The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [103]
Other students have been harassed for being brave enough to challenge the perceived norm. Cindy, a bookworm in Syracuse, was distressed to see her best friend, Becca, a straight-A student and an athlete, use drugs. Concerned, she wrote Becca a letter, saying she wasn’t “going to stand by and watch [her] kill herself” and that their friendship was “going to be [her] first consequence of drugs,” although she would be available if Becca needed help. Becca mocked the letter in front of crowds at school.
As a result, when Cindy opened her locker, pro-marijuana pamphlets spilled out. She had to change her phone number to stop the prank calls. Students whom Cindy once counted as friends texted her death threats. “You’re an awful person who makes everyone feel like shit,” one text said. “You’re not leaving school unless it’s in a body bag,” said another. (“It’s amazing how creatively sixteen-year-old girls will come up with ways to kill you,” Cindy told me.) At school, someone tried to push her down the stairs, but she caught herself on the railing.
Before long, Cindy was spending weekend nights alone. “Drinking is such a social event that if you don’t go, you’re an outcast,” she said. The only girl who came to Cindy’s defense was equally vilified. “You should just go kill yourself; the world would be better off without you, since you’re friends with that bitch,” a girl texted Cindy’s friend. Another wrote, “You are a whore who deserves to be shot and killed because you’re sticking with Cindy.”
When Cindy asked a guidance counselor for help, the counselor told her, “Keep your thoughts to yourself about drugs and alcohol.” Becca lost her scholarship to a prestigious college and moved in with her twentysomething boyfriend, an alleged drug dealer. Her mother found the letter that Cindy had written to her. She apologized to Cindy for her daughter’s behavior. “You’re the best friend Becca ever had,” the mother said.
Many students told me that drinking and drugs have become so prevalent that teenagers who abstain are the rare exception. “The drinking divide is one of the biggest ones in our school,” said Bethany, considered “a good girl” at her Connecticut public school. When Bethany began dating her first serious boyfriend, a popular guy, she felt pressured to go to the populars’ parties. She wasn’t a drinker, but at her first party, she had a beer. At school that Monday, people treated Bethany differently. Popular students high-fived her. Soccer teammates were pleased she “wasn’t the good girl they’d imagined,” Bethany said. “I felt awful [for caving in]. But almost everyone drinks, and if you don’t, you’re considered weird or awkward.”
Bethany’s assumption, a view that students echoed repeatedly to me, may be the key to helping teenagers resist the pressure they are so sure is inescapable. Why? Because that premise is absolutely incorrect.
Teenage drinking has been declining since 1999, but students vastly overestimate their classmates’ use of alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes. For example, a study conducted at a Midwestern high school when teenage alcohol use was peaking found that students believed that 92 percent of their peers drank alcohol and 85 percent smoked cigarettes. When researchers surveyed the school to unearth the actual statistics, they learned that 47 percent of students had consumed alcohol and 17 percent smoked. (Another study led by the same researcher noted that parents and teachers also significantly overestimated student use.) Even college students wildly overestimate