When I arrived at this new private school in seventh grade, after my mom got a job teaching, I hoped Fred and I might be friends. We were both faculty brats, and the school catered to elite students from wealthy families.

But our similarities ended there. Fred was tall for an eighth grader, and he was clear-skinned and golden, with hair so light it seemed more than blond. I was short, stocky and pale. He wore clothing emblazoned with Hilfiger and Klein. I was perpetually clothed in hand-me-downs. People whispered that he smoked pot and felt up girls after school. I had changed schools so often I’d forgotten how to make friends.

Something about my incompetence made Fred furious. In the locker room after lacrosse, he would snap at my ankles with his stick until they turned bright red. One day during practice, he dropped any pretense of chasing after the grounded ball and simply rammed into me with all his force. My helmet disappeared; my sweaty gloves flopped on the ground.

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“We should direct all highway traffic into the school parking lot!” somebody suggested.

“Let’s cover everything in Vaseline!” someone else said.

I played along, but I was having a tough time. Eight months before, my boyfriend Ben had been killed in a car accident. He’d been different from the other guys: almost preternaturally kind and, like me, overly intellectual. On the way to our junior prom, we’d sat in the limo discussing “The Great Gatsby.”

I knew Ben would have loved the senior prank a friend and I proposed -- a series of odd, unexpected happenings throughout the day, like hiding alarm clocks in the ceiling panels, and switching teachers’ desks. But I’d barely started my presentation when Caleb Grossman (not his real name) cut me off.

“Jenny’s idea is stupid,” he announced to the class, some of whom began to snicker.

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I wasn’t eating popcorn: One year after a surgery that removed a portion of my jaw, I could barely chew. This was just one of the small humiliations that had accumulated after I had been diagnosed with terminal thyroid cancer, undergone extensive surgery and testing, survived a recurrence of the cancer, and traded a death sentence for the murkier and far less glamorous reality of a rare genetic disorder. My neck was sliced halfway round, my jaw riddled with holes, and I had been diagnosed with a second, separate and distinct, type of cancer. The treatments had just started to remove the skin cancer ravaging my torso. Over the next three years I would have nearly four hundred biopsies.

I sat with cold hands tucked into each armpit, only half-awake until the movie started, and my perception of the world shifted in a sudden and irreversible way.

The film offered something that made every hair on my body stand on end: a glimpse of a world that might be out there somewhere — urban, messy, lawless; with cool, caustic boys on scooters, careless girls bedecked in ripped vintage clothes, and enormous empty warehouse apartments.

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Take, for instance, what happened after Utah blogger Dan Pearce wrote a frank and lovely essay on his Single Dad Laughing blog back in November, titled "I'm Christian. Unless you're gay." In it, he wrote about his friend he calls Jacob, a gay 27-year-old who lives in his conservative Christian community, and how "love, kindness, and friendship are three things that Jacob hasn’t felt in a long time."

Though his piece was largely a plea for Christians to butch up and start practicing acceptance toward gays, it was, in a much larger sense, a challenge for every one of his readers to refrain from putting conditions on their tolerance. "The more you put your arm around those that you might naturally look down on, the more you will love yourself," he wrote. "And the more you love yourself, the less need you’ll ever have to find fault or be better than others. And the less we all find fault or have a need to be better than others, the quicker this world becomes a far better place to live."

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To hear even his own family describe him, Carroll sounds like a bit of a handful. Last month, he earned a suspension for violating the school dress code and wearing a kilt, and last fall, he ran afoul of the school administration for tweeting an F bomb via a school computer.

But Carroll insists his more recent Twitter tirade -- which Indiana News Center colorfully quotes as "BEEP is one of those BEEP words you can BEEP use in any BEEP sentence and it still BEEP make sense" -- was banged out from his personal account on his home computer. The school district says the post came from a school-issued device or the school's network. (Both Carroll and the district seem to agree that the post was not directed at any individual or the school itself.)

