Member-only story
The Girl Wars Must End
It’s time we make girl-on-girl cruelty as socially unacceptable as assault
I was 14, maybe 15, babysitting for my friend Eric’s younger sister, Karen. We were watching TV when the phone rang and I heard a man’s voice — not a boy’s, but a man’s, deep and gravelly — say, “Summit Avenue? We know where you are, and we’re coming up to get you.”
Karen looked up from the TV. “Who was that?”
I didn’t want to frighten her, but I wasn’t yet adept at lying to a child, pretending to be confident when I wasn’t. “I don’t know,” I said, then started hurrying around her parents’ house, making sure every window and door was locked. Karen’s father was an architect and her family owned the largest, most contemporary house in town, a sprawling one-story structure made mostly of glass, so even the walls seemed vulnerable.
I had barely completed a circuit of every room, Karen trailing me and demanding to know what I was doing, when the phone rang again, and a man’s voice — not the same man, maybe his accomplice? — repeated: “Summit Avenue? We know where you are, and we’re coming up to get you.”
That was when I realized if even one man showed up and tried to harm us, I could do nothing to prevent him. I picked up the phone and called Karen’s parents at the party they were…
