Last year, when I was deep into writing 17 & Gone, I discovered an exciting new distraction and way to collect images that fascinated me: Pinterest. What started off as maybe one more thing to keep me from writing turned into a great source of inspiration, and my 17 & Gone inspiration board was born. I’d often write with the images up on my screen, staring at them in pauses between paragraphs.
So I was delighted when Penguin suggested I highlight ten images from my inspiration board and share them on a blog tour. On each stop on the blog tour I highlighted one of the photos that spoke to me and helped me find my way through the darkness of writing this book. Now, I wanted to collect all the inspirations in one place.
Below are details from the ten images—and below that are some lines I wrote inspired by looking at the images.
Images:
(Click the thumbnail to see the story behind each image.)
Lines:
(Click the line to see the image that inspired it.)
Thanks for entering my head and taking a peek at my inspirations. Don’t you love when other art forms—and other artists—inspire you? Next, I may share some songs.
Thank you to everyone who wrote a Haunted at 17 story and shared it online. I was kind of floored at the response. I spent the week sharing five Haunted at 17 stories here—all five from people who reached out to me and offered their stories to share in full on this site. Here are the five I featured:
Cordelia Jensen: “When I was 17, in 1993–94 Manhattan, I was haunted by AIDS. My father’s sickness an omnipresent force in my life. I tried to push it away with Yearbook, with partying, with Phish shows, and with ’80s movies, but it was there, no matter what.”
Madeline Claire Franklin: “The past haunted me. A moment in time haunted me. Being silenced haunted me. Being silenced still haunts me.”
Courtney Leigh: “…When the priest said homosexuality was wrong, there was a hitch inside this girl inside me. Slowly I began to notice her more and more. Soon she couldn’t keep as quiet or as still.”
Melissa Montavani: “By the time I turned 17, death had been haunting me for years. I was convinced that I wouldn’t make it into my 20s or 30s because I’d found a lump at the back of my neck.”
There are so many more. I want to share them all with you, every last one. So I spent today capturing quotes, collecting links, and making a list…
What Haunted YOU at 17:
Will Ludwigsen: “What haunted me was the possibility of inheriting my father’s glib charisma, his zeal for seizing opportunity, his anxious aggression and temper in a full-tilt battle with the world. What haunted me was the possibility — the probability — that I had sociopathic blood in my veins.” Read more here.
Samantha Mabry: “What plagued me was a narrow-minded, irresponsible determination that prevented me from seeing the joy of the present—the journey, as they say—and always had me hurtling towards the future.” Read more here.
Vanessa Barger: “I was haunted by my inability to look at them and say, ‘If you don’t want to be seen with me all the time, then why bother being friends with me at all?’” Read more here.
Kelly Jensen: “What haunted me at 17 … is the very thing that now I can finally and truthfully own. I guess this is the first time most of the people in my life, if they read this, will learn.” Read more here.
Natalie Whipple: “By the time I was 17, I was desperate for recognition and wanted so badly to scream, ‘Look at me! SEE ME! I’m right here!’” Read more here.
Singularly Em: “At 17, what haunted me, consumed my every waking hour… was my obsessiveness, my self-destructive love for my abusive girlfriend, my depression, and most of all… distance.” Read more here.
Beth Fred: “I really didn’t know the one word answer to what haunted me, but I’ve found it. The fear of being unlovable. The fear that the adults in my life were right about my lack of worth.” Read more here.
Susan Adrian: “I had no belief that I could do it. I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence, and what I did was fragile, and false.” Read more here.
Mame: “My seventeenth birthday was spent on a New Orleans street corner.” Read more here.
Marisa Reichardt: “By 17, I was afraid of falling asleep at night and not waking up in the morning. I was afraid of dying without having left something worthy in my wake.” Read more here.
Rebecca Barrow: “So what haunted me through 17, that year of parties and older boys and getting far too drunk in the warm safety of my friends’ homes? What haunted me was the idea that it would all go back to before.” Read more here.
