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  THE GOLDEN CHILD’S TEN LESSONS FOR SUCCESS

  LESSON THREE: HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE YOUR TEACHERS

  I found a copy of this dusty old book in the back of a cupboard in my bedroom: ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.’

  Anyway, I dunno why, but for some weird reason I decided to read it – and it turns out it’s a pretty awesome book. There’s a section on how to make people like you, and what he says is kinda cool. These are the main points:

  Become genuinely interested in other people.

  Smile.

  Remember that a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

  Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.

  Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.

  All these things work. I know because I’ve tried them all.

  But there’s one more important thing that Mr Dale Carnegie (who wrote the book) left out. One that’s guaranteed to build up, not so much your popularity, but your strength.

  You need to choose an enemy. Choose carefully and fight dirty.

  And don’t worry about the collateral damage ☺

  COMMENTS

  @DCFAN says:

  Please contact [email protected] if you’re interested in becoming a member of the Carnegie Society, or if you’d like to attend our annual conference in Warrensburg, MO.

  CHARLOTTE

  SHE’S CHARLOTTE HERE, NOT CHARLIE.

  A fresh start, that’s how her mother sells it. A new beginning. As if she thinks Charlotte needs one. And Charlotte has smiled and agreed that the whole thing is going to be a ton of fun: new country, new friends, oh, yes! Fun fun fun! Agreeing is easier than arguing about the meaning of the words her mother uses, easier than asking her why exactly she needs a new beginning, or a fresh start. Her mother will only, Charlotte knows, look alarmed and then a little sad. She’ll say that it is just an expression, that she doesn’t mean anything particular by it. It is just words, she’ll say, and then change the subject.

  Just words. Charlotte knows that there’s no such thing, knows that even the most basic expression can contain a whole lot of meanings, and a shitload of power. It was just words when in that last week at Brookdale more than half of her gang told her that their parents had said they weren’t allowed to associate with her anymore, which she knew was complete bullshit because most of them had been involved anyway – and their parents knew it. It was just words when the boy who had given her a Valentine earlier in the year – Caleb Jackson, the coolest and best looking and smartest boy in the seventh grade – asked her if she was some kind of kid psycho, and then announced to the other seventh grade boys standing behind him in the lunch queue that they’d all better watch out when she grew up because she’d probably end up a serial killer like those monster women on the crime channel. It was just words when Mrs Lopez, the school counsellor, whose Latino accent was so thick that most of her words were unintelligible, told her slowly and carefully that it was afortunado that she was leaving: if it had been up to her she would have had her expelled for playing such a dangerous game. Additionally (just in case Charlotte hadn’t quite got the point), she would have recommended an extended visit to some sort of institución; that in her experience, intensive terapia was the only way that niños malos like her could be made to understand the consequences of their actions.

  But Charlotte’s own words – and there had been a torrent of them – about what had happened: her explanation to the teachers that she’d had no idea that the leaf was poisonous; that it hadn’t even been her idea that the stupid girl eat that particular leaf, or any leaf for that matter; that all the other girls had been involved too, urging Arya to eat all the hideous things they’d brought for her to sample; that it was just a game, and that at some point they’d all done the same thing – were utterly devoid of any sort of power. Nobody listened (except, she had to concede, her mother); nobody heard – everyone had their own version of the tale all worked out: Charlie was the leader of the clique, the initiation ceremony was her idea, she had brought the poisonous leaf and she had forced Arya to eat it. The other girls, poor misguided darlings, had just gone along with it; the other girls had no idea what was going on, no idea what she, big bad scary Charlie, had planned.

  Nothing Charlotte said was going to change anybody’s mind: in one fell swoop she went from being Miss Popular, teacher’s pet and all-round parents’ favourite, to being the meanest girl in the sixth grade.

  Here, in this new school, in this new class, she is going to be more careful. Charlotte is going to make friends slowly and cautiously, is going to watch and see where the power lies in this particular set of girls. She isn’t going to be put in the position, ever again, of being blamed for something that isn’t her fault. This fresh start, new beginning, new leaf, whatever – this is what it means: Charlotte won’t be letting anyone have that sort of power over her ever again. Not the teachers, not the parents, not the other students. No one.

