Dear Teen Me from Author Ashley Hope Perez (WHAT CAN’T WAIT, THE KNIFE AND THE BUTTERFLY)

Dear Teen Ashley,

First, let’s get oriented. You’re fifteen; it’s noon on December 31 of 1999. At the moment, you have two nearly full-time occupations: worrying about Y2K and hatching your escape plan.

As for Y2K, let me give you in advance the epiphany you will have just a few hours before midnight, sitting on the concrete floor of the fellowship hall at church. You are playing Scrabble as part of a Fun But Wholesome Evening when you realize: if something terrible were going to happen “right at” midnight, it would have to happen timezone by timezone. Doesn’t that sound silly for an apocalypse? And by the time it’s midnight in Texas, you surely would have heard about the disasters in the earlier timezones.

Now that you don’t have to worry about survival without infrastructure, let’s talk about your escape plan. You know, the one that started with the pink postcard you got in the mail:

Accelerate to Excellence! Start College Two Years Early at Simon’s Rock College of Bard. Full-tuition scholarships available.

You carry it in the inner pocket of your backpack, and you think of it as your Get Out of Jail Free card. You have been writing and rewriting your scholarship essays because this escape will only be possible with a big-ass scholarship.

You haven’t told your friends about your plan because, well, what does it say about you if you think the paradise of high school (Cafeteria! Boys! Volleyball! Study hall! Driver’s Ed!) is an intellectual prison?

You are vaguely aware of some low-level drama at home, a tension you can’t quite identify but will later turn out to be the fruit of your alcoholic grandmother mixing booze and cancer meds and generally giving your mother hell.

I could tell you what that looks like from here—and a lot more about how things look to your almost-thirty future self—but let’s face it. You’re fifteen, Teen Ash, and you don’t really care. As far as you’re concerned, thirty is so far off that it belongs to science fiction; it’s what’s next that matters to you.

So let me offer some highlights from your remaining teen years. I’m not going to give you any advice because you won’t take it anyway. We’ll stick to facts.

The Good: You get the big-ass scholarship you need to go to Simon’s Rock. This happens way against the odds—you’ll get what I mean when you meet the competition and their perfect SAT scores, professional ballet credits, and published linguistics articles. Lucky for you, the admissions counselor takes to you like a junkie to the spoon. She loves your optimism and the fact that your teen email address is highhope84@aol.com (don’t worry, she doesn’t know that your first email address was hopeless2@juno.com). Anyway, Simon’s Rock will be a Very Good Thing for you.

The Bad: Some scary stuff will happen in the coming months before you leave for college. Grandpa will turn yellow, get really thin, and die of cancer. You’ll be there, but you will only understand what you feel when you start to write about it. Suicide attempts by people you love (one successful, one reconsidered) will bloom around you and leave you trembling and terrified, speechless except in bad poems that will nevertheless be a lifeline. Things with Grandma will get worse before they get better.

The Ugly: You’ll have braces for prom. And since you decided to go early… you’re going to college in braces. Cute.

The Serious: You will find a voice at Simon’s Rock. At first, it will be louder and more indignant than your true voice (which your adult self is still finding), but that makes sense because you, Teen Ash, still feel you have a lot to prove.

You will do one better than proving yourself. You will surprise yourself, and others, with what you write. You will write stories and poems that are not about you and that—whatever they are about—provide a place where you don’t have to bear the forever burden of Niceness that you were saddled with as a girl.

Let’s face it: being nice is, well, nice, but it only takes you so far. Because of Niceness, you are not very good at revealing yourself or taking risks. And I don’t just mean trying the hummus in the dining hall or going hiking in your first real snow. I mean risks in relationships, the risks that really count.

The Artsy: In college, you will have photography as well as writing. You will spend long, private hours in the dark room, and—even when digital eats this particular joy from your life—you will always have the memory of the red glow of the safelight, the chemicals that burned your nose and stained your fingers, the slow reveal of your images in the developer, and John (the 40-something, magenta-haired attendant who photographed cappuccino foam, said “Right on,” and maybe had a drug problem).

The Uncool: Because you bailed on high school, you will be a teenager for all but two months of your college career… and underage for all of it. That will suck because (a) all your friends are all older and (b) you are such a rule-follower you’re too scared the police will bust you for a sip of Franzia to even attend a house party. Mostly, you will avoid the issue by spending Saturday nights at the library.

The Funny: When you go back to high school just four short years after you left it at 16, you will teach classes that you never actually took. Junior and senior English. AP Lit. And, even better: a few of the students in your senior English class will actually be older than you. You will not tell them. Instead, you will attempt to disguise your extreme youth by wearing unflattering, high-waisted pants from the granny section of Macy’s.

But when you abandon the ruse (not soon enough, your now-husband will tell you), you will learn to be real with your students and to push yourself as hard as you push them. Your love for them will eventually lead you to write books that you hope even the most reluctant won’t be able to put down.

For you, Teen Ash, all that is still a long way off. If you don’t believe me on the details of all this, that’s okay. But at least trust me when I tell you that Y2K won’t end the world as you know it.

So now go beat some poor kid in the youth group at Scrabble and then finish that escape plan.

Abrazos from your (mostly grown up) self,

Ashley

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Ashley Hope Pérez is the author of two young adult novels, What Can’t Wait and The Knife and the Butterfly. Her first novel, What Can’t Wait, was named to YALSA’s 2012 Best Fiction for Young Adults list. Kirkus Reviews called her new release, The Knife and the Butterfly, “an unflinching portrait with an ending that begs for another reading.”

Ashley is also a passionate teacher and student working on her PhD in comparative literature. At the moment, she lives in Paris with her husband and son where they enjoy culture, croissants, and cramped living quarters. If you can’t shout that far, find her online at www.ashleyperez.com or follow her on twitter: @ashleyhopeperez.

Tags: Ashley Hope Perez, Carolrhoda LAB, Lerner Books, YA