Dear Teen Me from Author Audry Taylor
Dear Teen Audry,
I know it’s scary. You’ve done it so many times before, but it never gets less scary. You’re standing at the front steps of a new school in a small town. Everyone here knows everyone else. They’ve been friends since they were five; you’ve had friends ripped away from you since you were five, over and over again. You’re a military brat, and having a dad who moves even more than most military dads – every two years or less – has been the most disruptive force in your life.
Audry at 17.
You are thinking of the friends you left behind as you walk, shoulders hunched and head down, through unfamiliar halls, knowing you are being stared at by curious, unfamiliar faces. You miss your friends from the town before this, where you only lived for six months, and your friends from the tiny military base where you lived out your middle school years like a modern-day re-enactment of Lord of the Flies, penned in by barbed wire fences with kids who raised themselves with drugs and bullying, and absent adults who were too busy being soldiers to be parents. You miss those who served as a rock you could cling to in the ever-shifting storm, but you know you will never talk to them again. It isn’t just an entire continent that divides you now; it’s your own cowardice, for you know that even though they write you letters, you will never write them back. It hurts too much to lose them to acknowledge that they still exist.
You sit in the first class of the day, in the front. You’ve learned that some things are consistent in every public school, no matter where the school is located, and one of those things is that most students would rather sit in the back of class. They’d rather be somewhere else entirely, in fact: socializing, making out, playing sports, rebelling. All the things you don’t know how to do. You prefer the front seat, where you can listen to (mostly) intelligent adults fill your head with facts and history and words and vast worlds beyond your own, because you are too frightened to embrace the world that sits in the classroom around you. This last move has scarred you deeply; you were just getting the hang of talking to kids your own age when you had your roots ripped out again, and now you feel like your ability to connect with human beings will be destroyed forever if you have to make and then lose even one more friend.
Half way through the day, you’ve succeeded in deliberately meeting no one. The occasional student tried to speak to you, but you mumbled unintelligible replies to get them to leave you alone. You tell yourself it’s because they’re wearing cheerleader skirts and you don’t understand sports, or because they’re wearing shirts with the logos of rock bands you’ve never heard of, which reminds you just how much of a clueless outsider you are. You wonder if there is anyone here who could carry on an extended conversation about the differences between Dickens and Dumas, or if every one of them would groan when they heard the English teacher tell them they had to read anything more than five pages long. You tell yourself there couldn’t possibly be anyone in this school you could relate to. You tell yourself whatever you have to, just to get through the day.
In the locker room after gym, you change quickly and nervously. Being undressed always makes you feel exposed, and now that your body is growing up, you find yourself worrying that the first thing your new peers will notice about you is some physical flaw that they’ll snicker about behind your back in school halls. It’s an irrational fear, but it makes you hunch forward even more as you dress, and it gives you the excuse you need to avoid making eye contact with someone you might actually get along with. Someone you might eventually be forced to leave.
But it’s been a long and lonely day, after many long and lonely weeks, spent packing up, moving, unpacking, and then sitting in your room staring out a window, wondering what the first day of school would be like when it finally came. Wondering if anyone would say hello. They did say hello, and you blew them off, and now you’re feeling that loneliness stretch and stretch and stretch before you, like an endless, empty road you’ll be forced to walk along forever, and you’re not sure you can take it much longer, but you tell yourself you have to, because being alone will be less painful than being abandoned. You ignore the fact that so far, it doesn’t feel less painful.
Someone at the gym locker next to you fumbles with the lock. You glance in her direction. She looks your age. Her shoulders are hunched over. Her oversized shirt has one of your favorite characters on it: Ariel, from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, a character based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about a girl who didn’t belong in the place she was born, but couldn’t belong to the world where she wanted to be. Disney had given a tragic tale a glossed-up happy ending, but in spite of your cynicism, you’d liked it anyway, because for once, the girl who lost everything and everyone ended up getting the one thing she wanted most.
In her case, a prince.
In your case, a friend. Just one friend who wouldn’t disappear in two years, six months, or less.
Before you can stop yourself, you say, “That movie was pretty good.”
She looks at you, surprised. After a moment, she asks, “You like Disney movies?”
Before you can stop yourself, you are in a conversation that goes on for minutes, and then hours, and then on the phone long after the school day is over, and on into the weekend when the two of you go to a movie, and stop by a bookstore afterwards to buy stories about princesses and dragons and shipwrecked sailors having grand adventures. Before you know it, four years have passed by, four entire years spent in the same high school, growing up with the same people, and growing closer to the girl in the locker room, the girl who turned out to be the best friend you ever had, and the first friend you never lost.
The first day of Freshman year seems terrifying when you stand in front of those unfamiliar steps, especially when you are the stranger among old friends, but the next four years of your life are waiting for you inside that building, and to make those years worth it, the best thing you can do is have the courage to reach out and say hello to the best friend who will get you through it.
I am writing this letter to give you that courage. When you walk into that building today, I want you to do the thing that terrifies you most. Stretch your hand out to the girl you don’t know, and change both your lives forever.
Audry Taylor has worked in television as a pitch writer; video games as a QA tester and fixer-of-bad-game-writing; publishing as an editor; comics as the co-founder of the former manga publisher, Go! Comi; and casual gaming as the developer of writer of an interactive visual novel. Audry is currently working on a secret project that she makes snarky remarks about on her Twitter feed under the name Audry T. She currently lives in way-too-sunny Los Angeles, and continues to write for the audience she relates to most: teenage girls.
Audry’s father was in the Navy and his family constantly relocated to be with him for the first fourteen years of her life. She can still tick off on her fingers all the places she grew up in: Virginia, Iran, Utah, Japan, California, Maryland, Hawai’i, Utah again (for six months), and then a small town in rural Maryland where her family settled down after her dad took an early retirement. She still remembers to this day how dazzling he looked in his uniform when he retired, and how relieved she was that she’d never again have to worry about whether or not he’d make it home safely from a tour of duty.
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