Sabahat Ali Wani

From shows like Riverdale and Euphoria to all the bestselling young adult novels, the media is overflowing with depictions of steamy teenage romance. Sixteen and seventeen-year-old characters are shown to be entirely absorbed with the drama of their love lives, while the rest of their time is spent taking down the mafia (Riverdale), inciting nationwide rebellions (The Hunger Games) and engaging in other farfetched action that presents them as the exact opposite of normal teenagers.

Pioneered by iconic works such as Twilight and The Princess Diaries, this particular shade of teenage entertainment has been popular since the early 2000’s and is widely consumed by its target audience today. However, these books and scripts are written by adults; the shows and movies feature adult actors. When young people—already eager to grow up—are told that the gorgeous superstars on-screen are supposedly teenagers just like them, they seek to reproduce the same illusion of glamor and maturity, whether through acts of rebellion or the passionate romantic entanglements they have been convinced is normal for kids their age.

The hit 2019 HBO series Euphoria features some characters whose growth and conflict revolve almost completely around romance. A rift forms between two best friends, Maddy and Cassie, when Cassie develops an infatuation with Maddy’s boyfriend; cheating, arguing, and manipulating ensues. Both characters’ internal strife centers around their mutual desire for male validation—and while it is valuable to depict the common struggles that teenage girls face, as well as to present these characters as real, flawed people, to reduce the entirety of their characters to boy problems and “cat fights” is not.

Through word of mouth alone, it’s common in high schools to hear about so-and-so’s breakup and her fight with so-and-so, while many other couples break up within weeks or months. Shows like Euphoria, which cast beautiful actors in their mid-twenties and thirties to play high schoolers, contribute to the urge among teenagers to grow up as fast as possible.

Among others, a common way that young people think they can achieve this is by getting involved romantically. There is nothing inherently wrong with romance, but kids who have not yet reached emotional maturity are often unable to pay proper attention to a partner. Teenagers may find themselves going through the same exaggerated struggles of the characters in their favorite shows—though unlike the actors, they will experience real harm.

Though much less of a rough ride than Euphoria, the New York Times best-selling series and Netflix movie franchise To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before is just as inaccurate and misleading. Despite the initial emphasis on the protagonist’s mixed Korean and white heritage, Lara Jean’s racial identity is seriously glossed over. In the movies, it is essentially summarized in a brief hanbok montage (hanbok: a traditional Korean dress) with K-Pop playing in the background, and a few shots of her deceased—and apparently irrelevant—Korean mother. To top it all off, the actress cast as Lara Jean is not half-Korean at all, but is actually of Vietnamese descent.

Rather than devoting some time to flesh out Lara Jean as a character—and her identity as an Asian one—the series makes her sexy jock love interest the focal point of the story. The boy and Lara Jean make out in a hot tub; Lara Jean defeats his ex, the jealous popular girl. There is nothing wrong with To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before in its most basic form, which both at its heart and on the surface is cute entertainment for young girls. What makes it problematic is the bland, one-dimensional protagonist that Jenny Han has written to lead it, and while unintentionally, she is normalizing the lack of goals or personality in female characters beyond romantic love that is already a common feature of modern entertainment.

In reality, a romantic relationship is more than just two people’s interactions; both are already their own persons, with interests and beliefs that exist beyond the sphere of their partner. To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before is just one example of an unfortunate lack of such depictions in teen entertainment.

Chances of a development, however, are far from slim, and we can always hope to see changes as the world of entertainment evolves every day. Until then, teenagers should by all means continue to enjoy their favorite books and shows. But they should take care to differentiate reality from fiction.

Ming Wei Yeoh is a sophomore at Minnetonka High School in Minnesota. She edits and occasionally writes for the school paper. Her dream is a career in journalism and creative writing.

*This essay previously appeared in the Chanhassen (MN) Villager *

I never knew a thing about Georgia in the fall, until we plowed through forests in a rental car, its silver exterior lightening and slackening in the cold October sun. I got this from him – that thought that if I play the same songs on the broken stereo, and bring up the same three stories I can count on to warrant a reaction, that the trees lining the road will blur until indistinguishable from sand or sleet or Dallas, Texas where my father and I had that car ride without the speed bumps, or anywhere else we’ve been before. Both of us, always burdened by a sweet tooth, a tongue craving only what it’s tasted before. This wasn’t the ride through San Pedro where he spilled confessions onto my hands, which were still learning about steering. It wasn’t the slope down into the Spring snow when he screamed at me with black ice under the Subaru tires, either. I was eighteen, I had learned how to admit things, and forgotten how to drive. He was somewhere between blond and gray, a man who knows better than to change. The most callused hands that ever held me, and the softest ones that ever let me down. My father, my killer, who taught me the difference between trusting and believing. I watched the silhouette of his weathered face as he drove north of Atlanta, where he was alone in another condo with the same coffee machine – motherless, daughterless. I never knew if he was thinking so much at once that it hardened his face and furrowed his brows, kept him looking mean, but tender, just as he was, just as I became. Or if he’d heard so much too soon that he’d learned to tune it out, to tune me out, and watch the road and the rearview instead, and maybe that was why we hadn’t seen each other in three months and he’d forgotten to ask me a single question. I knew better than to try to keep my father, to even try to speak to him. I knew my father through the thick, curving scars on his hands, from ocean rocks and dirty brothers’ fingertips, and through the fights we fought just for a reason to burn and to talk, while my good sister watched. He gave me his agony, his ecstasy, the cracks in the sidewalk, and the tendency to not rinse blood off of clothes. I got temporary constitutions, we preach and retract. I catch him when his words come out all at once and step on each other’s toes, I step on his foot but I’ve never asked him to stop speaking. He can’t walk fast enough for cities, and I can’t sit still, so we drive, it is the only thing we know how to do. It is the only way to stay in steady motion, the place where he is right and I am wrong, we are big and we are small. Nothing meant a thing to me about Georgia in the fall, except that it wasn’t New York in the winter, except that he put his heavy map of a hand on my knee, and my lips were parting into teeth and my eyes were damp with the depth of it all, and he would love it, and so I never let him know.

