NORTH CAROLINA — Michelle Icard starts her days with a cup of tea at a North Carolina Starbucks. But on Monday, her morning ritual was ruined by the overheard conversation of a trio of “very pretty, very boisterous, horribly behaved” teen girls who were making fun of classmates and complaining about “crappy” presents they’ve received.
“I am crawling out of my skin,” the author and parenting expert writes in a Facebook post during the encounter. The conversation, she says in a subsequent blog post, “couldn’t have been written in a more cliché-mean-girls way by a Hollywood scriptwriter.” In a Facebook comment, someone suggested Icard “buy them another round and attach a note to the cups about their behavior.” And that’s what she did, per People.
First, though, Icard, 43, did some grocery shopping, according to the Chicago Tribune. She says she was “conflicted the whole time, and I could see the girls still sitting in Starbucks as I drove home.” So she got a notecard, “wrote a quick, heartfelt note,” and ordered the girls a round of Mini Frappuccinos.
In the note, she writes, in part, “You three are obviously pretty and hard-working. I wish your kindness matched your pretty exteriors.” She didn’t stick around to see them read it.
The “best-case, but far-fetched” scenario, she tells the Tribune, is that the girls would realize they were being unkind. “My best realistic scenario is they laughed it off or thought, ‘What a weird old lady,’ but they went home and one of them was thinking, ‘I felt a little funny saying that stuff, and now I know why.'” As for focusing on the girls’ appearances: “I thought it was important to speak their language before I delivered my point,” Icard writes on her blog.
(There will be plenty of room for mean girls at Starbucks’ largest store ever.)
This article originally appeared on Newser: Woman Gives Mean Girls an Intervention at Starbucks
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