The seventh-grade alpha female slides a size-zero body into her designated spot in the school cafeteria, her perfect blond hair swinging across her shoulders like a 1960s Breck girl's. A half-dozen ladies-in-waiting assume seats around her as she leans over to whisper something to her favorite of the moment.
Whitney Bullock, seated at a another seventh-grade table several rows away, takes it all in with a grimace.
"Do you see how she cups her hand around her mouth so when she talks?" Whitney asks, mimicking the hand gesture she knows well. "That means she's talking about someone, saying something that probably is not very nice."
Whitney, of the broad shoulders and wiry black hair, has been snubbed more than once by this girl. If you're a woman reading this, you can feel her pain.
If you're a man, you probably don't have a clue.
With all the debate among professionals over girls as victims, very few people talk about this: In middle school, girls have the only power that counts at that moment, social power. These alphas -- named after the first letter in the Greek alphabet -- are the brightest stars in their constellation, defining life as the young teen knows it. They decide that American Eagle shirts are what you wear with jeans, Dasani water is what you drink at lunch, Jen ispersona non grata at their lunchroom table and Brittany must ask Adam to Courtney's party.
They hang over guys at school and telephone guys at home at night, becoming increasingly direct as they get older. Girl or guy, you don't dare get in their way because they can slice you up with a word or a look. Kids both rely on and resent them, and primatologist Jane Goodall would spot them in a minute.
Although alpha females can be found among many species in many habitats, Goodall was one of the first scientists to identify them among chimpanzees in Tanzania. She shocked gender theorists in the 1960s with the finding that some female chimps kill the young of other females in an effort to maintain their dominant position in the troops.
Since then, primate experts have discovered females among other ape types who lead by cooperation rather than intimidation -- the bonobos, for example. In any middle school cafeteria today you'll see examples of this type also, and there's some reason to believe these girls are on the rise. But let's stick with alphas for the moment.
Alphas have been around forever, assuming their thrones based on beauty, dress, family or sheer force of personality. Back when girls didn't or couldn't compete with boys in the classroom and on the playing field, pubescent alpha females learned at their mother's knee a roundabout route to power that they then passed on to their daughters. Hollywood captured them on-screen in movies such as "Heathers" in 1989 and 1997's "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion."
What we most remember is their power to exclude.
Lauren Kepple, a freshman at American University, knew a girl named Stephanie in fifth grade. "I had just been moved into a class for gifted kids and was assigned a locker next to Stephanie's," she recalls. "She said something that made me feel I was not good enough."
Alphas, she says, "zero in on your biggest failing. If you have weight issues, they'll go right to your weight."
Lauren's friend Meredith McGloin, another AU student, says, "I've never seen guys be so cruel." Her reaction to the alpha girls in middle school? "To go off in my corner and read books. I was going to shut them out before they shut me out."
Goritza Ninova, 16, recently moved to Northern Virginia from Bulgaria and knows all about alphas. Sipping cappuccino at the Pentagon City Mall, dressed in a zipped-up cardigan, jeans and chunky black shoes from her native country, she describes the alphas there, starting at age 11 or so.
"They wear tight jeans, tight, low-cut shirts and lots of makeup. When they walk by a guy, they move their butts just so. They think they can get anything or anyone they want." There's a Bulgarian word for them, she says: tarikatka. In Bulgaria, a tarikatka went after Goritza's boyfriend. "She was so self-confident. I was scared," Goritza recalls. Fortunately, "she scared my boyfriend as well."
Girls flout the wishes of an alpha at their peril. Tegan Hendrickson, a senior at Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, fell out of favor with Jenny in seventh grade. Before she knew it, Jenny's friends started a whisper campaign that Tegan, who liked to wear black clothes, was a Satanist.
"People would come up to me and tell me to go to hell, then laugh," she remembers. "I'd say, 'Been there. Done that. Want a reference?' It was pretty cruel."
The Wanna Betas
Tegan is a beta, and no one knows an alpha like a beta, the second Greek letter, the second-brightest star. Betas usually make better grades than alphas. They run faster in track and play a sweet violin. Parents tell them they're wonderful just the way they are, even if they don't think they're as pretty as the alphas. Teachers tell them their personalities are changing, that the label that applies to them right now may not apply next year or the year after that.
