My favorite way to terrorize my former coworker and current friend is by asking her what will happen when her two daughters — 7 and 4 (their ages, not their names) — eventually become pre-teens.
"Are you dreading it?" I texted her over the holidays, my first instinct after receiving her holiday card. In the photos everyone is smiling, having a fantastic time.
"1000 percent," she wrote back.
Speaking as a former child and person of eighth grade experience, her fear is warranted. Tantrums, mood swings, and bad behavior all get bigger (and worse) when kids become 5-foot sentient beings. Making everything more terrible, kids are also surrounded by other kids, all of whom are testing the new limits of their own autonomy.
And at that age, I did not fear death or injury the way I did the hot glare from a trio of preternaturally cool girl best friends in my Catholic grade school (I'm not going to name those girls because maybe deep down I'm still terrified of them).
Their friendship was largely and likely based on the coincidence that they all hit their puberty growth spurts at the same time. And not only were they almost adult-sized, they all had older sisters they siphoned forbidden secrets out of, like how one of our teachers may or may not have had a glass eye, or how the eighth grade trip to Catalina Island would require each cabin (one for boys and one for girls) to share two showers, or that flashing the "peace" sign during mass was actually much cooler than shaking hands.
Those girls told us things about the real world that our parents wouldn't. And if our parents weren't going to tell us the big truths these girls had revealed, my classmates and I started to wonder what else our families were keeping from us.
Those girls were my M3gan.
On the surface, M3gan is a horror movie about a murderous, rogue AI, but it's also an hour-and-30-minute camp meditation about how a pretty white girl best friend can be one of the most terrifying things in American life. It's Sydney Sweeney's portrayal of Olivia in the first season of The White Lotus or the tweenage girls who gave millennial's inevitable obsolescence a demeaningly cute name: "cheugy." It's Regina George or Heather Chandler, references that tweens would call vintage (or something unintentionally meaner) once you explained to them that there was once a movie called Mean Girls and another called Heathers.