Sarah Wedgbrow: “I don’t remember being haunted at seventeen, but I am often haunted today by my seventeen year-old self. And I’ve been systematically trying to destroy her.” Read more here.
awholehandful: “What haunted me at seventeen was my quest to not be alone, and my obsession with finding the perfect person to settle down with. Of course, when I was eighteen and decided I needed to stop looking for a guy and just enjoy my life, I met my husband.” Read more here.
Elana K. Arnold: “I tried to become a ghost, starving the fat from my bones, floating my thoughts away on exhalations of smoke.” Read more here.
Katie L. Carroll: “As winter and basketball season approached, I struggled to keep my mini panic attacks from becoming noticeable. What if my one poor grade in pre-calculus junior year tarnished my transcripts? What if I didn’t get into my top college? Or any college? What if my relationship was too good to be true and he dumped me out of the blue?” Read more here.
Takayta: “So, what’s haunted me at 17? Well, for starters, I’m actually 17 right now… I think what haunts me now is just the fact that I’ll be going to college next year, and the fact I’m almost an adult… I just have to brace myself, be prepared, and be positive no matter what happens.” Read more here.
Adrianne Russell: “On the surface, 17 looked awesome. A cute running back called me his girlfriend, I had my own car, lived in a big house in an economically uplifted suburb, made good grades, and was well on my way to being voted one of the Most Popular Seniors in my all-girls private high school. But underneath? Utter fear.” Read more here.
Elena: “I was in love with the idea of being seventeen thanks to pop culture. Ladytron sings ‘they only want you when you’re seventeen’, Broken Social Scene has ‘Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl’, Stevie Nicks talks about the edge of seventeen, the list goes on. Braces crushed my dreams.” Read more here.
Jennifer R. Hubbard: “At 17, I thought it was all behind me. I didn’t see how much I still carried with me.” Read more here.
Lindsay Leggett: “When I was seventeen I thought of myself as somewhat of a ghost hunter. I wasn’t actively searching, but I never turned down an opportunity to go somewhere creepy.” Read more here.
Reynje: “I think I wanted someone to ask. Part of me wanted them to say: “Are you okay?” so I could say “no.” I wanted to grab their hands and push them against my chest so hard they would break through my sternum, snapping my ribs like dry sticks.” Read more here.
Katie: “At seventeen, I was haunted by desire. Not only desire to be loved and touched and wanted, but desire to make a name for myself, to be wild, to be known. I was desperately afraid of not being known.” Read more here.
pdxjess: “When I was 17, I was still haunted by the death of the first boy I ever slow danced with. He had reddish brown hair, freckles, the biggest smile, and an even bigger temper.” Read more here.
Jody Casella: “When I was seventeen I punched a girl in the face. Even now, many many years later, I can see her expression, her wide eyes, her mouth falling open, and her hands flying up in surprise. ‘You hit me,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe you did that.’” Read more here.
Alexandra: “At seventeen-years-old I was on average a year and a half younger than other college freshmen, which I never thought too much about. …For the majority of my life, I had been living the sort of life that those that are almost two years older than me live.” Read more here.
Jessica R: “I know what haunted me at 17 because it still haunts me today. I’m not haunted by ghosts. I am the ghost.” Read more here.
xdanigirl: “I was haunted by fear. Fear that I wouldn’t get into to the school I wanted…fear of leaving everything I knew to chase my dreams. Then it was fear of being a single mom, fear of not being a good mom, fear of failing myself and my unborn child.” Read more here.
Janet Fox: “Because, at 17, secure and happy with Mike, I decided one day to drop him like a hot rock. And I dropped him for his at-the-time-but-not-to-continue best friend. Stupid, stupid, stupid. But only in hindsight, from way down life’s road.” Read more here.
K. Ashley Dickson: “I was haunted by the discovery that the larger world was spinning at a dizzyingly fast speed, and I suddenly launched into that world, desperate to catch up with it and make myself part of it.” Read more here.
These are all amazing stories, each one true to that moment, that memory, that place, the truth of being 17, because we all have so many truths. I read every word—and I hope you will, too.
