Mean girls

I haven't seen the movie, but I have read Margaret Drabble's novel Cat's Eye, which is an uncanny depiction of how long meanness lasts in a victim's head. This story about childhood friendship gone sour is told by a woman who spends much of her adult life working out the damage caused by those relationships. The girls' meanness is so skilled and subtle that the narrator is the one who always feels she is in the wrong.

Today I told a group of stressed-out freshmen that no one now cares how I did on a history test I took in ninth grade, not even me. But I can still feel the residue of conflicts I had with friends, the hurts we inflicted on each other. Which means those old friends of mine still feel those hurts too.