Mean Girls at Columbine?

Shortly after the massacre, the media published several stories about Landon Jones, a star player on the state-championship Columbine football team. Jones' girlfriend, Caitlin Marquez, accused him of being an abusive jerk and sought a restraining order against him.

Some years ago, Jones posted on the board:
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He said, essentially, that Marquez was a manipulative little witch who played games with him, cheated on him, and then tried to trash his reputation. Not knowing either one of them, I can't really pass judgment.

Marquez was interviewed by Ralph Larkin for his book Comprehending Columbine. (Jones was not. One of his complaints was that, allegedly, no one ever sought his side of the story.)

...

RL: I talked to some other girls, and they said that when they first entered Columbine, one of the first things they were asked by other girls was, Where do you live?

CL: Yup. It was very important to live in Governors Ranch, which is where I live now.

DL: Where's Governors Ranch?

CL: It was the nicer neighborhood. ... It had a nicer elementary school.

SK: It's got the Brady Bunch vibe so deeply it's scary. ... It's one of the feeder elementary schools. Governors Ranch, Leawood, Normandy, Columbine Hills, Dutch Creek. Five elementary schools, and they all go into Ken Caryl [Middle School]. That's the only feeder junior high is Ken Caryl [sic], so six years with the same fucking kids.

SK: Junior high was absolutely horrible for me 'cause I was a Leawood kid at the time. I was a poor kid. I got it horrible there.

CL: The girls would not, as much as I wanted to have friends in junior high, they would belittle me and they were always making fun of me, they wouldn't include me in their things because I lived in the poor neighborhood. I mean that was the bottom line. I wasn't cool enough for them because I lived in the poor neighborhood.

DL: Is there really a poor neighborhood around here?

CL: No.

...

SK: This is weird. CL was the girl who was so hot and popular she didn’t need to be on the cheerleading squad.

CL: But I wasn’t popular in the sense that I had a lot of friends; it’s just everybody knew who I was, but I really didn’t have any friends. It’s just people knew who I was ‘cause of the way I dress and the way I look. People thought I was in the popular crowd, but I really hated all of them. And I didn’t hang out with people on the weekends. I wasn’t associated with that crowd. If anything, within the popular crowd I was known for arguing with them and causing a ruckus and being hated by them because I wouldn’t put up with their, whatever they did. I didn’t pretend like I was happy.

DL: But CL, you dated this guy who was a jock, right? (LPorter101: Landon Jones)

L: I dated all the popular guys. But whenever they would go out on the weekends, I stayed home by myself. It’s just those were the only guys asking me out. So if a girl’s going to date in high school, how else is she going to go out with somebody? Those are the only guys that had enough guts to ask me out. SK never asked me out. Never, never, never ever.

SK: Remember the first time you came out here and we sat--you want to hear this story? This is going to be interesting. After math class, fourth hour, CL and I sat next to each other. I was like, I guess I was like the nerd guy who sat at her table.

CL: I never thought you were a nerd.

SK: We’d talk all the time, and we’d help each other with math, blah, blah, blah. And finally I did get the guts to start talking to her outside of class. ... We were friends. And a friend of hers, let’s not name him what is real name is, the man you were talking about, and a few of his friends came up and told me that I shouldn’t talk to her because I was a fag, and I should learn to suck cock instead.

CL: Was I there when you said that?

SK: You were five feet away with your back turned.

CL: So I didn’t hear it, ‘cause if I would have heard it, you know what I would have done if I would have heard that.

SK: So it shot my confidence for asking any girl out. I didn’t date a single girl at Columbine after that, couldn’t do it. So it wasn’t that we didn’t want to, it’s that we’d get the shit kicked out of us if we tried.

RL: That’s interesting.

CL: I didn’t know that.

SK: Yeah, I know.

DL: That’s more than interesting, that’s horrifying.

RL: It’s like property.

CL: Yeah, I always felt like property, always.

SK: You could tell. No offense to you, but you were definitely regarded as property. It was fucking horrible.

CL: Even when I didn’t have a boyfriend, and even though I didn’t, I wasn’t friends with them, and I didn’t hang out with them. I was property.

This conversation reveals several aspects of the peer culture at Columbine High School. First, although CL was perceived to have high status among her peers because of her physical beauty and the fact that she dated members of the football team, she was not a member of the female leading crowd. She characterized her relationship with girls in the leading crowd as one of mutual dislike, for at least three reasons: (a) She came from a family with a modest socioeconomic background; (b) She was Hispanic; and (c) Many were jealous of her physical beauty and attractiveness to the jocks. Because of the abuse she received from the girls in the leading crowd in junior high school, she decided that she was going to keep her distance from them in high school. In so doing, ironically, she found herself friendless and lonely on weekends even though she was regarded by her peers as having high social status. The leading crowd of jocks, cheerleaders, and hangers-on were well aware of who they were and defended the boundaries between themselves and lesser mortals in the social structure of the school through intimidation and humiliation. This was as true for the girls as it was for the boys, although the techniques of intimidation and separation were quite different. The jocks were not afraid of using physical intimidation and rituals of public humiliation to maintain their supremacy in the peer social system. The leading group of girls defended their positions with as much viciousness as did the boys. However, their means were much less direct, with gossip that focused on sexual activities, the wearing of clothes, physical attributes, and so forth as methods of distinguishing themselves from other female students.