Well, it’s been awhile, but lately I’ve been feeling like it’s time to bring out high school Brenna again.

This particular excerpt is one of my first observations on a phenomenon near and dear to my fiction-writing heart: The attraction that the generalized “bad boy” holds for the generalized “good girl.” Yes, like so many popular motifs, it’s a cliché because it’s true. (And yes, we can make a case that it goes the other way, too—I just hadn’t run across that permutation yet.)

First let me say, I loved this dynamic. I looked for it. I kept tallies of it in the back of my English binder.

As with most of the things I liked that year, I was a fan for purely voyeuristic reasons. I liked the incongruity, the shocking wrongness that didn’t stop it from happening all the time, no matter how unquestionably you knew that it was not going to work out.

Before we begin, some background:

Although she has now been in public school for five months, Brenna is still new to this whole social-milieu thing. She is very much an ingenue, and is endlessly fascinated to find that she is now among people who smoke cigarettes in PE, light trash cans on fire, paint each other’s nails in homeroom, and are habitually unable to recognize when their romantic interests are completely inappropriate for them.

Unfortunately, she is also at her most cynical, complacent, and judgmental this semester. It is January, which is her least favorite month after November, and she hates being cold. But is. Both literally and figuratively. (She also finds, even now, that it is easier to speak honestly of one’s character flaws when using the third person.)

Jay is a minor drug-dealer and occasional bully. Sixteen-year-old Brenna hates sharing a lab table with him, because he sits across from her and does this thing where he licks his lips whenever they happen to make eye-contact. It makes filling out worksheets together very uncomfortable. On this particular day, he is clearly—to Brenna, at least—excruciatingly hungover.

Eenie is warm, cheerful, and generally oblivious. She’s not a cheerleader, but she’s friends with them. She smiles a lot and asks the kind of questions that have very unimportant answers, like she doesn’t want to risk cracking open a conversation where people might start disagreeing with each other. Brenna likes her, but often finds her confusing. (Eenie was much perkier than me, and also way friendlier—this resulted in me spending a lot of time trying to divine why, if she constantly had to cast around for neutral things to say, was she always talking? Later, I realized that this is what’s known as not being socially inept. Which is another post for another day.)

I’m in ICP* right now, where trains hit moose who happen to be standing there, and the moose don’t liquefy or splatter, but only get pushed back however many meters along the track, at however many meters per second because they are imaginary moose.

As far as I can tell, Jay just left to go throw up. Not because of the moose, since those are only imaginary, but something else. It’s loud in here and I can’t hear anything, so when he told the teacher he needed a pass, it was only his lips moving, but really, what would I need to hear him say? I saw him with his eyes closed, arms against his stomach, leaning forward. How when Eenie scooted her chair next to his, he straightened up, pressing his palms flat against the tabletop and faking a smile. [ some stuff about math ]

Eenie would always like for him to be paying attention to her. She sits beside him, flirting with her eyelashes and when he ignores her, she thinks maybe he’s playing. It’s so strange to watch. She’s so transparent that it hurts and she likes him so much and he’s a pretty-boy, sure, but not the way she thinks he is. He’s much worse. Jay selling drugs. Jay kissing girls. Jay, arms pressed against his stomach, taking short gasping breaths. Eenie, with her mix-and-match blouse-and-sweater-sets, her shiny Target sun-dress. What are people thinking?

Despite the dispassionate tone (the imaginary moose), I didn’t take this interaction as lightly as I liked to pretend. Some variant of it happened almost every day, and looking back, I think I wanted to be part of it, or part of something like it. I wanted to be normal. And at the same time, I wanted normal social interactions to make more sense. It bothered me that people were always picking things that were blatantly wrong, and then pursuing them anyway.

I wanted to point out the absolute folly, and also to get in on the action. I think we’ve just now—right this minute—arrived at the root cause of why I write books.

I basically spent my entire adolescence wanting to solve every problem and to live every life.

*Intro Chem/Phys, for those of you thinking insane clowns and horrorcore.

Disclaimer: this is still a hard subject for me to talk about, which makes me feel stupid. I hate admitting that I’m easily influenced by completely artificial constructs, most of which probably have something to do with the media. Also, I’m totally old enough to know better. And guys out there? I guarantee some of this won’t even make sense.

At 15, I found social concerns far more captivating than, say, Algebra. There were the usual distractions—what to wear, who to sit with, how to start a conversation. However, all these things paled next to that ravening concern that blindsides so many teenage girls. Being Pretty.