I tried to leave comments on all these posts—when comments were open—or contact everyone if I could find a way to contact you to see if you’d like some 17 & GONE swag in thanks. Please get a hold of me if I missed you, or if I missed your post.
I’m truly honored—humbled, really; surprised, also; plain thrilled—that so many people took part in this and shared their Haunted at 17 stories. Thank you for writing them and thank you for reading them and thank you for helping me celebrate the release of my haunted little book.
Thank you so much for reading the Haunted at 17 blog series to celebrate the publication of my new novel, 17 & Gone! To mark the release of this story about a 17-year-old girl haunted by the missing, I asked some authors I know to join me in answering this question: What haunted YOU at 17? They answered, and now it’s your turn.
Today I have the last featured Haunted at 17 story sent my way. It’s by Melissa Montovani. Read on to see what haunted her when she was 17 years old… and thank you again for reading all the stories.
Guest post by Melissa Montovani
(Melissa at age 17.)
Saying that few things haunted me at 17 wouldn’t be completely accurate. The truth is closer to the exact opposite. While I had a small group of great friends, I still felt like I didn’t fit in, that my small town was just too small. One look at the baggy, figure hiding clothes that I wore, including the never-wear-shorts-or-skirts rule, and I remember how uncomfortable I was with my body. Yet all of these hauntings were merely floating on the surface of who I was back then. They didn’t define me. Or, if they defined me at all, it was only in part.
Because by the time I turned 17, death had been haunting me for years. I was convinced that I wouldn’t make it into my 20s or 30s because I’d found a lump at the back of my neck. Cancer was the bogeyman in my closet as a child because most of my grandparents died of some type of it. Entangled up in my worry about the lump was my equally weighty fear that when I did die, I wasn’t someone that people would remember. I figured that if pressed to do so, then some of my peers would say that I was a very quiet, shy, and possibly, stuck up girl with a great smile (maybe they’d mistake a painfully shy girl with snobbishness), but they certainly didn’t know the real me. And as much as I wanted them to, I didn’t know how to share the person I was with them.
However, it wasn’t just my own death and its threat to the shy girl I was that haunted me. A few years earlier, one of my favorite aunts died suddenly and left me with a lot of questions that still haven’t been completely resolved. Unlike everyone else in my life who’d died up till then, she hadn’t been ill, and at 31, she was younger than I am today. All that I really knew was that my aunt, who let me drive her car at 14, who introduced me to some of my favorite bands, and who stood up for me time and time again, had killed herself. None of “the reasons why” explained why I’d never see her again and the words about a knife didn’t explain how it occurred. I may have been a few weeks shy of 15 when she died, but at 17, the horrifying things I imagined happening with that knife still haunted me.
While a lot of time has passed, some of these ghosts haven’t gone away. I learned long ago that the lump wasn’t anything serious. I’m still shy, but nothing like I once was. I haven’t lived in that too small town for a long time, and over the years, I’ve developed more close friendships and come to love my body. But, sometimes, when I least expect it, the ghost that’s haunted me the longest—my aunt’s death—feels like a dull ache.
Melissa Montovani is the founder of YABookShelf.com, a young adult fiction book blog, where she has been writing content about YA authors and books since 2010. She writes freelance reviews for Canadian Children’s Book News and is the Toronto Young Adult Fiction Examiner for Examiner.com. She has an M.A. in English Literature and lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
MORE HAUNTINGS
Don’t miss all the posts in the Haunted at 17 series, in which YA authors revealed what haunted them at 17… (Thank you to these generous authors for taking the time to write these stories and be a part of this!)
Thank you again for reading all the Haunted at 17 stories, here and elsewhere! I’ll be putting up a post featuring all the links that have been sent to me—and I’ll be contacting everyone who wrote a post to see if you’d like some 17 & Gone swag in thanks!
Thank you so much for reading the Haunted at 17 blog series to celebrate the publication of my new novel, 17 & Gone! To mark the release of this story about a 17-year-old girl haunted by the missing, I asked some authors I know to join me in answering this question: What haunted YOU at 17? They answered, and now it’s your turn.