All they want to be in middle school, however, is an alpha. Whitney Bullock is an example.
This is Whitney's first year at E.H. Marsteller, a Manassas school of 1,000 students in grades six through eight. Arriving a year after everyone else was difficult, especially during lunchtime, the main event each day.
"I'd head over to one table and see one of the popular girls and think, 'Oh, I better not sit there. I might say something stupid.' Then I'd head toward another and the same thing would happen."
Finally, at her brother's school's football game, she found a classmate she thought would be a friend.
She and the girl were the only kids from Marsteller. They shared a slice of pizza. At school the following Monday, Whitney approached her girl in a hall between classes with a big smile.
"Hi!" she said. The girl, standing with some other girls, mumbled a greeting and turned back to her friends. Whitney got the message and slid away.
Undeterred, she sought out the girl at the next several Saturday games, and again, the girl couldn't have been more friendly. They continued to share food on the bleachers, and Whitney met the girl's family. On school days, however, she got the cold shoulder, occasionally accompanied by a glare.
"She made made me feel really self-conscious about who I am," Whitney says.
Alphas have a way of doing that, their smugness often mistaken for self-esteem. Recently in music class, another popular girl asked if she could cheat off Whitney's paper during a test. Whitney, stalling, asked her why she wanted to.
"Because I'm really good at it," the girl replied.
"It took me a while to say no," Whitney says. "The thought kept running through my head that if I say yes, she'll like me and maybe I'll be popular." Whitney turned her down, and later a friend heard the girl bragging that she had cheated off Whitney's paper anyway.
Whitney admits she's done some things to try to fit in with the alphas. She has cussed like they do (not in front of her teachers, of course; a beta would never do that). When alphas say something about someone, she acts as if she knows what they're talking about even though she doesn't have a clue. At home she has a closet full of shirts that, until recently, she didn't wear because she was afraid the alphas wouldn't like them.
But after her experience on the football bleachers, she took out a couple of those shirts to wear. The more she watched the alphas, the more it seemed they didn't care about the things she did, and she realized that she cared about things like her reputation and her grades.
She tells herself that she learned from the girl who shunned her. "Now I'm careful whom I'm friends with. I won't change myself just so someone will like me."
Who is that self? The beta thinks about that question a lot. On some mornings before school, Whitney stands in front of a mirror and, following the advice of a teen magazine, tries to come up with five things she likes about herself. When telling this story, she can think of three.
"I have power inside," she says, "but it's hard for me to see it as clearly in myself as I see it in other girls."
Just wait a few years, Tegan Hendrickson would tell Whitney from her vantage point of five more years. Tegan is president of Wootton's film club, which nominated her for the Miss Wootton contest this month, a spoof on Miss America designed to raise money. She didn't make it to the finals -- betas rarely do -- and was a bit put out, but not overly so. She has come to terms with the fact that she is different from a lot of the girls at Wootton.
She loves Latin and history and musicals. She uses big words when she speaks, her conversation pouring forth as rapidly as white water. She wears her hair short and dyed red.
It's not that alphas don't bother her. This year several of them moved into her area, drama, acting superior to the crew and to those in each cast who don't play starring roles.
"This one girl acts like she's always right and can do no wrong. She bosses us around when we're working, then avoids us out of class. It's really irksome," she says. "They get this whole attitude thing when they don't get their way."
Betas such as Tegan know something the alphas don't, something the betas learn from their mothers. Alphas can flame out eventually. The cheerleader may marry the quarterback, but five years later she either dumps him or gets dumped and goes to work as a night-shift cashier at Swill-Mart. Meanwhile, the lesser stars learn to fly airplanes and practice law.
A Better Letter
Along the way, betas may evolve into the third type of girl, a girl who rules based not on what she appears to be but on what she does. This girl isn't easily labeled because her role is changing as women's roles change. We'll call her a gamma, the third letter of the Greek alphabet, known in science as being one of three or more closely related chemical substances. The designation seems appropriate because productive and task-oriented relationship-building is one thing that distinguishes gammas from alphas.
