Hyenas

Hyenas recur in Cady Heron’s account as a point of comparison between the animal communities she knew in Africa and the social world she encounters at North Shore High School. They help her describe both the aggression she observes and the limits of treating school as a simple animal hierarchy.

Background and First Comparison

Cady is sixteen when she begins attending school after being homeschooled by her mother, with her father as the substitute teacher. Her parents are research zoologists, and she has spent twelve years in Africa, where animals including hyenas belonged to the familiar landscape of her childhood. That experience gives her a habit of observing people as if they were creatures in a habitat, an interpretive tool she carries with her into the school cafeteria.

Her earliest comparison comes amid the disorder of her first day. A girl warns Cady away from a seat because a boy’s girlfriend is about to sit there; the girlfriend then pulls the boy toward her. Cady judges the display by the gentler behavior she has seen among hyena packs. The comparison registers her surprise at human conduct, while also establishing the animal imagery through which she makes sense of a social environment she does not yet understand.

Reading the Cafeteria

At lunch, Cady finds the cafeteria divided into long-table territories, each occupied by a distinct group. A girl closes off an empty seat with her bag, and a nearby group of boys makes her uncomfortable. Seeing a table of Black girls, Cady greets them with “Jambo!”—an attempt to connect that she recognizes as misplaced. She leaves and eats alone in a bathroom stall.

The next day, Janis Ian gives Cady a hand-drawn map of the cafeteria, complete with illustrations and group labels. The map turns the previous day’s bewildering space into something she can read, much like a field map used in her parents’ research. Cady’s attention to territories and groups shows how her observational habits can help her navigate school, even as her first attempt to apply them to people leads to an embarrassing mistake.

The Watering-Hole Image

At Old Orchard Mall, Cady sees a large fountain and imagines the gathering around it as a watering hole. She compares a cluster of girls chatting to apes grooming one another and a group of boys to hyenas circling nearby. The image extends her animal analogy beyond the cafeteria: socializing and watching one another seem to Cady like behaviors organized around a shared resource and group proximity.

The comparison is also part of Cady’s way of narrating unfamiliar human behavior, not a claim that people are literally animals. Its vividness makes the mall legible through the natural settings she knows, while the recurring hyena image carries an edge of mockery when she interprets the boys’ group as intrusive or unpleasant.

The Image Reversed

The animal comparisons gain a more consequential meaning when Cady’s own standing at school changes. After the Plastics’ performance at the Christmas talent show, she feels that she has become part of high school, though she still does not trust Regina. Cady frames that distrust through the danger of leaving a gazelle’s young with a lion. Here, the animal image expresses her ongoing suspicion beneath a moment of belonging.

Later, when the Burn Book’s contents become public, Janis’s page labels her with a homophobic slur. Cady recalls having written another insult about Janis earlier in the school year, and her account shows how demeaning labels travel through the same social world she once tried to map from the outside. During her confrontation with Regina, Cady turns the language of the outsider back on her, calling her a “homeschooled jungle freak” and a less attractive version of herself. The animal-world vocabulary that began as Cady’s means of interpreting school has become a weapon in its conflicts: it can illuminate patterns of social behavior, but it can also reduce people to stigmatizing types.