Today’s featured Haunted at 17 story is by Courtney Leigh. Read on to see what opened her eyes and haunted her when she was 17 years old…
Guest post by Courtney Leigh
(Courtney at 17, in the black dress.)
When I was 17, I was haunted by the girl living beneath my skin.
Up until then I didn’t know she was there. I thought I was everything I appeared to be. A blonde-haired, blue-eyed, fresh-faced, top-ten-percent cheerleader, thespian, band nerd, and tennis player. I loved my family, hated breaking the rules, had the best and most beautiful friends. With only 90 students in my graduating class, “small town” almost isn’t small enough to describe it. We were sequestered, secluded, and protected somehow from that harsh, unforgiving rest of the world. I lived next to a creek which connected to a river, and my brother, my sister, and I would traipse up and down the shallow liquid lengths for fun in the summer. We worked with our parents in a 2-acre “yard” almost every weekend when the weather allowed. The land we lived on had been in the family for hundreds of years. It still is. I could breathe in the wholesomeness. I could feel it under my hands and on my face and in my bones. It was so warm and soft and easy.
That’s what I remember most, how easy it was. It was the simplest thing, the simplest truth for us to say, “I can’t believe we live here. We are so lucky to have this place—this town and these people. Things are good here. Things are deep down good here.” I believed it for a long time. Longer than I like to admit. Sometimes, even now, I feel a deep burning shame for how long I let myself believe these things.
Luckily for me, there was the other girl, the one under my skin. She had ears under my ears that heard other things. Her ears heard the quiet, unsaid words. The way no one protested at the use of racial slurs. The way no one argued when a boy in my computer literacy class said there are no important women in history. Her ears heard the silent existence of varsity athletes hazing the freshmen, domestic abuse next door, child molestation in our school system.
The girl had eyes under my eyes. She saw the way her friend’s boyfriend pushed her out of his truck or yanked her by the wrist and then how her friend wouldn’t break up with him. She saw that there were no black students in the hallway, nor any Asians. She saw how the white students rarely acknowledged the brown ones and vice versa. Her eyes didn’t always understand what they saw, but they did see.
Every Sunday I went to mass with my mom. This girl went, too. Her heart beat beneath my heart, and when the priest said homosexuality was wrong, there was a hitch inside this girl inside me. Slowly I began to notice her more and more. Soon she couldn’t keep as quiet or as still. One day she got her voice under my voice, and she said, We have to leave. We have to go somewhere else and be someone else. I didn’t know why she said this or why she sounded so sad when she did. Because I was happy. I was lucky. Everything was good. And yet she said this and I had to listen. Seventeen was the year I quit volleyball. It was when I dropped out of math. When I cut my silky golden strands up to my ears and dyed them almost black. I kept my thoughts more and more secret, twining them with hers. I turned inward, toward the girl under my skin. Until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Until I was so brittle that I needed to pick and peel away at everything the girl beneath my skin heard and saw and felt. Seventeen was the year I began to molt.
Not soon after, I left my too-small town. The girl who’d been living under my skin blossomed and grew and strove. It took her, now me, a long time to forgive the place I grew up in. Now, the only girl that haunts me is the one I could have been, that shining golden girl, the one who didn’t listen or see or feel the truth around her.
Don’t miss all the posts in the Haunted at 17 series, in which YA authors revealed what haunted them at 17… (Thank you to these generous authors for taking the time to write these stories and be a part of this!)
Thank you so much for reading the Haunted at 17 blog series to celebrate the publication of my new novel, 17 & Gone! To mark the release of this story about a 17-year-old girl haunted by the missing, I asked some authors I know to join me in answering this question: What haunted YOU at 17? They answered, and now it’s your turn.
Today’s featured Haunted at 17 story is by Madeline Claire Franklin, and was originally posted on her blog. I’m reposting it here so everyone can read this powerful story about what haunted her when she was 17 years old…
Guest post by Madeline Claire Franklin
(Madeline at 17, on the right, wearing, in her words, “that inexplicable polyester shirt.”)
