"you don't know what you want (it may take you years to find out)"

Before I met Carrie, I always thought of myself as the bad influence when it came to my friends. Yvette's first cigarette, Whitney ditching class, Barbara smoking weed with high school boys under the bridge of the dry riverbed...these things all happened because of my, if not pressure, than encouragement.

I couldn't say exactly when it was that I turned bad. It was somewhere around the halfway point of 7th grade, I believe. It wasn't any one instance, or any person that influenced me...I think I was just waiting for a moment to revolt against the shy, awkward person I was throughout elementary school. I had been rejected by the pretty, popular girls for so long, and had coveted their lives to an obsessive degree. I went from wanting those things (long hair, trendy clothes, hip parents) to outright rejecting them. And rejection, at least in a small suburb where everyone has known you as a timid dork for your entire adolescence, translates to full on rebellion.
This includes, but is not limited to:

• at-home body piercings
• homemade tattoos
• enthusiastically taking drugs that your peers wouldn't try for years (long after you had learned your lesson)
• engaging in elicit acts with older boys which would subsequently take you years to realize that you had been taken advantage of

While some of these things are fun and made you feel young and alive, the majority are things that, once you outgrow that phase, take you a long time to convince yourself that those mistakes don't define you as a person, and an even longer amount of time to stop being ashamed of the person you were.

Carrie was just one of the many damaged, colorful friends I had during my initial foray into rebellion at the tender age of 13, although she had a lack of empathy and a flippancy which I hadn't encountered before. While the majority of my 7th grade class were mostly familiar faces, faces I had known since kindergarten, Carrie was brand new. We became friends quickly (something so much easier to do when you're young) and before long would spend the majority of our time together.

Her family life was so weird, and to this day I'm curious about her story, one she kept very guarded and only gave me snippets of after we had smoked a joint or drank a couple stolen beers. Carrie and her little brother and baby sister were obviously of Hispanic descent; her dark skin, black hair, and pretty eyes that always had the look of expertly applied eyeliner (even though she didn't wear any) were evidence of that. But her parents...man, her parents were nuts. White, Christian, working middle class types from the Midwest...they were strict and secretive and didn't trust me immediately. Their mistrust wasn't something I resented though...I ran with it, and used it as an excuse to not feel guilt when Carrie and I would scale her roof, after her parents had gone to bed, to run wild in the safety and quietness of a suburban night, basking in our youth, which felt like it would last forever.

She had been adopted, and her biological parents...were dead? I think that was how it went. I remember snippets of the story she told me about her childhood in South America...having to flee the small town she lived in? something about a invasion? or an accident? I don't really remember. All I have in my memory are the scenarios I pictured as she told me the story, and they don't have a clear narrative...just the image of people running away.

She moved away as abruptly as she had arrived. It was a succession of events, each one adding fire to the last; suspended for smoking cigarettes at school (with me), caught out way past curfew (with older boys), drugs found in her backpack, a boy found in her bedroom, etc. I eventually learned my lesson, figured myself out, and subsequently straighten my life out. Maybe it's because of her traumatizing childhood, or her parents who just didn't understand how to raise a teenager, or possibly her powerlessness over the direction of her life due to outside forces, but I don't think she ever had a chance. She crosses my mind every now and then, and I always get a sinking feeling she didn't fare well in the long run.

I suspected it at the time, and now I know it to be fact; adolescence sucks. All the money in the world wouldn't convince me to go back to those unsteady years.