  On her first day, the headmistress, who seems okay – far warmer and less intimidating than Mrs Guterman, though also less impressive – buddies her up with another girl in her class, Indiana. Indiana is a tall, graceful girl who wears her long brown hair in a thick, high plait and arranges her feet in dance positions when standing still for any length of time. She seems friendly enough, though maybe a little quiet for Charlotte, and is satisfyingly impressed by the new girl from America. Because among these girls, almost all of them Aussie born and bred, Charlotte’s American-ness (slightly exaggerated, naturally) gives her instant prestige. Some new girls have to fight to get to the top, but Charlotte knows she has an advantage, and she intends to use it.

  It doesn’t take her long to sort out how things work, what the pecking order is. The set-up is pretty clear after her first two recesses. HLC is a smallish school: in her year there are only two classes, a little under fifty girls. The popular group, into which Charlotte is immediately welcomed, is far smaller than its counterpart at the Brookdale Academy. There are about eight girls who form the core, with another half-dozen who belong only marginally, drifting back and forth between other groups. There is no clearly defined Most Popular Girl; instead there are three who more or less share the honour of being highly sought after, and who are engaged in a covert and sometimes nasty battle for supremacy.

  All three girls – Amelia, Grace and Harriet – are immediately well disposed towards Charlotte, vying for her attention, offering her the seats next to them during lunch and recess, as well as in class. All three of them are instantly trusting and confiding, supplying her with all the information, and ammunition, that she needs.

  After her first week, Charlotte has already received two thirteenth birthday party invitations: one from Amelia, and the other from a quirky girl in her art class, Matilda. Matilda is not one of the popular gang – who are primarily the pretty, academically talented group, mostly very wealthy – but one of a smaller gang of arty girls, the ones who draw, do drama, play instruments; girls who would probably end up being goths or emos at a different sort of school. She gets on well with Matilda, and has fun at her party, but is quickly made aware that the two groups are mutually exclusive. Matilda’s gang calls Harriet and co the Three Stooges; the Stooges call Matilda’s gang the Cutters. And it’s hinted that to make it into either gang, she’ll have to make a choice. By the end of her third week, two of the Cutters have invited her for sleepovers and one of the Stooges has invited her to spend a weekend on her father’s cruiser. By the end of her first month, Charlotte has made her choice. She’s gone for security rather than excitement. And they can’t be the Three Stooges if it’s a gang of four: Harriet, Grace, Amelia and now Charlotte.

  The other girls in the year, who are neither cool nor popular, are harder to categorise. Some of them are nondescript, the same girls who are invisible at
every school; girls who, Charlotte supposes, will probably be invisible all their lives. These girls, who are neither pretty enough nor clever enough nor confident enough to make themselves attractive to either teachers or students, form loose and endlessly changing coalitions. They include the hopeless dags, the girls who are physically unattractive, those who are ridiculously immature, the girls who are dumb, the ones who are somehow damaged or disturbed. Finally, there are the loners: girls who are simply off any sort of scale of looks, of smarts, of freak-ness, girls who don’t want or need or are simply incapable of making friends. Most of the loners appear happy enough to be alone and their status is explicable and justified. They fit logically into the year seven social ecosystem.

  But there’s one girl, Sophie, whose status perplexes her. Sophie has multiple defects: she’s fat, asthmatic, shy; her auburn hair is untidily curly, she’s not pretty (her nose is too big, her eyes too widely spaced); she’s awkward physically and socially – but her exclusion is not about this. Or not just. It’s weird, but it seems that her loser status is more about her immense musical talent than the more obvious things. Charlotte has been told that because Sophie is a genius at the piano, she has no interest in anything else, not even in making friends. Somehow Charlotte doubts this; there was that hopeful smile on her first day, and there were a couple of other times since – once in music class when Charlotte was forced to take a seat alone and Sophie made obvious overtures towards her – when her shy friendliness, her desire to connect, was embarrassingly clear. Charlotte suspects that Sophie’s lunchtime music sessions have more to do with her lack of prospective lunch partners than the obsessive focus that the other girls despise.