Being 17 wasn’t a bad time really: I was dating an older boy (+1 cool point) from a different high school (+1 cool point), who was the lead guitarist in a decent rock band (+100 cool points). I had my night license and a hand-me-down $500 car from my older brother, so I could drive anywhere, anytime, and that’s what we did most weekends. We’d drive out to haunted roads and cemeteries, or to rock shows downtown, or to out-of-state Denny’s where we would sit in the smoking section burning through soft packs of cheap cigarettes, drinking bottomless cups of coffee, thinking we were so damn cool.
So what haunted me at 17, you ask, when I was so clearly living large and loving life? Well, like most hauntings, it was complicated, vaporous, and hard to define. The past haunted me. A moment in time haunted me. Being silenced haunted me.
Being silenced still haunts me.
A little back story: I’m the youngest of three (well, 3.5 but that’s a tale for another day), and one of the most unobtrusive people you’ll ever meet. I learned from a young age that if I wanted to get a word in edgewise at the dinner table I had to shout, or cry, which itself never produced any desirable outcomes. Instead, I learned to be quiet and patient, and to bite my tongue instead of raise my voice. Among my friends, I was known as the quiet one–the shy one. I disappeared in the classroom, in the halls. And in high school, even with dreadlocks and piercings or bright green hair, I somehow managed to pass unnoticed, unheard.
I filled notebooks with the words I didn’t say. I wrote essays to give voice to the thoughts I never spoke aloud, and novels to tell the stories that my friends and family didn’t have the attention span to hear. By the time I was in high school I was used to my words going unheard. But there came a point when being unheard became absolutely unsustainable–only, I wouldn’t realize that for nearly a decade.
I was 15, and I’d just broken up with my first longterm boyfriend. And, as 15-year-old douche bags are wont to do, he was telling people we’d had S-E-X, because at 15 nothing is more interesting to others after your breakup than that one big question: did you guys do it?
I was so angry, but I was powerless to do anything but refute it–as if they’d believe me, the girl, who would of course not want anyone to know what a slut she was, because that’s what everyone thought (/still thinks) of girls who had (/have) sex in high school. And there I was, the girl no one ever noticed, suddenly the topic of scandal.
I had to tell someone, I had to make somebody hear me, because I hadn’t spoken back when everything happened, back when I should have broken up with him, back when my life fell apart for the first time in a long series of breakdowns. So I told my best friend, in the locker room, after gym class. I told her the hardest thing I’d ever forced myself to give a voice to: “The truth is, we did have sex. But I said no. And he didn’t listen.”
“So what?” she said, dismissive, shrugging, looking away, turning and talking to someone else like I hadn’t just carved out my guts and held them up for her appraisal.
At a time when I needed to speak, and to be heard, more than ever before in all my life, I had never felt more silenced. And I wondered if…maybe she was right? Maybe it was no big deal, after all? Maybe he hadn’t heard me. Maybe I was a slut. Maybe it was my fault. Believing that felt slightly better than believing I was someone else’s victim. Blaming myself, and hating myself, was infinitely easier than accepting the truth.
He transferred schools shortly after, and I didn’t dare mention it to anyone again. Those awkward days when I ended up in the guidance or social worker’s office at school, I told them my “irrational crying” was just stress, hormones, that I’d been sleeping poorly–anything but the truth, or what might have been true, or even an approximate version of the truth.
