Dear Teen Me: Authors Write Letters to Their Teen Selves (True Stories) (30 page)
Read Dear Teen Me: Authors Write Letters to Their Teen Selves (True Stories) Online
Authors: Unknown
“I started my own babysitting service when I was twelve. A quarter an hour.”
Ilsa J. Bick
“Babysitter, then lifeguard.”
Lauren Oliver
“I was a canvasser for the League of Conservation Voters when I was 14. I got mugged on my third day. Nobody believed me.”
Carrie Jones
“Mucking stalls in my aunt’s barn. (FYI, mucking stalls means shoveling out the horse poop.)”
Tera Lynn Childs
“Working at the local McDonald’s. I was even in a national commercial for them.”
Heather Davis
“Babysitting a nine-year-old demon spawn all summer when I was 13. First ‘real’ job, where I got the minimum wage? I was a hostess at the K Bob’s Steakhouse.”
Nikki Loftin
“Babysitter, followed by camp counselor, followed by one of those people who dresses up in colonial costume and gives tours of The Freedom Trail.”
Leila Sales
“Waiting tables at Paco’s Mexican Grill when I was fifteen. I came home smelling like chips and salsa everyday. It was pretty gross.”
Stacey Jay
“McDonald’s cashier, complete with polyester uniform that gave me a rash in my armpits.”
Amy Kathleen Ryan
Hannah Moskowitz
Dear Teen Me,
So you have this CD you burned a few weeks ago, and you’ve listened to it God knows how many times now, because ever since you got your license you’ve hardly left your car. It’s just easier to drive around and go out for coffee (which you don’t like) with boys (who you don’t like) than it is to go home and stare at all the food you want to eat and cry over the 94 percent on your test (because
what about the other six points
)
.
Because then you eventually just have to go to bed for your four hours of sleep before you have to repeat the whole thing again…and again…and again.
Lately you have an extra hour in the car every week, because you’re driving to and from therapy trying to shake that eating disorder.
You’re about to turn seventeen, and it doesn’t matter how much you want to get out of the house and listen to those same songs again and again and again; driving scares the crap out of you (it still does), so half the time you call and cancel the therapy appointments five minutes before they’re due to start, which means your parents still get charged the full amount, which means your parents probably think you’re going, but instead you lie on the floor and count your ribs, and you’ve never hated yourself as much as you do when you see what you are doing to your mother all the hell over her face. You take pictures of yourself sucking in your stomach and leave them on her camera because you just don’t care anymore, because this stopped being fun a long time ago, and your favorite clothes are too big, and now the only good part of any of this is that CD.
I’m listening to the songs I can remember from it while I write this, and I’m right back there in the parking lot where you used to park illegally, sitting in the car instead of going in to therapy, seat pushed all the way back, crying so hard you can’t breathe. I’m there too. Pretend I’m there the whole time, okay?
Because I haven’t forgotten. I remember you, Hannah.
And I know what you want to hear more than anything else in the world, what you’re dying to hear, what you want so much to be true—and
listen to me,
because it
is
true. Ready?
This isn’t normal.
It’s
not.
It’s not normal and you don’t have to go through it. You’re not weak. You’re a chick with some messed up brain chemistry, and you’re crying in the parking lot afraid to take meds because you think you won’t be able to write anymore if things don’t hurt this much.
About six months ago you wrote that book about the kid who wants to break all his bones (and in about a year and a half people are going to start asking you, “How do you know so much about self-injury?” and you’re going to smile and talk around the question). A few days from now, you’re going to be standing on the sidewalk outside your therapist’s office when your agent calls and tells you that you’re going on submission, but she’s going to tell the publishers you’re seventeen, okay, because no one wants to work with a sixteen-year-old, and
God
, can you understand, because you have to
live
with a sixteen-year-old and you have to watch your parents try to live with a sixteen-year-old and you’d get out of all of that somehow if you knew how. (You don’t get out. You stay. And thank you for that, Hannah. Thank you for that every single day.)