Dear Teen Me: Authors Write Letters to Their Teen Selves (True Stories) by Unknown Read Free Book Online

motherly, she isn’t sympathetic, but she is awfully insightful. You go to the library.
    The library aides are bookworms and they welcome you immediately. You find your tribe there, and you stay put. This turns out to be a good thing, since you’ll be bullied out of the theater in a couple of months for dating the guy everyone else had a crush on. But by then, you’ll have made lifelongfriends—friends who are weird in a lot of the same ways that you are, who are into magic, and who have already discovered an essential lesson that you’ll soon learn: that life is what you make of it. And that goes for school, too (whichever school it may be).
    It turns out that, despite appearances, you really were in trouble when you got called into the principal’s office. You couldn’t see it, but Big Bern could.
    I don’t want to know what would’ve happened if she hadn’t pointed you in the right direction, if you’d ended up alone and lost in the public school when things tanked with your theatre friends. It’s not important. What is important is that you listened to someone and grabbed the lifeline you needed. Asking for help when you need it isn’t weakness; neither is accepting help when you don’t think you do. Don’t be afraid to do that, again and again.

    Jessica Corra is the author of After You (currently set to publish in the spring of 2013), a magical realism novel about sisters and sacrifices. Jessica believes in magic and chocolate cake, and is only nominally crazy. She goes on adventures in the Philadelphia area, and you can find her online at JessicaCorra.WordPress.com .

RAISING ME
    Heather Davis
    Dear Teen Me,
    It’s not easy raising yourself and your sisters, and it’s not fair. Even all these years later, as I look back at all you’re going through, it still makes me mad. What kind of a mother bails out on her daughters?
    The day your parents told you they were getting divorced you were secretly happy that you and your sisters would be living with Dad, but you had no way of knowing that Mom was going to move out of town. And then out of state. And then out of your lives altogether.
    You had no way of knowing that your grandmother would be the one to take you to be fitted for your first bra. She would have to be the one to buy you that massive box of feminine pads (which would sit on your shelf, untouched, for what seemed like forever).
    You had no way of knowing that your dad would come to rely on you to take care of your younger sisters. That you would be the responsible one. The one who doesn’t want to let anyone down. The one who your sisters look up to and then later resent—after all, you’re more than a sister, but less than a parent.
    But you don’t blame Dad—how could you? He’s a single parent, coming into his own true identity away from Mom, trying his best to help you along the way. If anything, you should give him a hug and tell him that you understand. Years later, he’ll be one of your very best friends.
    You’re in the toughest part of it all right now. During these teen years, your mother will blow into town every once in a while to ask personal questions and observe you like you’re some kind of science experiment: Did you get your period yet? Are you shaving your legs now? Did you pluck your eyebrows?
    And even though it makes you uncomfortable, you answer, because she is your mother. You answer because you feel you should. You answer because you don’t want to disappoint her—which is so messed up, because all the while she’s the one who’s disappointing you.
    And she’ll take this personal information that she extracts from you and lord it over your father. She tells him about the private things she’s mined as if they prove she’s still involved, that she knows something personal—something you were clearly too embarrassed to share with Dad. During these drop-ins she usually takes you to the movies. She tells you she loves you. And then she leaves. Over and over