The Lies I Tell

This section begins the reversal of Meg and Kat’s positions. This time, it’s Kat who struggles to get in touch with Meg until Meg relents, and most importantly, this begins the final touches needed to make their shifts at the end believable. Meg is now in a position where her pursuit of justice is about to come full circle, and she won’t let anything stop her, which is demonstrated in this section by her tunnel vision and playful language. Kat, on the other hand, realizes she can’t continue writing pulp articles to dig herself out of the hole Scott made for her; she needs closure with Meg to move forward.

Meg encounters a number of obstacles on her path to this reversal, ones she avoids by attempting to maintain tunnel vision. Even though she had desperately tried to reconnect with Kat earlier, Meg chooses to ignore her text in the beginning of this section because she can’t afford a misstep in this moment. This tunnel vision increases the dramatic tension between Meg and Kat, as they both need to air out the truth with each other to complete their personal journeys, and it also makes the catharsis when they do meet up again more rewarding, even if it is layered in the series of lies they’ve built between them.

Another way Meg confronts these obstacles is through manipulation of language. She retools her ability to fit neatly inside the perceptions of others into a linguistic variant that allows her out of a sticky situation when Scott is following her, and she purposefully has him rear-end her. Instead of being her capable, persuasive self, she goes into a “meltdown” in front of the officer when Scott asks to speak to him alone:

‘Hell no,’ I say, my voice close to hysterical. ‘You’re not going to have some bro convo behind my back.’ I point at Scott, stepping closer to him. ‘I fucking see you. I know what guys like you try to do. You’re going to put your heads together and make this my fault. ‘Female drivers,’’ I say, putting the words in air quotes. ‘I don’t think so. Not today’ (243).

The intentional use of the word “hysterical” to describe her tone exemplifies how she’s playing into the angle of sexist posturing by fulfilling a stereotype that women are too “emotional.” She uses language like “bro convo” and “guys like you” to force the officer to ignore Scott’s request by not wanting to be associated with sexist people. She even uses dramatic flair by putting “female drivers” in air quotes when she speaks, and the use of female here has a slightly derogatory connotation in that in this situation, using “female” rather than “woman” is slightly dehumanizing and generalizes bad driving to all women, another view the officer is likely to not want to take on, especially when Meg is presenting herself as “emotionally unstable.” This act is too much for the officer to deal with, and Meg gets her way here by using language to manipulate the situation and reverse the roles. Really, she is at fault in the accident, but her tone and lies make it such that no one would ever want to say otherwise.

Likewise, Kat is also forced into a new role. She cannot keep paying for Scott’s mistakes or living the life her mother built. She is crushed by all that has happened, with the loss of her novel and the fracturing of her relationship, but the fact that she turns to Meg in this moment shows that she is beginning to realize how wrong she was about her view of Meg all along. This realization not only furthers the theme of Girl Code: The Need for Women to Help Women—that women should protect women in a society that will manipulate them when it can—but also shows that women are more than the sum of their stereotypes. Meg is neither a femme fatale nor a damsel in distress, but a powerful player in a game she didn’t create. Kat, who has been unwittingly playing the game, is realizing the part she has been playing and is making her journey toward claiming her power in the game as well.