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As you certainly know by now, in "The Hunger Games," Katniss Everdeen is a teenage girl living in a dystopian far-future America where children from slave communities are forced to slaughter one another on television for the amusement of the wealthy. Katniss is moody, rebellious, deeply committed to protecting her mother and baby sister, and can incidentally shoot a man's eye out through his windpipe. Right now, millions of nice young ladies all over the world want to be her. This should probably worry Rick Santorum more than it seems to.

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ABC's Terry Moran introduced the segment by warning, "For any parent concerned about what their teen does online, the huge popularity of the young man you're about to meet may be deeply disturbing." We're then introduced to a handful of young women – all well over 18 – who think 25-year-old Deen is totally hot and, like, "the Ryan Gosling of porn." Then reporter Cecilia Vega announces that the adult business "has now targeted and reached a new demographic: teenage girls."

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As is often the case with reports on the latest wild-and-crazy teen sex trend, this was all total and complete BS. The original research inspiring these proclamations had been distorted and exaggerated beyond recognition. But if you’re interested in the real story behind these salacious reports, you’re in the right place. (If you want to be titillated by tales of teenage orgies, you’ll have to look elsewhere -- sorry.)

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The fear of an attack ad along those lines must have motivated the Obama administration's decision today to overrule the Food and Drug Administration's recommendation to allow emergency contraception to be sold on store shelves, and made available without a prescription to those under 17. There's certainly no explanation based in science.

In an extraordinary statement, FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg said she agreed with an internal study that "there is adequate and reasonable, well-supported and science-based evidence that Plan B One-Step is safe and effective and should be approved for non-prescription use for all females of child-bearing potential." But, she said, the secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, disagreed. Sebelius issued her own wishy-washy statement, claiming there wasn't enough data on the drug's effects on adolescents.

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So, what is it with the schizophrenic coverage?

More than anything, the coverage of this latest finding should highlight our cultural inability to look at teen sexuality with any nuance. The narrative tendency is to swing between the extreme poles of corruption and innocence. They are either hormonal, sex-crazed maniacs or innocents in need of protection. Take, for example rainbow parties: In 2003, an episode of Oprah sparked a panic over the supposed trend among adolescents. Some two years later, the New York Times exposed it as an urban legend. Cultural panics over teen sex tend to follow the arc of a classic horror film, and perhaps we've reached the dénouement of the sexting scare (although, beware the false ending). The coverage of the latest research allows us to believe that we have either slayed the scary beast of teen desire or simply awoken from the nightmare of it.

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Each morning of seventh grade I took the bus to school, and each morning I was bullied by a girl I’ll call Jane.

“Ew -- don’t you wash your hair?” Jane shouted at me from two rows back as her sidekick Kim laughed. I did wash my hair, but apparently once a week was not enough. And I wasn’t exactly the most fashion-conscious kid. In fact, I was pretty much fashion unconscious -- to the point where I could have used some smelling salts and a personal shopper. I thought sitting behind the bus driver would protect me. Instead, he just turned up the volume on the Eagles. (Years before Noriega was tortured by rock 'n' roll music, so was I.) This went on all through seventh grade. That year, I pretended to be sick so often that I’m surprised my parents didn’t whisk me to the local hospital.

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Turns out I'm far from alone in experiencing such early unwanted advances. On Monday, a study finding that sexual harassment between peers is widespread in grade school started making the rounds, and the New York Times' coverage swiftly climbed the most-emailed list. The survey, conducted by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), found that almost half of seventh to 12th graders had been sexually harassed during the last school year. Girls were the most frequent target of "unwelcome sexual behavior," but 40 percent of boys had experienced such an incident in the last year. The news has predictably stirred up significant media attention – the topic of kids and sex always does – but the phenomenon itself is hardly new. For decades now, countless studies have shown this to be a problem, and yet the message doesn't seem to stick.