I observed early on that being pretty was a tricky situation, a balancing act that called for absolute precision, and the footholds weren’t always obvious. After a good deal of thought, I developed a theory. It was good to be pretty—but not too pretty. It was good to be not-ugly. It was bad if the boys liked you more than they liked other girls, because then the other girls might hate you.

I myself was not a hater of pretty girls. They kind of scared me, but in a mesmerizing way, like poisonous flowers and solar eclipses are sometimes scary. More over, I felt sorry for the girls who drifted too far toward the stunning end of the spectrum and so, had to be punished for it. This is most apparent in the case of Rosie—to this day, one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen in real life, and in 10th grade, virtually friendless:

Angela says she’s jealous of Rosie, because all the boys like Rosie because Rosie is beautiful and friendly and knows how to make people pay attention to her. I’m not jealous of Rosie. I mean, I am. But I wouldn’t want to be like her.

And even Angela began to notice, after a few weeks, how Rosie eats lunch at a table by herself, walks through the halls alone, has no real friends. Shark-Boy’s her friend when we’re all in PE, but outside of class he barely glances at her.

All those guys who flirt with her, they’ve got other friends, real friends, and once the bell rings, she doesn’t exist anymore.

Pretty much everything about this troubled me, but the most troubling part was my own failure to befriend Rosie. I wanted to ask her to eat lunch with us. I wanted—badly, even—to talk to Angela about the Whole Rosie Predicament, but I didn’t know what to say.

The beauty conversation was one you were only allowed to have if you were tearing yourself down. I knew I didn’t want to get into that, so it was easier to avoid it. Subsequently, I kept quiet about Rosie. I refused to admit that I ever even thought about clothing or makeup or boys. Those things were “shallow,” and also, if you admitted to anyone—even in private, even in a whisper—that you might possibly be pretty, you were clearly stuck-up and full of yourself.

Then, boys started liking me—not all the time, but enough to make things uncomfortable. I did the only sensible thing. I freaked out, went to Target, and bought a terrible hat,* which I used to hide my hair and a good portion of my face.

Couple this with well-cultivated silence and a staunch refusal to make eye contact, and you have the formula for invisibility. It helped. Sort of.

This next excerpt is from the Hat Era and is as close as I came that year to discussing any of my attending beauty-panic. Also, it’s pretty representative of my 15-year-old propensity to leap from topic to topic in the style of a flying squirrel.

My mom said that she’s going to buy me an alarm clock. She told me the other day that I was like the Snow Queen, cold and untouchable. That boys might be frightened of my tiny wrists, how smooth my skin is. Sometimes she says these things like they come out of nowhere.

But I can only see it the other way, like I am Jane (It doesn’t matter which one. They are always the girl-next-door). When I was little, I had a book about Plain Jane. Her bangs hanging down in her eyes, she said, “I wish he loved me.” And the fairy-godmother’s hobby was making wishes come true. I haven’t got a fairy-godmother and the boys around here smoke too much pot.

I want to point out that none of this is precisely true (except, my mom really said that, and I had the book with the fairy-godmother, and the part about the boys smoking pot—that was true). I wasn’t plain, I wasn’t Jane, and I wasn’t the girl next-door. I was pretty, which is scary to say even now. Also, I lived halfway up the side of a rather treacherous mountain and was no one’s next-door neighbor.

More importantly, the whole time I was writing it, I didn’t really believe it. But even in the privacy of my own journal, I had to go for the tear-down. I couldn’t talk about what it meant for boys to like me, because I might be punished. I couldn’t talk about how it felt, because that would mean admitting that boys might possibly (sometimes? a little?) find me attractive.

It was two more years before I could think critically about the hazards of beauty without feeling like I was doing something wrong, because part of the beauty game is that you never acknowledge you’re playing it. Even now, I want to reduce it, just throw up my hands and say “Yeah, fifteen was a really weird age.” But that’s not adequate. The game was a kind of survival exercise, and I was always amazed that we played it right in front of boys, parents, teachers, without them even noticing.

I can look at it now and say (emphatically, if not objectively) that it was a bad game. Although the rules were nonsensical, the message was clear: Beautiful was what you were supposed to want, and it was also the worst thing you could be.

*Exhibit A: Hat I wore for roughly eight months, in order to diminish attractiveness and prevent scrutiny. Also, photographic evidence that I look exactly like my father.

Well, I’ve been MIA for a while due to my second round of revisions, but I’m back! At some point, I may even get around to talking about revision and structure and what it means to sit down and really take stock of your story, but right now, I’m in the mood to talk about high school. Specifically, I’m in the mood to talk about that ever-popular literary cliché, The First Day.

Unfortunately, I have no cohesive written account of this event. It’s kind of too bad, because I’d really love to know what my fifteen-year-old self would have said about it.