"They're someone everyone says is a friend," says AU student Lauren Kepple.
Older women remember this type, though there weren't as many gammas in earlier generations as there are now. Gammas used to be the student council vice president and co-editor of the yearbook. Nowadays, they are elected president and vice president, assisted by other gammas who crank out the election posters. They have influence onstage and off, and, thanks to the new world order that followed Title IX, they know they don't have to manipulate and posture to acquire it.
They've watched their sisters graduate from Princeton, their moms go to work and television's Buffy slay vampires. They've seen Mia Hamm kick a soccer ball and Reese Witherspoon graduate from Harvard in the popular movie "Legally Blonde," befriending everyone along the way.
They are careful listeners, easy to talk to and laugh with, and Jessi Reedy, one of Whitney Bullock's classmates at Marsteller, is practicing to be one. "I jump from group to group," she says. "At lunch, I'll just grab a couple of kids to sit with. If I see someone sitting by herself, I'll usually go up to her."
It's not that gammas don't like being center stage. Jessi admits she loved the notice she received for wearing a watch to school that she had gotten from a package of Lucky Charms cereal. "I'm expected to do things like that," she says, having an alpha moment.
Yet gammas characteristically talk about activities they're doing for others, not for themselves. Alpha power "is all about me," says Abbey Race, student government president at Marsteller. "Leadership is about representing something or someone else."
Gammas start coming into their own in high school, and one of the first things they learn is that it's not easy to cultivate leadership and stay agreeable.
Donna Lin, a gamma senior athlete at Rockville's Wootton, says that back in first grade, she was the kid in her neighborhood who would say, "Let's go outside and play," and everyone did. Now she has to choose her words carefully. In volleyball at Wootton, a sport at which she shines, "if someone was playing badly, I don't think I'd say, 'You suck.' I'd probably say something like, 'It looks like you're tired, but I know you can do this.' "
They love details, these gammas, and plan circles around anyone else, including the boys. Exhibit A is Wootton's senior planning committee. It's made up of 27 students chosen by their teachers: four boys and 23 girls.
Senior Brian Footer, who isn't on the committee, suspects he knows why it is so overwhelmingly female.
"These girls are goal-oriented and headstrong," he says. "Guys are lazy, I guess, or they don't care, or they're not thinking about that stuff yet."
Mix alphas and gammas together, as school organizations like Wootton's senior committee inevitably do, and it sometimes can be hard to tell the difference between the two. These girls are still, after all, trying on different selves like they would new clothes.
At one point in a meeting just days before the Miss Wootton contest, three girls on the committee had their hands up, two girls were talking at one time and senior class President Joyce Fu, a slightly built, soft-spoken girl, stood silently at the lectern. Committee members have been known to yell at one another, even make one another cry.
The burden on the gamma can be heavy. Another gamma, Kristin Smart, president of Wootton's student council, sympathizes with Joyce. "Some girls just don't know when to stop," she says. At student council meetings, "I sometimes feel like a kindergarten teacher having to separate the children."
Wootton Principal Rebecca Newman has no tolerance for such behavior at the 2,000-student school. "You're the role models for this school," she tells student leaders. "You better do it right, because if you don't, I'm in your face."
You wouldn't know it now by looking at Newman, an outspoken, power-suited lead dog, but she started life as a beta. Adopted by loving but extremely poor parents, she says she spent most of her kindergarten year under her teacher's desk, hiding from the rest of the kids.
Maybe that's why she has a special place in her heart for gammas who are cultivating their own brand of power. She has worked hard to move them beyond personality, hiring faculty members who encourage them to take science and play sports. Girls now make up half of Wootton's science classes and half of the athletes, she says with pride. Last year, the largely female senior leadership produced an outdoor rock festival that raised $25,000 so that a dying boy could visit Australia.
Yet too many Wootton girls still don't understand that lasting power comes from paying attention to issues of substance, she says. In other words, there are too many alphas.
For those girls, she says, "it's still who you're dating, or who said something cutting to whom. We've got to move beyond that, get them to see there is so much more."