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The argument about whether young-adult fiction has become too adult in its subject matter is a long-standing one. My concern is not this debate -- in fact, I consider it to be moot. The YA category is a marketing distinction, not a moral one, however much parents would like it to be a synonym for “safe.”

But you are raising a child, possibly the least safe enterprise imaginable. And if this child is also a reader, there is a high probability that, closely preceding adolescence, his or her literary curiosity will hit an exponential curve -- one that will be made apparent in a taste for books intended for the adult market. Let’s call this the V.C. Andrews Curve, after the author of "Flowers in the Attic." It can be attributed more or less to two phenomena: first, with a simple increase in reading comprehension, adult genre fiction will be of considerable appeal owing to the accessibility of the prose and story lines. Second, irrespective of age, human beings have an innate attraction to the dramatization of issues around life’s central mysteries: its genesis and termination. Put another way, not only will your kids survive an exposure to violence and sexuality in books, but it is crucial to their moral development.

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One sad autumn a couple of years ago, I wrote two pieces, similar in tone, about being absolutely friendless in middle school and high school. They were written weeks apart but published within hours of each other. That week, everyone felt bad for me.

“I’m sorry it was so hard for you,” said my friend Lisa.

“Can you believe what we survive?” my sister asked with a sigh.

There was one dissenting voice. “That’s not true,” said Veronica, when she read it. “You had plenty of friends in high school. Well, maybe not plenty. But you had me.”

Did I? Veronica may be one of my closest friends now, and we may have gone to high school together, but that’s not the same as the presumption that I had had her during that time. 

I responded with a passive aggressiveness that is uncharacteristic (aggressive aggression is more my speed). It was all the more jarring, because I said it with a laugh: “If I’d had you, I would have asked you to protect me from you.”

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The Collective Shout blog points out that the Australian accessories chain Diva -- a kind of Claire's Boutique for the Down Under set -- has launched a Playboy line of accessories. What's your pleasure, kids? A necklace with an iconic rabbit silhouette? A vintage-looking bowtie?

Diva isn't Toys R Us, and Playboy isn't trying to peddle Baby's First Bikini Wax. The merchandise in question includes earrings and pendants, not plush toys. But that doesn't mean that either Diva or Playboy get a pass for another obvious attempt at sexing up young girls. Diva, with its cute pink heart logos and invitations to "BFF us on Facebook," aims squarely, unambiguously at the junior set. Most grown women aren't looking to pick up a K Perry ring or a Pixie Dust Necklace with Tinkerbell charms.

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Besides the fact that the slogan doesn't really make much sense -- not that we want girls to use their looks instead of their heads, but shouldn't they woo peers and not siblings? -- the predictable flap illustrates a larger truth. If you're trying to make money by getting people to plaster ridiculous sayings across their chests, it's better to go surreal or silly than stereotypical.

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While discussing his upcoming films "Pearl Jam Twenty" and "We Bought a Zoo" at the Television Critics Association press conference in July, Crowe said he'd consider a "Say Anything" sequel. But just as fans started getting excited about Dobler Part Deux, they suffered a collective buzz kill Monday when Crowe told IFC that while he thinks about what might have happened to the film's characters, a sequel remains a pipe dream.

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Sunday afternoon, a body was pulled out of the Ohio River, near Hardin County, where the festival was held. It was determined by the city's coroner that the corpse was "dressed like a Juggalo." Incidentally, this year's GOJ had less security than before, despite the reputation of the attendees for being violence-prone and filled with illegal substances.

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Not everyone shares my gratitude toward the sexy subset of the genre, though. A recent study published in the Journal of Sex Research warned that more than half of popular YA titles include some sexual content, defined as everything from kissing to intercourse. Researchers also noted that 94 percent of sex scenes involved "non-married partners, and over a third of those were non-committal." It's worth noting that the study was conducted by Brigham Young University, which is, ahem, run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The dubious source aside, this is far from the first time concern has been raised over the prevalence of sex in teen reads, which is unfortunate.

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