Suffice it to say, there was an incident, and that incident clearly made an impression, because I continued to mention it in my journal for the rest of the year. But at the exact moment that it happened, I was far too mortified to write it down.

On the first day of school, I had to stand in line in the counseling office to pick up my class schedule.

I was on a natural-selection kick (yes, you can have those) and had assembled what can only be termed a scientifically-informed outfit.

It went like:

Plain navy blue T-shirt, not quite fitted, but not too big. Cut-off denim shorts. Turf shoes, which were the only sneakers I owned that didn’t have cleats attached to the bottom. To prevent my hair from attracting attention, I braided it into a ballet bun—dainty, demure, conservative. Totally inoffensive. This is the apparel-based definition of protective coloration.

None of my efforts mattered, as you will see in a moment.

For the sake of this narrative—my stats:

Height: short
Width: twig
Depth: impenetrable
Volume: mute

So, the story. There’s this girl (me) standing in the scheduling line, not bothering anyone. She has on this completely terrible Wal-Mart wristwatch. It’s ugly the way a codfish or a potato is ugly, by which I mean, it is so ugly that it’s not even ironic-ugly. It is black polyvinyl, she hates it, it is water resistant to 20 feet.

There’s this boy (douchebag)* standing in line just behind her. I say boy, because looking back, I realize that no matter how I viewed him at the time, he was young—eighteen, nineteen. But from the perspective of the girl, who is fifteen and completely unused to institutionalized learning, he is the very picture of authority. He’s terrifyingly adult-looking, with capped teeth and weight-room muscles. He has a stupid little festival of facial hair. He has a neck tattoo, okay? He is not a boy.

He’s visibly bored, clearly at the top of the social food chain. He takes pleasure in the fact that there are very few obstacles to prevent him from doing whatever he wants. She notes this, because she is nothing if not observant. Her observation is reinforced a minute later when he reaches out and takes hold of her wrist.

Remember folks, she hates this watch. But that is not the reason she doesn’t stop him. The reason is mysterious. The reason is that the situation is just too bizarre, and no stranger has ever taken the liberty of touching her without permission.

The buckle is a cheap one. It sticks and he has to work at it. She doesn’t look at him. She stands placidly, patiently, while he undoes the buckle and removes the watch from her wrist.

Anyone shaking their heads in disbelief yet? Because I am. I was there, and I’m still marginally scandalized by my behavior.

I did look back at him. Once. It didn’t prove to be a very effective defense tactic. I don’t know what he saw, because he smiled—this wide, carnivorous smile—and then I just looked at the floor. I was mortified. I was mystified and petrified, and still, I couldn’t stop thinking that this was by far one of the most interesting things that had ever happened to me in my entire life.

I went to my first class, which was Geometry. My errant watch-thief was there. His seat was directly across the aisle from mine. Until he got dropped from the class a month later, he would periodically lean over and hold up his wrist so I could read the time.

We never spoke. Occasionally, I wrote flippant, angry things about him in reference to other events (and once, in reference to William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies), but only because I didn’t want to admit that I was actually angry with myself.

I recognized that I had set a precedent of inactivity. But at fifteen, I was content to accept that, if it meant avoiding conflict. My greatest horror was Making a Scene. Occasionally I wondered what would have happened if I’d objected—just snatched my wrist back and told him to go to hell—but not with any real curiosity.

I didn’t think much about things like personal integrity or establishing reasonable boundaries. Hey, at that point, I hadn’t even figured out that the person I was actually mad at was myself.

After giving the matter a great deal of insufficient thought, I concluded the only thing that would be different if I’d protested was that I would still have my watch.**

*Can I say douchebag? I think I can—they say it on network TV. Okay, I’m leaving it in.
**Several weeks later, my mom asked me what had happened to the watch. Always the literalist, I told her that I’d lost it.

I’ve been thinking about this journal. I know, I know—you can’t tell by looking at it. I am a very bad journal-keeper.

But here’s the thing: I wasn’t always.

There was a time in my life when I recorded my thoughts and observations with an enthusiasm bordering on obsessive. It sustained me. It kept me from melting into a puddle of boredom during high school.

I can’t be sure that other people like journal entries and scrapbooks the same way I do, because I also like liverwurst and that Swedish salt licorice that’s shaped to look like little fish, so this is going to be kind of an experiment. megancrewe has been talking about adolescence, posting journal excerpts that chronicle various revealing moments. In a certain sense, you could say that I’m copying Megan Crewe. And you would be right.

