What teen girls are made of

In their own dark and funny words, four teenage girls tell us everything we need to know about sex, parents and gym class.

Editor's note: Excerpted with permission from "Red: The Next Generation of American Writers -- Teenage Girls -- on What Fires Up Their Lives Today," edited by Amy Goldwasser (Hudson Street Press, 2007).

By Carey Dunne, Eliza Appleton, Emma Considine, Deborah Kim

Read more: Education, Sex, Divorce, High School, Teen Sex, Teenagers, Life

Nov. 7, 2007 | It's easy to assume that we know what teenagers are thinking; after all, we've been there and have the clichés to prove it. We know about the rage and boys and clothes, eating disorders and fast cars and slammed doors.

Those sleepy-looking, weirdly outfitted creatures who pass us on the street, or in our own homes? They don't know anything that we don't. Except, of course, for the things that differentiate their generation from ours, and scare us: the hook-up culture and the short attention spans and the MySpace and the IMs!

Despite the simultaneous familiarity and exoticism of teens, their universe is one that doesn't often hold much appeal for adults. It's a life-stage best forgotten, a time we hope our loved ones move through with safety, grace and as much speed as possible. I'll admit that when I got a copy of the book "Red: The Next Generation of American Writers -- Teenage Girls -- on What Fires Up Their Lives Today," I opened it grudgingly, figuring I knew what was in there.

But in the introduction to "Red," editor Amy Goldwasser makes the case that her book offers 58 stories from a generation, "perhaps the first, of writers." Between blogging and Facebook and e-mailing and texting, Goldwasser writes, these are kids who are regularly "generating a body of intimate written work."

Goldwasser is right, and it shows in these essays. I was stunned by speed with which each of these stories pulled me in, whether they were about the high-drama, very special episodes of adolescence (cutting, criminal boyfriends) or what Ginia Bellafante recently described in a New York Times story about the late great "My So-Called Life" as the "everyday indignities" of teen life: "overhearing people talk behind your back, the plop of a grim-looking lump of mashed potato on a pallid cafeteria tray."

It was tough to choose only four of these 58 stories for Salon. There's 17-year-old Carey Dunne's "Gym at Riverton," which made me laugh out loud with its dry depiction of one of life's most disenchanting experiences: gym class. Anyone looking for hand-wringing about the loose morals and ambient sexuality of kids today will wallow in 16-year-old Eliza Appleton's ode to grinding. Emma Considine, a gimlet-eyed 16-year-old, doesn't spare an ounce of her fury and sadness over her parents' separation. And 19-year-old Deborah Kim, forced to move frequently, understands with disarming clarity that while adults may go years without seeing their friends, for teens the bond is "lost because people change, especially if you're fifteen. There are too many new things that matter: different favorite color, new crush, new car. Suddenly you don't know that person anymore."

Enjoy these four essays, and know that there are many others like them out there: funny, smart, dark, observant. If "Red" is any indication, the kids are alright. --Rebecca Traister

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"Gym at Riverton" by Carey Dunne, 17

I started going to a school called Riverton, in a really white area of the Bronx, in seventh grade. Before that I was going to a school I liked, on 17th Street in Manhattan, but my mom thought it was pulling me in a bad direction. She said, "You need fields and openness." Riverton had fields, so I went there. Turns out the worst parts of my Riverton experience were probably spent on the fields. Except for maybe the parts spent in the gym, like school dances. I once danced there with a kid named James Pinky. He had a perfect bowl cut.

At Riverton there were mandatory gym uniforms that were revolting and uncomfortable. Mine got washed maybe once a semester. The sweatpants had nipple-high waistbands; the crotch started at your knees. They were tight and scrunched around the calves, then baggy in the thighs and butt so that you looked like a blown-up rubber glove waddling around trying to kick things.

