Sixteen-year-old Evan
Last week, I contributed a letter to the Dear Teen Me website, and I’ve truly been overwhelmed with the response. (I feel a little like George Bailey at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life when all his friends show up to help save the Savings & Loan.) For the uninitiated, Dear Teen Me is a site where writers for young readers write theoretical letters to their teen selves. Friend and fellow author Suzanne Sutherland (When We Were Good) wrote one earlier this year, and I begged my publicist Jenna to get me on the site (it seemed like such a cool idea). Being a consummate professional, she arranged for a posting (also one for fellow ECW author Chantel Guertin), and it went up last week. After it went up, I learned that (a) I have some of the most amazing friends in the world, (b) everyone loved the computer game, The Secret of Monkey Island and (c) Chandler from Friends was the Oscar Wilde of the 1990s.
Below is an excerpt, but you should head over to Dear Teen Me to read the full letter (and read letters by way more interesting authors, as well!).
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Dear Teen Me,
First of all, you’re not very good at this confessional stuff. You don’t get much better when you get older. Even though Mrs. Doubtfire totally made you cry like a baby when you saw it in the theatre with your parents on New Year’s, you don’t really like sharing emotions and stuff. So, that doesn’t change much.
But teenaged Evan, you are what the kids call a ‘late bloomer.’ You don’t have a nickname because there are no other Evans in your grade and you don’t have much of a personality, but if you did have a nickname, it would be ‘White Rabbit,’ because you’ll be late for a lot of things.
You’ll be late getting into the world of love and romance. I mean, you just passed through a phase where you went to bed while calculating the Top Ten Comic Book Characters You’d Most Like to Kiss. (Fun fact: Diamondback from the Captain America comics will almost always top that list.) Actual romantic interactions are something you’re not even going to really think about until seventeen or eighteen. And you’ll be really bad at it, too. And take it far too seriously. In twelfth grade, you’ll get really obsessed with a girl because she seems to enjoy talking to you, but you should realize that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. You probably shouldn’t ask your first girlfriend out on a date by getting down on one knee either, but you will for some reason. Probably because you have terrible emotional issues …
… more at Dear Teen Me.
