Thank you for the suggestions and insights. I was beginning to think I was overreacting but clearly several of you think this is fairly serious. She has been trying to work this out herself for a while now and it took some coaxing to figure out why she suddenly wanted to change schools and hated recess.
We have tried role-playing and discussing what friends are and are not allowed to demand from one another - a month ago. She did put a friend on probation for a week or two for bossing her too much, with a reasonable level of success. That friendship is now going ok during playdate time. Some of the kids might see her as a proxy for parents that don't always follow the kids' demands - that's a useful point of view I will have to think about. (It's the opposite of a divorce case, but more applicable.) The playground culture is that you can't say you can't play, and that's pretty ingrained in all of them. The problem here is the opposite: she is happy to play with A, B, and C, but they have *chosen* not to play with each other, so they feel they can demand her to themselves on a rotating basis.
We will have some further discussions on how to gently end a friendship and not be a doormat.
Oddly, this is the child that the teachers were concerned about only a couple of years ago because she preferred to play by herself if no one wanted to play the game she wanted to play at that time. They thought she should be more flexible and just do whatever the other kids wanted to so she could be interacting with them. I guess she learned that lesson too well.
And the thought of intimate relationships with this one make me shudder. She is going to be a hard adolescent to parent. You're right, puffin, better to get this part worked out now.
