Welcome to Well, That Sucked, our weekly compendium of exactly what it sounds like. Thrown in this week’s garbage: anyone else who’s scared as shit of teenagers.
There’s a kind of magic that happens on the cusp of your 13th birthday. You go to bed a child and wake up that much closer to being a real adult. So many things change when you become a teenager: your weird, hairy body; your new, terrifying responsibilities; your sudden urge to kill, kill, kill. Becoming a teenager is a lot like becoming a werewolf. I am far more afraid of teenagers.
For ephebiphobiacs, merely getting into a different subway car is not enough to avoid the scourge of adolescents. They’re everywhere, and they are scaring the shit out of me. Why are their pants so tight? Who let them out of the house?
New research shows that biology, not parenting, is the real reason teenagers become sullen skinny-jean wearing sociopaths. By 13, girls start developing the ability to feel empathy, but boys don’t get there until around 15. Empathy, they say, needs to be taught at an early age and isn’t inherent. In fact, boys demonstrate a decline from 13 to 16, which only tells me that I had every reason to not go into the 7-Eleven last week when I saw eight of them circling it, like a murder of crows on old bikes.
But hey, if I’m about anything, it’s gender equality, so let’s not pretend that teenage girls are decent human beings. Earlier this week, two girls were charged with aggravated stalking after allegedly bullying 12-year-old Rebecca Sedwick to death. She killed herself five weeks ago by jumping from an abandoned cement factory silo.
One of the girls charged is 14-year-old Guadalupe Shaw, a dead-eyed android seemingly incapable of understanding human emotion. After Sedwick’s suicide, she apparently wrote a Facebook post saying, “Yes ik I bullied Rebecca nd she killed her self but IDGAF,” the last part being shorthand for “Oh, I am definitely going to jail for this.”
I can’t imagine being that young and having that much venom for someone else. It’s an almost-impressive level of commitment and insanity. At 14, I was far too preoccupied with trying to make sense of how much face-hair I was developing to think about anyone else.
But let’s top this shit-trifle with a dollop of farts from this week’s Steubenville, Maryville, Missouri. God, does anything good ever happen in Missouri??
Daisy Coleman, then 14, and Paige Parkhurst, then 13, allege that then-17 year old Matthew Barnett and his unnamed friend raped them after getting them drunk. The charges against Barnett, however, didn’t stick. Just this week, Nodaway County prosecutor Robert Rice decided to actually do something about it after dropping the charges against Barnett in 2012.
Maryville technically occurred before Steubenville, but it’s also worth noting that apparently, teenage boys don’t all seem to understand that you should not get young girls drunk so that you can rub your d all over them. (In addition to looking remarkably like Abe Lincoln from Clone High, Barnett is also disgusting.) This, in addition to the skill of having feelings and wearing clean underwear daily, is another thing we have to teach our teenage boys.
My niece still has another decade before she becomes a teenager, but I already have plans set in place for when that happens. Sure, she’s cute now, mixing up her v’s and b’s when she talks, calling me “Boo,” refusing to brush her wild hair. Adorable! But just as quick, I’ll turn around and she’ll be arguing about what she wants to wear to school and smoking in the bathtub and mispronouncing my first name to my face like an asshole.
We’ll send her away to a hut in an undisclosed location where eye-rolling is illegal and there’s a restriction on how much black liner you can use on your bottom lid. This isn’t just to protect her from other teenagers—boys and girls alike—but also to protect her from other people, whatever awesome hell she plans on unleashing in ten years’ time. I don’t trust her with the great power that comes with being 15.
She can come back home when she’s 26. I’m not taking any chances.
Well, That Sucked appears every Friday.