So, here goes. The Alice in this early observation is excruciatingly shy, which may explain why she is so fascinating to Sophomore Brenna. She wears glasses and is a year or two older than me, putting her at about 17. She wears combat boots and plays the cello. Although she mostly seems to go unremarked, Sophomore Brenna finds her utterly remarkable and admires her in the way that younger girls admire older ones. Although you can’t tell it from her somewhat impressionistic description, Sophomore Brenna spends most bus-rides wishing that she looked just like Alice.

No girls ride the bus except me, and sometimes Alice. But Alice keeps to herself and doesn’t say much. She is kind of pretty, with short auburn hair and gray eyes. She reminds me a little of a rabbit. The kind of rabbit that doesn’t say much. When someone asks her a question, she sighs, like the answer weighs a lot. Like so much that she almost can’t breathe.

She sits with her cheek against the window and her knees pulled up to her chest, tugging on the laces of her boots. Her slip is always uneven, hanging down past her skirt, and her stockings always have runs. I make up stories about her. About how she dreams of symphonies, of pirate ships or stars, like she’s always someplace else.

Alice escapes by staring out the window, but I don’t have to. It’s strange to know you mostly don’t exist. I’m not even a real wallflower, but more like the shadow of one. Sometimes people in my classes make comments about how I’m a space cadet, or “not all there,” and maybe that’s the same thing I’m doing when I pretend that Alice has gotten away. Maybe it’s the equivalent of calling her a space cadet, when really she’s just like me.

I could say a lot about this—things about empathy and self-perception and projection, but I’m mostly just astonished to realize that I probably could have been friends with Alice if I’d been more outgoing or hadn’t been in such peculiar awe of her.

At the time though, I felt her solitude was necessary to her character. Even though I prided myself on my objectivity, I still had a tendency to view everyone through my own lens. I saw people in terms of narrative rather than real life. It occurred to me that Alice was lonely, but not that I had any possible influence over her loneliness. I was fundamentally separate. Even sitting across the aisle from her, I had no involvement in the situation. The idea that I might one day start a conversation with her was flatly implausible.

This makes me regretful now, mostly because I think I would have liked her. In some ways though, it was simply a necessary part of my socialization, one more thing to grow out of. Because as weird as it may sound, at 15, if I didn’t know someone, they were mostly just a story I happened to be telling.

This is a tricky question. It’s not exactly rhetorical, but it’s also not one of those ones that requires a definitive answer. It’s not like “Can I put away this cordless drill?” or, “Do you need anything from the store?”

People are allowed to write what interests them. That’s the cool thing about writing—you get to tell the stories that matter to you. People ask why I write about high school and I’m inclined to say that it’s because I am allowed to. Which is a complete cop-out.

So, honesty time: I write YA because high school was one of the most interesting things that has ever happened to me in my whole entire life. Ever.

This is mostly because it was the first time I had attended—you know—school, and when you spend the majority of your time alone in your room with your extensive collection of spiral-bound notebooks, or else playing Blackjack with your sister, you never have to practice skills like plotting the quickest route to your locker or peacefully coexisting with 2,500 total strangers.

On the first day, a boy asked me which junior high I’d gone to and I told him, very indistinctly (I’d previously had near-perfect diction, but the social rigors of school immediately transformed me into a mumbler) that I had been homeschooled by hippies.

He looked at me for a long, long time. Then he squinted and said, “Wait—did you just say you were raised by gypsies?”

I shrugged. I lifted my hands and let them flop back down. “Sure. Yeah, that.”

Because at a certain point, there is not really a quantifiable difference.

I realized at once that being homeschooled by hippies (alternately, gypsies) was not very normal. In an attempt to isolate the elements of Normal—not an attempt to necessarily be normal, but just to have a clear understanding of what it entailed—I started writing things down.

I wrote down what people did and said and wore, and how they acted when they knew people were watching them, as compared to how they acted when they thought they were alone. I developed theories on various mating rituals, and divided displays of aggression into classes and subclasses. I studied my peers with the intensity of an anthropologist. A tiny, unlicensed anthropologist who was supposed to be doing her English homework.

But that was at the beginning. After a few weeks, I stopped trying to wedge everything into a scientific schema. I was interested in people because they were interesting. They were surprising and kind of wonderful, and I wrote down anything remarkable (and many things that—looking back—were not particularly remarkable) every single day. I have never in my life paid as much attention to what was going on around me as I did between the ages of 15 and 18.

So, I guess the answer is, I write YA because I still have hundreds and hundreds of close-written pages, no respect for the margins, all of them containing something raw and startling and true to remind me what it was like. Because it’s very interesting to watch who people are while they’re in the process of becoming themselves. It’s very real.

What about you—readers, writers, either, both—why YA?