Word Count: 389
They’ll be sorry, she thinks, as a thousand children before her have said. They should have listened. They should have noticed. But now it’ll be too late.
Jen is fifteen years old. She is pretty in an innocent way. Her eyes are large wafers. Her lips are full pout. Her hair is thick and shiny like melted chocolate. She is tall and thin but shapely. Her recent vegetarian trend has fallen to her love of hamburger and lamb stew and her disgust with the embarrassment of lentils and beans. Her mother is a real estate agent and her father is middle-management in a company that’s managing to squeak by in hard times. She has an iPod, an iPhone, an iPad and wireless connection. She is an A student when she tries; B-minus when she refuses to study. She has three close friends who all hang together and a boyfriend who presses her to have sex.
So everything is just about normal.
Why then, these thoughts of suicide? Why the need for attention? Because she is fifteen and a cross word cuts like a razor. An overlooked invitation is surely a slight. A giggle across the room must be over the dumb sweater her mother bought her. Because she is fifteen.
After a year of going together, Jen has occasional sex with her boyfriend. He is rushed yet spends time on getting her where she should be. But it’s not at all what she expected. She doesn’t find sex to be fun. Something, she thinks, must be wrong with her “that way” but though she’ll hint, she won’t come out and ask anyone.
Nor does she understand why she hates her bedroom, her house, her parents. Maybe “comfortable” is what irks her the most. She thinks, as she reads Poe, Faulkner, Borges, and Blake, that there is something big in life she is missing. She writes. She posts at Facebook, twitter, and at a weblog loaded with photos and good times with friends. And she writes in a weblog where nobody else has the password but her.
That’s where she lays out her frustrations, her plans. Where nobody else can read them, know who she is deep inside.
And somehow, likely just luck of the draw, her timing is wrong–or right, she turns sixteen and moves on.
