was never something that came naturally to me, the suave nature of the cool girl attitude looked like a cheap imitation when I attempted them.
    Miles called me Evan. I called them Connor. We met in a public kik group chat for the musical Dear Evan Hansen (hence the nicknames) and were drawn to each other, likely because we were the only children in the chat. We texted constantly. We never called, just texted. I’d hide my phone under my desk in French class to tell them about the ridiculous pronunciation that the boy next to me had, I'd send them pictures of my plate at family dinner, and they’d tell me about how they hated being rich and a part of a nuclear family. They always said they were “born to be poor” and “forced to have money.”
    We wrote each other letters. When my mother would ask why I was receiving so much mail from Georgia, I created a bullshit excuse about a penpal. I could never tell her where Miles and I had met. The envelopes held stickers, teabags, receipts, anything that could illustrate to the other the week prior, anything that could make us have a physical connection.

    One day, Miles called me. They were crying. They wouldn’t stop crying. They wouldn't tell me what was wrong. They wouldn't stop fucking crying. Suddenly, they hung up. They stopped responding to my messages apart from a single message: “Goodbye.”
    I knew their address. I knew they were depressed. I knew they had spoken about wanting to disappear, about feeling worthless. I had to do something. This was my best friend, my only person. I contacted the police in their small town in the suburbs outside Atlanta. I was thirteen years old.
    They were asleep, I found out. They called me, texted me goodbye, then took a two-hour nap, completely safe. The police arrived at their house from my anonymous tip about a possible suicide attempt, searched the house, spoke to their parents, and left.
    Miles hated me. They hated that I revealed their depression to their parents, they hated that I wanted to save their life. They thought I betrayed them. They never spoke to me again.


                SNAPCHAT (AND DISCORD).
    Until two years later. On Snapchat, I received a message from Miles.
        Heyyyyy Evvy
                                Hey lol
        How have u been!
                                Pretty good!
        I miss you. We should start talking again.
                                Okay.
        Join my discord?
                                Okay.

    And I did. And we spoke again. And we ended up dating. We started sending letters again; we started texting every day again; we started calling every night before bed, and we fell in love. Until I found out that they had been cheating on me the whole time with a 17-year-old, bearded Slavic alcoholic. I never spoke to them again. I keep their letters in a box under my bed.

                    WATTPAD
    I don't want to talk about this one tbh.


                            INSTAGRAM? AGAIN?
     Meet Jennifer Lowe—  a fictitious twelve-year-old girl that my twelve-year-old mind created (based on a stock image I found on Pinterest). She was a lacrosse player, short and thin, with dirty blonde hair and hazel green eyes, unique enough to stand out, pretty enough to fit in. She was a transfer to my middle school from the Midwest with a subtle accent that only came out when she was excited. I created an Instagram account, @jennifer_lowe12, and put Thurston Middle School class of 2018 in her bio alongside three elegant emojis (a blue circle, a dolphin, and a lacrosse stick). I followed everyone I could think of: the soccer boys, the track and field girls, the theatre kids, and, most importantly, the lacrosse girls.
    I got a hundred people to follow her back. People believed in her. Everyone was talking about her. Everyone was talking about me. I switched to my main account and saw floods of spam accounts posting screenshots of her profile, asking if anyone knew who this girl was. At 200 followers, people started getting more and more suspicious. Then, they found the original stock image.
    There were theories that our middle school guidance counselor created the account to combat cyberbullying, theories that teachers were doing it to make sure kids do homework, theories that parents were doing it to snoop on their children. I got scared and logged out. Nobody knows it was me.


                TIKTOK (AND MUSICAL.LY)
    Musical.ly called to me because I didn’t have to be creative. I could lip sync to songs and skits that other people had made, and get just as many views as the creator. I was on musical.ly when it became TikTok, the period where videos were either deeply misogynistic, vaguely funny (mostly due to their random nature), or thirst traps. I spent hours on TikTok a day, I would post the stupidest bullshit I could think of, captioning videos with as many hashtags as I could think of. A video of me reacting to someone making slime with the caption “#fyp #foryoupage #slime #mentalhealthawarenessmonth #dogsoftiktok #foryou” got 1.1 million views. A video of me calling a popular TikTokker cringe got 4.5 million views. For whatever reason, TikTok was an app that I always fell back on, it didn't have the pressure of Instagram, where everyone I knew would scrutinize each of my posts, and I didn’t have to be creative at all. It did, however, engulf me in cringe culture, the blatant judgment of others based on nothing but what they post in a 45-second clip. I, to this day, am still trying to shake that.


                COOL GIRLS HAVE FRIENDS.
    I was a fat twelve-year-old with long, perpetually greasy, mousey brown hair and two (occasionally three) friends at school, surrounded by twelve-year-old lacrosse prodigies who owned every item from Vineyard Vines and Ivory Ella. I sat in the back of my classes, silently ignoring my teachers, nearly failing math and history, waiting for the next time I could check my phone, waiting for a moment where I could pretend I needed to go to the bathroom to scroll through Twitter. I silently chuckled in the math wing bathroom stall every day to messages sent to me by my inappropriately aged online boyfriend, or the reblog tags on my musical theatre Tumblr account.
    I hated my life off-screen. I had no purpose in real life; I didn't know how to talk to anyone, and nobody wanted to talk to me. To be fair, who would want to talk to the girl who sits with a group of friends who don't like her and stares at her phone all of lunch?
    Social media was a way to get away from that. Twitter was where I’d get all of my pop culture news (it still is), Instagram was where I could live vicariously through the girls on my feed (it still is), and Wattpad was where I could show my creativity and express my love for writing (thank god it isn’t anymore). My phone was there for me when my grandmother died, it was there for me when I went through my first breakup, when I had my first panic attack, when I got cheated on, when my mom broke her ribs, when boys at school would shove me, when my brother would ignore me, when my favorite celebrities died, when my favorite musicals closed.
    I recently deleted all social media from my phone (now an iPhone 11.) I get called cool offline more than I do online. I wear shoes that hurt my feet but make me taller, I wear clothes that sometimes fit and sometimes don’t. I put my old phone in a frame and hung it on my wall. I have cool friends now. My iPhone 5 was my first true love. My iPhone 5 was always my coolest friend.