Then, the summer before our senior year, he came back to town. 17 would be the last year of my life that I would have any contact with him, but it was a hard and bitter year of silence, shame, and insidious ghosts. I ran into him at parties, his pupils dilated, tripping on cough syrup or god knows what. He tried more than once to corner me and talk to me, ask me about my new boyfriend, tell me how much he missed me. When fall came, he was back at school, sliding notes into my locker that told me in excruciating detail about his time in the psychiatric hospital, his drug-induced suicide attempts, his visions of God telling him how I still loved him, that I would be with him again in time. And even then, I was haunted by a kind of guilt–guilt that he was destroying himself under the guise of loving me, and guilt that I honestly felt he deserved to suffer.*
I survived. I graduated, and life went on. I fought hard to forgive him (yes, I did forgive him eventually), so that I could have my own life back. But in the end, as life after high school changed everything about my world, I realized it wasn’t a loss of innocence that haunted me at 17, or the ruins of a boy I once loved falling at my heels. It was the years and years of allowing myself to be silenced, of allowing my anger and sadness to go unheard. It was his betrayal, yes, but it was also the betrayal of the friends I had given my heart to as well, and a family that didn’t realize they were nurturing my silence. Every time my friends joked with him in class and I had to hold back my anger, every time he scared me with his horrific notes in my locker and I wanted to tell someone, but couldn’t–every time I wanted to shout or cry out, but didn’t–that was the thing that haunted me the longest, the deepest.
And on my darker days, it still does.
But, true to form, I don’t like feeling like a victim. And I’ve realized, finally, so many years later, that it was my own betrayal that hurt me most of all. I betrayed myself by buying into the silence, by buying into the lie that what I had to say was not worth saying, not worth taking up the lesson I had learned as a child, at the dinner table: that I could be heard if I shouted, if I cried. But learning to raise my voice–allowing myself, now, to be seen and heard–that’s probably the hardest lesson I’ve ever had to learn.
(So that this doesn’t end on a totally dark note, enjoy the caption my husband gave me on this picture of me climbing through a window when I was 17.)
(This is some “Clarissa Explains It All” shit right here.)
*I haven’t seen him since I graduated from high school ten years ago, but I did hear, about 7 years back, that he’d been shot point-blank in the chest during a drug deal (or a robbery because of drugs? I don’t remember/care), and I actually laughed. He survived, but… I didn’t know that when I laughed.
Madeline Claire Franklin has been writing, making movies, telling lies, and otherwise creating stories for as long as she can remember. She holds a BA in Media Studies/Production with a minor in Anthropology from the University at Buffalo, where she further expanded her storytelling capacity through film, animation, and the study of the human race.
In addition to her love of telling stories and researching dead people, Madeline is an avid traveler and lover of foreign cultures. She has contracted salmonella in Costa Rica, was bitten by a goat in the Sahara Desert, got salt in her eyes at the Dead Sea, and her pants once caught on fire while she was walking down a street in Spain. None of this deters her.
She currently resides in Buffalo, NY, with her husband and their growing menagerie of pets.
MORE HAUNTINGS
Don’t miss all the posts in the Haunted at 17 series, in which YA authors revealed what haunted them at 17… (Thank you to these generous authors for taking the time to write these stories and be a part of this!)
…Do YOU Have a Haunted at 17 Story You’d Like to Share Here?
Feel inspired and want to share what haunted you at 17? If you write a post on your blog, leave a link or tweet it to me. I’ll send you some 17 & Gone swag if you’d like it, and I’ll be listing all the posts in a round-up this weekend.
Even better, as you can see from today, I’ll be featuring five of your Haunted at 17 stories here in full next week. So if you don’t have a blog—or even if you’d already posted yours and want to include it here—email your story me.
And remember: You don’t have to be a writer to take part in this. All you have to be is someone who was once 17.
GIVEAWAY!
Want to win a signed hardcover of 17 & Gone, some swag, and a signed hardcover of Imaginary Girls to keep it company? Every commenter on this Haunted at 17 post will be entered to win. You can also enter by filling out this entry form.
The giveaway is international. Closes 11:59 p.m. EST tonight!, Thursday, March 28. Two winners will be chosen.
Thank you so much for reading the Haunted at 17 blog series to celebrate the publication of my new novel, 17 & Gone! To mark the release of this story about a 17-year-old girl haunted by the missing, I asked some authors I know to join me in answering this question: What haunted YOU at 17? They answered, and now it’s your turn.
Today’s featured Haunted at 17 story is by Jennifer Gennari. Read on to see what haunted her when she was 17 years old…
Guest post by Jennifer Gennari
(Jennifer at 17 years old.)