Gym was like war. I was forced to battle all these suburban beasts. Half the kids there were from Riverdale or Westchester, so they were athletes since birth. Greta Stein was an example. Her motto was "Blood makes the turf grow -- kill, kill, kill!!!!" Each time she touched grass she became an animal or a Viking. She actually gnashed her teeth at people and would grunt heavily. She could punt a soccer ball and make it explode. Whenever I was around her, I wished for a metal shield or sword.

My biceps are seven inches around when flexed; this is smaller than some people's wrists. I'm retardedly uncoordinated, or maybe just unmotivated when it comes to sports, so I would try to be as neutral as possible in gym games. I'd stand on the side like a stump. Some days we played flag football, which was really obscene-looking. You had to wear a belt with streamers hanging over your butt, and the tagging was like butt-grabbing instead of just tapping. You had to yank the belt off the person's waist. The gym teacher was a creep who wasn't afraid to talk about people's torsos.

The swim coach, Kunkel, looked like a hammerhead shark. He always shouted "Dunne, look alive!" His voice was insanely deep. It was like talking to a truck. Swimming at Riverton was a whole new level of torture, like a private-school hazing ritual. They made you swim every single day for two weeks in a pool you could tell was sweaty. It was co-ed. I was really pale and scrawny. It was freezing, and when you got out you had to look at all the other pasty, weird kids in bathing suits and also be looked at in yours. In ninth grade I looked like Gollum. Not much has changed, really, but in ninth grade it was more like fetal Gollum. Swimming at school was the most awkward thing I've ever done. Obviously there were girls who liked it, liked to be in bathing suits in front of everyone. It made me want to pee in the pool to screw them over.

Moira was my sole ally at Riverton. She had brown hair, and her left eyebrow swirled upward at the end, like an eyebrow cowlick. Instead of running, she trotted, because she had a passion for horses. One day she led me to a secret bathroom she had discovered in a secluded wing of campus. It had a pleasant windowsill for sitting, and Moira and I became a pair. Hiding was our main activity, and no one ever looked for us, which is lucky for them because had they found us, we would have shunned them in a traumatizing way.

When swimming time came around, Moira told Coach Kunkel she was hydrophobic, to the point where she pukes. He was either brainless enough or nice enough to believe her and let her skip. I wasn't as suave as Moira, so I had to face my foes alone. I imagined her lying in some grass, in a comfortable turtleneck and long pants, being dry. This angered me. I would do the 18 required laps as fast as possible in order to get out of the pool and into clothing.

Coach Kunkel must have mistaken my haste and horror for talent. "Dunne, you're a shark! Join the team," he'd say, and I would get really awkward and mumble "no thanks." Then he would start blathering how my torso was a prime swim-team torso. I knew this meant it was disproportionate to my legs. I was a long slimy fish with little stubby flipper legs. I was scared of diving since it clogged my ears. When we had to try fancy flip turns I rammed my head into the pool wall. But that didn't stop Coach Kunkel. Soon his hassling went beyond the pool area. He'd see me in the halls and boom "Dunne the shark!" and I would turn red and flip out. Then he called my mom and told her about me needing to get on the team. She was all for it. She valued team mentality. I didn't join the swim team.

Like swimming, CPR class was mandatory. It was taught by Coach Gratch, who was as fierce as her name sounded. In CPR we gave mouth-to-mouth to mannequins, life-size limbless torsos with heads. Some of them were black and some of them were white, except for a few that had black heads paired with white bodies or vice versa. Riverton was constantly talking about the importance of diversity in education.

When you pushed on the mannequins' stomachs, they made clicking noises. Coach Gratch told us that in a real-life procedure, two or three ribs usually break—but you have to ignore that and keep going to save the person's life. CPR was a fun class. But when the certification exam finally came around, it took me two tries to pass. I'm still not sure what I did wrong the first time, but whatever it was, I know it was embarrassing because it involved making out with a mannequin in front of my entire grade.

Next page: "The most exciting thing about grinding is being able to tell your friends afterward that you danced with 10 different guys"