The author of this essay is probably someone who would annoy me to no end if I ever met him. I get the feeling he is the sort of person who enjoys “Goofus and Gallant” cartoons. I get as annoyed as any other person my age when adults start complaining about how we’re all going to hell in a handbasket because teenagers are so awful. But despite all of this, I agree with the essay.

Platt verbalizes some things that had been hovering in the back of my mind for a year and a half. Namely: why are my goals so different from those of my peers? My best friend Christine and I reached the conclusion that it was because we were supposed to have been born about 150 years before we were.

I changed a lot over the course of freshman year, a change that I would now classify as moving from a teenager to a youth. My taste in clothes changed. I developed a fondness for handkerchiefs and Victorian novels. I took up knitting again. I turned fifteen that summer and my sister turned twelve. We joked that it was all a ruse, that she was really the teenager and I the child. I classified my behavior as childish at the time, not being able to put a better label on it. I knew this wasn’t quite the right word for it, since I was at the same time acting more mature than most of my peers. I never thought it immature or babyish, though. I knew that I was not moving backward, but forward.

Last spring I was puzzled about what to do for my sixteenth birthday. Sixteen is always an important age in stories and fairy tales. It seemed somehow more significant than my other birthdays to that point. I looked forward to ten because it meant two digits, but it didn’t change my life in any great way. Thirteen was supposed to be a big one, but I didn’t feel different after I had reached it. I knew, though, that sixteen was going to be a turning point. I wanted to do something interesting for that birthday.

No inspiration came to me until my sister’s birthday, during which we got out some old videos of our birthdays when we were little. Watching us drink lemonade and caper about the lawn in our pastel sundresses sparked my idea. I would have a birthday like we used to have! I could make pink lemonade and a cake with tinted icing. We could use a white linen tablecloth, place cards, and the good china. I would invite three or four of my friends and we would wear sundresses and be giddy and have a good time.

The day before I turned sixteen we had the party. It was a Sunday afternoon in June and perfect for such an event. Everything went beautifully. I made myself a white sundress out of an old fitted sheet the week before. We had fondue and lemonade and cake with tinted icing. That night my family went to see Twelfth Night at Agecroft. I loved it. The whole day was perfectly lovely. The next day was my birthday, and my parents gave me a beautiful wooden turntable. It’s the best birthday present I’ve ever gotten. I use it all the time.

After I read this essay I realized that that birthday was the perfect expression of my switch from being a teenager to being a youth. The things that I wanted for that day were drawn from my childhood, but the things little girls do now are often the things young women did 150 years ago. I called them childish for lack of a better word, but at the same time they were everything I wanted the year sixteen to be. That birthday was a coming of age for me. I feel ready for a lot of things now that I didn’t before.

And so I am happy to have found this essay, however stodgy, because it gives me an accurate word for myself. The author assumes that no youths could possibly exist anymore, but Christine and I have somehow emerged. I’m proud.