Seventeen is the sex year.
OK, that’s what my eighteen-year-old daughter just said, when I told her about responding to Nova Ren Suma’s call for blog posts to celebrate the launch of her book, 17 & GONE.
But I completely stopped talking. She was right—seventeen was the sex year.
I was a late bloomer. We had moved to Vermont two years earlier; I was fifteen, skinny like a two-by-four, and unkissed. I basically stayed silent my entire sophomore year, observing, eyes wide. The culture was so different from suburban Boston. In my new high school, many of the kids were dating the people they would marry. I studied the boots, the embroidered floral sweaters, and turtlenecks. Soon I was wearing red chamois shirts over jeans but my hair stayed long and straight.
My first kiss, horribly later than my younger sister’s first, was at sixteen. But the way it happened made up for the wait. It was summer and he was blond, nothing like me, and so sweet. One night, we walked hand and hand out to the bridge across the pond in the middle of the golf course. The frogs were croaking, and we leaned into each other, crashing against the rickety white railing.
I knew instantly I liked it. I liked it a lot. He was nice, but making out was awesome. Sex education was about how to say no and wait or, if you go for it, don’t get pregnant, don’t get STDs. But no one had mentioned the pleasure of fumbling and frantic needs met. The shocking greatness of hands on skin. Kissing felt good!
I was still shy, but I joined my friends in obsessing about landing a boyfriend. (In fact, years later, I realized that opposite-sex pursuit was not for everyone.) We flirted in the halls, passed notes in class, drove to clandestine keg parties on the off chance someone—anyone—would pair up with us. Every moment was about chasing after the promise of that electricity, that brief sensation of solidarity with another body.
That was me at seventeen. Yes, I wanted to fit in, and I never quite did. But I did have a boyfriend, and I learned just how great sex could be. (Thank you, Planned Parenthood, for protection!)
The only thing that haunts me about these good memories is the way grownups still aren’t honest about what preoccupies every adolescent—boys and girls. Sex at seventeen? If you’re ready, and he’s right for you, it’s OK. (And may it be wonderful, awkward, loving sex!)
Jennifer Gennari is the author of MY MIXED-UP BERRY BLUE SUMMER (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children), an ABC Spring 2012 New Voices title and ALA Rainbow List title. She is now at work on a young adult novel, LIFE, SUSPENDED. Visit www.jengennari.com or follow @JenGenn.
MORE HAUNTINGS
Don’t miss all the posts in the Haunted at 17 series, in which YA authors revealed what haunted them at 17… (Thank you to these generous authors for taking the time to write these stories and be a part of this!)
…Do YOU Have a Haunted at 17 Story You’d Like to Share Here?
Feel inspired and want to share what haunted you at 17? If you write a post on your blog, leave a link or tweet it to me. I’ll send you some 17 & Gone swag if you’d like it, and I’ll be listing all the posts in a round-up this weekend.
Even better, as you can see from today, I’ll be featuring five of your Haunted at 17 stories here in full next week. So if you don’t have a blog—or even if you’d already posted yours and want to include it here—email your story me.
And remember: You don’t have to be a writer to take part in this. All you have to be is someone who was once 17.
GIVEAWAY!
Want to win a signed hardcover of 17 & Gone, some swag, and a signed hardcover of Imaginary Girls to keep it company? Every commenter on this Haunted at 17 post will be entered to win. You can also enter by filling out this entry form.
The giveaway is international. Closes 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday, March 28. Two winners will be chosen.
Thank you so much for reading the Haunted at 17 blog series to celebrate the publication of my new novel, 17 & Gone! To mark the release of this story about a 17-year-old girl haunted by the missing, I asked some authors I know to join me in answering this question: What haunted YOU at 17? They answered, and now it’s your turn. Starting today, I’ll be featuring (at least!) FIVE of the Haunted at 17 posts that you wrote and either posted on your blogs or emailed to me.
Today’s featured Haunted at 17 story is by Cordelia Jensen. Read on to see what haunted her when she was 17 years old, in poem form…
Guest post by Cordelia Jensen
Cordelia at 17. Photo taken by her mom, Mariette Pathy Allen.