  The teachers have been harder to work out. Charlotte is careful always to appear keen and interested, even when she’s not. She is conscientious in class and never joins in illicit iPad conversations or games, avoids whispered conversations and gossip. She intends to develop just the right reputation here. Mostly, it’s working out. Some teachers, like her maths and science teachers, have warmed to her immediately, but others have been harder to impress. Some, like Mr Pollard who takes PE, are generally indifferent to all the year seven girls, but one, her young English and Drama teacher, Miss Foley, seems impervious to her charms. She has even tried to give her demerits, once because Charlotte misheard her, and another time because Charlotte had mistakenly worn the wrong sports shirt. The woman’s attitude is baffling. English is Charlotte’s best subject, and one that she clearly excels in: her reading age is far beyond her actual years; her writing is sophisticated and fluent, exceptional even in this class of bright and privileged girls. She’s used to being the English teacher’s pet.

  Still, Charlotte’s first weeks at the college go well. She has firm friends, she is already establishing a reputation among her peers and her teachers as reliable and smart and helpful. She may not be the most popular girl in the class yet, but she’s popular enough.

  Things can only get better.

  PART TWO

  ANDI

  THE WORST THING, IT SEEMS TO ANDI, IS THAT THERE WERE no early signs. There were none of the things that parents are warned to look out for: no evidence of depression, no episodes of self-harm, no negative self-talk. There had been no indication at all that whatever it was that Sophie had been hoping for – attention? oblivion? – was being sought. However Andi looks at it, whatever angle she takes, she can see no clear trajectory leading them inevitably to this point. No. That’s the thing – it wasn’t inevitable. The whole fucking tragic mess could have been avoided.

  There are things that, added up, taken together, might have led to the moment, but Andi likes to think that it would have taken only one small change – if she hadn’t fallen asleep that afternoon, if she’d called Sophie down to watch television with her, even if she’d just checked on her daughter once during that disastrous drowsy hour, the whole thing would never have happened. Perhaps then that particular moment would have passed; the desire (fleeting, surely) would have been replaced by others, more imperative.

  It’s the sort of possibility that she rarely came across during her years in legal aid, where other families’ fucked-up, sorry disasters of lives were never decided in a split second, but had been inexorably making their way to that particular destination for years – since their miserable fucked-up childhoods, generally. The drink-driving incident or domestic violence or drug conviction that sent them her way was just another toxic drop in a cup that was already filled to the brim with poison. But there had been no build-up of the sort, she would swear to it, in her own little family.

  There are other moments that she would change too, given the chance. That initial schoolyard meeting with Beth – she’d gladly excise that event from her life, if she could, because chances are, if she hadn’t spoken to Beth on that particular day, the two women would probably never have become such friends. Andi’s visits to the school have grown increasingly infrequent. She no longer does drop-offs or pick-ups, now Sophie’s old enough to walk or catch the bus, and since Gus arrived she attends only those events that are absolutely essential – concerts, parent teacher interviews – sometimes not even then. And when she does attend, Andi has neither the time nor the inclination to socialise.

  Part of her is aware that she probably should have made more of an effort, that the schoolyard is one way to meet other mothers, and that forging connections with a few parents might have helped smooth things socially for Sophie, if only indirectly. But Andi has never been one to join gangs or cliques. Of course she’d done her bit early on, had volunteered in the canteen and the library back in Scone, but in the years that Sophie has been at HLC, she has never really been involved in any of the numerous school activities. Maybe she should have made more of an effort, but during this precious time off with Gus, she has been happy just doing her own thing.

