I Have Some Questions for You

We get so used to twenty-four-year-old actors playing high school students, and we seem so mature in our own memories, that we forget actual teenagers have limited vocabularies, have bad posture and questionable hygiene, laugh too loud, don’t know how to dress for their body types, want chicken nuggets and macaroni for lunch. It’s easier to see the twelve-year-olds they just were than the twenty-year-olds they’ll soon be.

You don’t have to have been friends with someone to be old friends with them later.

It was the one where she walked around in her skin and her bones for the rest of her life but her body was never recovered. You know the one.

Not a single cell of his body was the same as it had been in 1995. But he was still himself, just as I was still, despite everything, my teenage self. I had grown over her like rings around the core of a tree, but she was still there.

it was easier to believe she was lying than that lightning loves a scarred tree.

Life isn’t that messy if you stay away from mess.

But I’d learned long ago not to counter people’s trauma with my own.

Walk into any place like you belong, and you will.

How many times did I have to learn the same lesson? You’re not special. And that’s okay.

My point is, you were a part of the machine: an arm, a leg. You drove the getaway car. You threw bricks through the window and someone else grabbed the jewelry. You distracted the feds while the spies got away. You held her down while someone else beat her. You shot the deer and wounded it. When the second hunter came along, the deer could no longer run.

I’ve always been happiest when I can sit in the dark, when I can turn off my own life and watch a story unfold.

What's as perfect as a girl stopped dead, midformation? Girl as blank slate. Girl as reflection of your desires, unmarried by her own. Girl as sacrifice to the idea of girl. Girl as a series of childhood photographs, all marked with the aura of girl who will die young, as if even the third grade portrait photographer should have seen it written on her face, that this was a girl who would only ever be a girl.

A boat was a place where no one could reach you, a place where some boy couldn't slide into your path to make you a prop in his joke. Even when the boys rowed past us, all we'd do was holler or chant; we didn't have to drop everything to watch them, which was the usual expectation. (Do you remember, for instance, the fake Woodstock that Marco Washington and Mike Stiles set up on the quad? They hauled couches from the dorms, used extension cords for guitars and stand mics. I joined the audience to listen to their terrible playing because it was the thing to do. Just as Open Dorm nights were for girls to feign interest in boys playing video games. Just as the only sporting events with full stands were for boys' teams. At the time, what rankled was the idea that we were supposed to see these boys as the stars, to fall at their sweaty feet. What bothers me now is those boys internalizing girls as audience, there only to act as mirrors, to make their accomplishments realer.)

I thought of a friend in La who'd said recently of her own daughter, "It feels wrong to give her all this happiness and confidence when we know what is coming. Seventh grade is going to hit like a wall. It feels like fattening a pig for slaughter." But what was the alternative? Starving the pig?

Just because you can’t picture someone doing something doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of it.

The dosage of my antidepressant is such that I haven’t cried actual tears in a decade, but there are times when I want so badly to cry that I make all the noises of crying, press my fists into my eyes so I feel something similar. The absence of tears hurts more—or makes whatever hurts hurt more—than if I could just sob.

What happens when your only escape is the same thing you’re trying to escape? Here’s the soundtrack of your tragedy: Dance to it. 54

For a teenager, being seen a certain way is as good as being that way

The kids were to bring one hundred of something, and to dress like old people. Lest any twenty-first-century mother find a moment not devoted to proving maternal devotion through crafts.

Don’t get me wrong: I wanted your head on a pike. I was just willing to wait.

Research has always been my happy place. It might be related to my sometime collecting of facts about my peers, an attempt to feel safer by mapping the world. If I can chart everything around me as far as I can see, then I must be in the middle of it all, real and in one piece. You are here.

The hell of imprisonment isn’t the terrible food, it’s the lack of choice of food. It isn’t the cold, wet floor, it’s that you can’t choose another place to stand. It isn’t the confinement so much as the fact of never running, never getting in your car and speeding off, as Omar loved to do.

The irony being: I was steeped in irony. I was the one whose entire attendance at Granby felt ironic. I was the one whose clothes and posters were ironic. Whereas they (I believed) sailed through life sincerely, with their layered haircuts and North Face and plaid miniskirts. So when I replied with “Oh my God, you too,” even though the girl in question was wearing her lacrosse uniform, I enjoyed the look of confusion, then the unsubtle roll of eyes Beth would share with Rachel.

These plants below were lucky, the early arrivals. The ones born later to a choked summer ravine would have to fight for sun and space. Plenty would make it. Everything green is something that's survived.

Mike was an interesting case study: someone with a career’s worth of experience in human rights, who still couldn’t quite handle justice if it would affect his buddy.

The need to keep busy is both a symptom of high-functioning anxiety and the key to my success.

Adler struck me as a hugely creative kid who’d gotten the unfortunate message early on that there was always a right answer.

You’ve heard of her,” I say—a challenge, an assurance. Below me and above me and in the woods stretching thick and endless, their leaves made of sugar out of nothing but light.

People would move on. Trump would say something dangerously idiotic any moment now, and everyone’s attention would turn.

It doesn't matter which story. Let's say it was the one where the young actresses said yes to a pool party and didn't know or no, let's say it was the one where the rugby team covered up the girl's death and the school covered for the rugby team. Actually, it was the one where the therapist spent years grooming her. It was the one where the senator, then a promising teenager, shoved his dick in the girl’s face. She was also a promising teenager. It was the one where the billionaire pushed the woman into the phone booth, but no one believed her. The one where the high school senior was acquitted of rape because the sophomore girl had shaved her pubic region, which somehow equaled consent... The one where the judge said the swimmer was so promising. The one where the rapist reminded the judge of himself as a young rapist. It was the one where her body was never found. It was the one where her body was found in the snow. It was the one where he left her body for dead under the tarp. It was the one where she walked around in her skin and her bones for the rest of her life but her body was never recovered. You know the one.