When I was 17, in 1993–94 Manhattan, I was haunted by AIDS. My father’s sickness an omnipresent force in my life. I tried to push it away with Yearbook, with partying, with Phish shows, and with ’80s movies, but it was there, no matter what. Here are two poems about that time:
The Stranger on the Street
I escaped through playing quarters. Drinking wine coolers on the stoop. Wearing denim shorts and flipping my hair just right. For them. Running with girls who held the power of a room. Who knew how to shape it. I came home to the phone, gossiping with the girls I just left on the bus. On the streets, we would push each other into strangers. Walking fast. We would laugh as one of us crashed into someone. We didn’t care who. We had a game where we trashed bathrooms. We made music videos. We posed. See me? I was the butterfly catcher. I captured the beautiful about us, dried it out, and hung it up for the viewers. I lived nostalgia before it happened to any of us. The day I found out: I took each of you aside, I told each of you what was happening. A conference call. An emergency break-through. And AIDS became what was ignored as we chatted. AIDS became the stranger on the street I kept bumping into.
Caught in Evolution
When I turned 17, Dad took me on a walk.
He was slow, five months from dying.
We walked up, down one block.
Started on Riverside: Daddy’s head down, coat collar up,
His arms long and feet big like a monster crawling
Up from the sea, a creature becoming extinct.
It was windy with bright sun and I felt nervous,
Scared this would be a talk about sex or death.
My head down too, sometimes glancing at him, sideways,
We are closer to West End when he says,
“You don’t have to ask me permission to do anything anymore,
You are an adult. I’m going to treat you as an adult.”
My heart stuck in my throat, like a lozenge that cannot soothe,
Cannot candy coat what is swollen.
I still can’t find the words to speak my side of his life sentence.
I know he said it to release himself:
Time taking his t-cells away, he could check off
an item on his list of life tasks by calling me grown up.
It was also to free me of preoccupation:
As if I was the scientist obsessed with analysis,
determined to study him, a specimen caught
in evolution. After he said the words, standing still,
I looked past the Hudson, into New Jersey,
and wondered how many people were saying goodbye.
Cordelia Jensen graduated with a MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Cordelia was Poet Laureate of Perry County in 2006 & 2007. She works at The Big Blue Marble Bookstore in Philadelphia where she teaches creative writing classes for kids & teens. She has recently signed with agent Sara Crowe at Harvey Klinger for her YA novel in verse, Skyscraping. You can find her at: https://twitter.com/cordeliajensen
MORE HAUNTINGS
Don’t miss all the posts in the Haunted at 17 series, in which YA authors revealed what haunted them at 17… (Thank you to these generous authors for taking the time to write these stories and be a part of this!)
…Do YOU Have a Haunted at 17 Story You’d Like to Share Here?
Feel inspired and want to share what haunted you at 17? If you write a post on your blog, leave a link or tweet it to me. I’ll send you some 17 & Gone swag if you’d like it, and I’ll be listing all the posts in a round-up this weekend.
Even better, as you can see from today, I’ll be featuring five of your Haunted at 17 stories here in full next week. So if you don’t have a blog—or even if you’d already posted yours and want to include it here—email your story me.
And remember: You don’t have to be a writer to take part in this. All you have to be is someone who was once 17.
GIVEAWAY!
Want to win a signed hardcover of 17 & Gone, some swag, and a signed hardcover of Imaginary Girls to keep it company? Every commenter on this Haunted at 17 post will be entered to win. You can also enter by filling out this entry form.
The giveaway is international. Closes 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday, March 28. Two winners will be chosen.
Last year, when I was deep into writing 17 & Gone, I discovered an exciting new distraction and way to collect images that fascinated me: Pinterest. What started off as maybe one more thing to keep me from writing turned into a great source of inspiration, and my 17 & Gone inspiration board was born. I’d often write with the images up on my screen, staring at them in pauses between paragraphs.
distraction no.99 