"She heard her voice speaking the word, and her heart rose suddenly into her throat. Had she really said that? Had she actually agreed to this insanity?"
One of the thematic undertones constantly bubbling beneath the surface of the relentless movement of the action of the narrative is the power and consequence of peer pressure. The actual term “peer pressure” appears just once in the narrative and the most interesting thing about that appearance is that it occurs in relation to a fifth-grade flashback. This theme primarily revolves around Susan because she is the outsider. The word that Susan speaks at this moment that stimulates her anxiety is nothing profound or even legally incriminating. It is just a simple “Okay” confirming agreement to nothing specific, but rather just a general acknowledgment to going along with everybody else in an ill-defined plan to “teach old Griffin a lesson.” Because, of course, that is the insidious nature of peer pressure. It rarely commences with precision and specificity. It almost always takes the form of movement from the general to the increasing specific. By this point, the specificity has only reached the point of mentioning blindfolds as a way to escape identification. Which for Susan is still enough to make a determination of the lack of sanity of this plan.
"By the time she was a year old, Betsy had accepted the fact that little girls who handed out smiles and kisses could name their own rewards, and the self-confidence this knowledge gave her served her well."
This novel was published in 1978. That was a full thirty-six years before two twelve-year-old girls attempted to stab their best friend to death to prove their worth to a fictional character known as Slender Man. It was less than a full year, however, before a teenage girl stood on her porch firing a rifle into a school across the street, killing the principal and eight children, and notoriously replying when asked why she did it, “I don’t like Mondays.” That teenagers named Mark, Jeff, and David would engage in the brutal actions constituting the plot of the novel would not have been shocking in 1978, but that a character named Betsy was portrayed as being every bit as sociopathic as the boys would still require at least another year to no longer be shocking. Betsy is a stereotypical bubbly blond teenager born with both an almost preternatural charm and the genetic luck of being born impossibly cute rather than enviously beautiful. The urge to use her gifts in the service of increasingly more serious pursuits of malevolence was not typical of such young women in literature at the time of publication. Betsy’s own self-awareness of the manipulative powers fate has awarded her is unusually chilling. Were she a male, it is easy enough to imagine a future as a serial killer lying in wait. The really chilling thing, however, is there is never any reason to reject this course as Susan’s future.
“I told you before—revenge. Revenge for every stingy, cruel, rotten, stinking thing you’ve ever done to us, any of us.”
This quote represents Mark’s reply to the very same query posed to him by Mr. Griffin that was posed to the teenage girl shooting a rifle into a schoolyard. Since nearly everyone can identify at some level with fantasies of revenge, however, Mark’s answer to what he and his friends stand to gain by killing Mr. Griffin does not seem quite as patently insane as the justification of not liking Mondays and needing something to liven up the day. The inescapable truth is that there is no difference. Unloading a rifle into a school teeming with young children because it was a boring day is not crazier by even a single degree than exacting revenge upon the acts of a perfectly average teacher. In addition to peer pressure, one of the major themes the story explores is that even by the time of high school, the human brain is still not fully developed and thus is often subject to completely irrational reactions to the behavior of others. Rather than simply castigating these students as inherently evil—even the clearly sociopathic Betsy—the intimation is that if their paths had crossed with that of Mr. Griffin as a college instructor rather than a high school teacher, this very same group of friends would probably have responded to perceived slights in a more rational manner.
