Hooray! School is out. I finished the last of my exams today and now I have a life again. And I'm turning seventeen on Tuesday.

In bad novels, teenagers wake up on their birthdays and suddenly feel older, but I never found that true until last year. I actually went through a transformation as my sixteenth birthday approached, and now I think I'm having another one. Yesterday after my history exam, I got to talking about college applications with a few other girls. The teacher asked where I wanted to go, and when I said Bryn Mawr was my favorite he asked why. After I had explained that, he asked what I wanted to major in. And as I explained it all to him, the college and the language department and why Russian is actually very practical if you plan to go into refugee services, I realized I sounded different. I sounded like someone who was applying to colleges, someone who knows what she wants to do with herself. Not like a child at all.

Then today was the annual neighborhood picnic, which was the same as always. There's a hired caterer who serves the same barbeque, potato salad, and cole slaw every single year. People stand around with their styrofoam plates and sodas and talk to their neighbors about their dogs and children and jobs. Being vegetarian, I usually don't find much to eat there, so this year I was smart and ate had some cereal before I walked up there. I thought about finding some shoes to put on, but in the end felt happily bohemian walking up barefoot in a cotton skirt from the thrift store and a bandana in my hair.

I stood around for a while talking to a boy I hadn't seen in five years, which is also part of the tradition. All the teenagers stand around avoid eye contact for half an hour or so until they get bored and start making converstation with kids we wouldn't glance twice at during the school year. It never gets as far as actual flirtation, but people seem more interesting when surrounded by your neighbors than at school.

I decided to go home after I ate my potato salad and some pie,. As I walked home, I remembered something that had happened at the same time a few years ago. As I was leaving the picnic, I passed two boys on their way in. I didn't know them, but one of them gave me a look I'd never seen directed at me before. It was the look Caelia always hated, the kind that doesn't focus on your face at all. I think I pretended I hadn't seen it and kept walking.

But today, with my red calico skirt and bare feet, I thought that if the same thing happened now, I wouldn't look away. Instead of feeling nervous, I'd laugh, give them what Mark terms "a heroic smile," - and keep walking, of course. It's not what I would have done a year ago, or even a few months ago. I think seventeen is going to be a good year.

"How old are you, my fair pretty maid?
How old are you, my honey?"
To that she gaily answered him,
"I'm seventeen come Sunday."
With a roodlum day, fa ra diddle dum
Fa ra da, a diddle um a day!

Or Tuesday, really. Yay for English folk songs.

May 24
June 23