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“The big girls on the second floor pushed us around now and then . . . They wore lipstick and eyebrow pencil and wobbled their knees while they watched TV. Fifteen, sixteen, even, some of them were. They were put-out girls, scared runaways most of them. Poor little girls who fought their uncles off but looked tough to us, and mean.”

In the beginning of the story, Twyla introduces the gar girls as both the perpetrators and the victims of exclusion. The gar girls represent a particularly powerless demographic of society. They are young women who have been abandoned or abused by the adult figures who were supposed to protect them. As young children, Roberta and Twyla see the gar girls as gargoyles because of their made-up faces and their mean attitudes, but their appearances are a façade. Twyla’s thought process as an adult is more nuanced and introspective than her opinion as a child. She recognizes that the gar girls were tough and mean because their survival depended on it. The gar girls’ harsh energy appears to manifest as power, but in reality it is masking the pain that resonates beneath the surface.

"Bow legs! Bow legs!” Nothing. She just rocked on, the chin straps of her baby-boy hat swaying from side to side. I think we were wrong. I think she could hear and didn't let on. And it shames me even now to think there was somebody in there after all who heard us call her those names and couldn't tell on us.

Near the beginning of the story, Twyla describes the cruel way that she, Roberta, and others treated Maggie. Maggie represents the lowest rung in the social hierarchy at St. Bonny’s, even lower than the girls sent to live there. The way others treat Maggie illustrates the desperate ways people often behave to keep themselves from being excluded. Twyla is already near the bottom of the social hierarchy because she has a living mother who is possibly a sex worker, her roommate is of a different race, and she doesn’t perform well in school. She is desperate to be above anyone, by any means necessary. Twyla’s shame, which resonates into adulthood, illustrates that she is aware it is wrong to put others down to hold yourself up. Her unspoken cognizance is a parallel to the way many people in society are silently complicit in the oppression of the most vulnerable.

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