  New motherhood has suited her that way. Not for Andi the confected intimacy, the faux concern, the intense competitiveness that lurks beneath the hugs and organic cupcakes of mothers’ groups. She’d made an attempt when Sophie was a baby, but it hadn’t lasted long. She had been impatient with the other mothers and their anxieties, always faintly annoyed by the fussing, the complaints, the tensions and the absurd comparisons: whose baby was sleeping through, whose was feeding to schedule, whose was more clingy. Though she had found Sophie – and now Gus – entirely fascinating, the public examination of every detail of their routines seemed intensely boring. No, Andi isn’t really a mothers’ group kind of mother; she owned up to it this time round and simply refused to put herself in that position. She had Steve, she had her children, she had her wider family and a few good friends, and that was all she needed.

  But the two women had met. Andi had been in the HLC playground, waiting for Sophie’s late return after an excursion. She hadn’t noticed Beth particularly, had been busily concerned with keeping Gus quiet and avoiding eye contact with the huddle of lycra-clad gym mummies on one side of the playground and staying out of the way of the pacing power-suited mobile-clutching career mums on the other. She’d been crouched beside the pram, bobbing up and down, making silly noises and pulling faces in a vain attempt to stop Gus’s hungry grizzles from escalating into full-scale screaming. The last thing she wanted was to have to breastfeed among this lot – to have them witness (with pity or, worse, plain incomprehension) the additional rolls of flesh she’d accumulated during her pregnancy. It might just have been a paranoid delusion, but it seemed to Andi that all the women were stick thin, with not an ounce of unwanted flesh between them. She was sure that, taken singly, most of them were likely to be reasonable people – all of the women she’d met in the time they’d been in Newcastle were fine, normal enough, even friendly in a distant sort of way. Ridiculous then that Andi, one of those power suited mums herself in a not-so-long-ago former life, and who told her daughter repeatedly that looks weren’t important – that she should ignore the gibes of girls who thought that their future hinged on their bust-t
o-waist ratios, the length and glossiness of their ponytails, the smooth hairlessness of their tanned legs, the maintenance of their box gaps, for Christ’s sake – ridiculous that in this context she should be so instantly self-conscious about her postpartum self, almost ashamed of the additional bulk around her middle, the bountiful excess of her breasts.

  Andi knew her adult accomplishments were considerable, but in some horrendously Pavlovian way, just being in a school playground brought back all her adolescent uncertainty. All those things that mattered when she was sixteen – looks, clothes, friends – felt like they were important again. Other things, deeper things, turned to dust – it was all about smooth surfaces, outward appearances. And her self-consciousness wasn’t just a matter of self-esteem: what a sight it would be to greet poor Sophie – her fat, frowsy mum breastfeeding in the playground. Her daughter didn’t need her sense of being different from her well-groomed, uber-confident peers to be so embarrasingly confirmed.

  Gus’s squawks had become slightly more intense, and she was contemplating pulling him out of the pram and finding a shady spot when a woman sat down beside her, her attention all on the baby, and crooned. ‘Hello, you gorgeous thing. Are you giving your mum a hard time? Don’t do that, little one.’ The woman bent over the pram, gave a sweet smile, and Gus stopped his grizzling almost immediately. His eyes widened, his frown cleared and he smiled gummily at the stranger, distracted momentarily from whatever discomfort he was suffering. Andi turned to thank her, but the woman’s attention was still on Gus; she murmured some nonsense to him, his smile became wider, and he made that sound that approximated a laugh – somewhere between a cry and a whistle.

  She was quite gorgeous herself, this woman; not in the expensively well-groomed way of so many of the mothers at the school, but gorgeous in a natural un-made-up way: her hair a mass of dark blonde curls, tied back messily, falling in ringlets around her face, her skin fair and freckled, her eyes hazel under dark heavy brows, her mouth wide in a narrow face. She was dressed badly – or what Andi knew was considered bad in these parts – in faded jeans and a black T-shirt, a pair of worn joggers, an old cotton cardigan wrapped around her waist. She was obviously renovating or engaged in some sort of manual labour – there were splashes of paint on her shoes, dirt on her knees, dust on her shirt. Gus was still smiling up at her, patently smitten by the curls and the colours and the smooth, soothing murmur of her voice, and Andi – watching her – could quite understand why.