Lovisa Lohmann, has been writing short stories and poems ever since she was little. Anytime she feels anything, her first inclination is to write about it, so that she can capture it before it disappears, and make sense of it. She writes most about the people she’s close to, and writes exactly the way she thinks,— so showing people her writing is like showing them a little piece of the inside of her brain. This is her first time having anything published anywhere, and she’s working on learning how to share her work with other people.

In my girl group’s high school coming-of-age movie, I’m the Token Gay character. You know–that comedic relieving gay best friend that is only in the movie for the pride points and the main character’s support. While I do know a few other lesbians, all of my best friends happen to be straight (shocker: not every gay person is friends with every gay person). As a high schooler, friendships are a huge part of my life. My best friends keep me from stressing about finding tablemates at lunch, finding partners for projects, and finding roommates for field trips. Not to mention all the tears, fears, and secrets we’ve shared. These girls are my sisters at heart and their friendship is nothing short of a blessing.

But, being the only lesbian in a friend group of straight girls can be…well…queer (please excuse the pun). It’s not that my friends have ever had any problem with my sexuality. We’ve all been very open and interested to hear about each other’s different walks of life, and we celebrate that. Still, there is a certain loneliness that comes with being the gay friend. I never share the giggles that erupt as the apparently “cute” boys walk by like my other friends do. I don’t get to jokingly make fun of my friend’s crushes without hearing that I couldn’t understand it anyways. I don’t feel that same rush of uncertainty and hopefulness around school dances due to the severe drought of queer people at my school. Of course, none of this is my friends’ faults. There’s simply a barrier of understanding that straight people and lgbtq+ people have yet to transcend.

Being queer as a teenager can feel as if that High School Musical life you imagined as a kid is passing you by, or like it was never built for you in the first place. A queer person who “peaked in high school” is virtually unheard of. And while it’s true that high school is an all-inclusive hell and that many straight people suffer it as well, they can at least have a hopeful chance at that Prom Court Dream while queer people are forced to accept their reality as the pre-dance decorators. Along with popularity and external validation, that Prom Court Dream is about something else: The Knowing. The Knowing is the consciousness that this is where I’m meant to be. The Knowing is the assurance that I will be fine wherever I go. The Knowing is this abstract feeling that if people like me enough to put a plastic crown on my head in a school gym, then I’m probably doing okay in life.

Unfortunately, it takes more than a plastic crown to reach The Knowing, it takes community. The best way to find who you are is to find others who understand your reality. While my straight friends try to do this for me–and I appreciate their efforts–there are certain realities we will never be able to see for each other. They don’t know the stress of rummaging through outfits, looking for one that seems “gay” enough for me to feel seen. They don’t understand the meticulous dissections lesbians must undergo to figure out whether we’re talking to another lesbian, or just a really nice girl. They don’t see the furrow of my brow as I listen to a straight girl complain about how “unfortunate” her attraction to men is and how she “wishes she were a lesbian.” I think that’s why high school is such a bleak place for most queer people. We don’t know others like us so we don’t feel seen. We don’t feel understood. We don’t feel Known.

Although this may all seem a frivolous issue, suicide rates and attempts in lgbtq+ youth are disproportionately higher than their straight counterparts, which can likely be attributed to the incessant loneliness that is high school for a queer person. If we could build a sense of community and belonging for queer teens in school, I believe we would be much closer to solving the suicide epidiemic. Straight friends of the world, try to listen, see, and understand–even failed attempts mean more than you can understand. And for people like me, I hold the knowledge that high school is temporary and that we will find each other when we are meant to. Somewhere out there, there is another person understanding, seeing, and Knowing.

Lydia is an aspiring writer from North Carolina. She hopes her writing will serve as the sign someone is looking for.

We spent most of last summer somewhere between the kitchen, the Walmart parking lot, and her white-silver Audi. On the kitchen island, our feet dangling in the thick air, on the tile floor, our backs pressed against her mahogany cabinets, dark red varnish with nice silver knobs. The Walmart in our Illinois town, and, when we grew tired of looking at bruised produce, the Walmart in the town ten minutes over. One weekend, on a whim, she picked me up from work and we drove to Milwaukee. Midnight, new smells, beer signs, my mother blowing up my phone, and still, we ended up in a Walmart. This is the great fucking thing about Walmarts, she said. The ubiquity. You travel states away and your home is through the automatic doors. Who knew Wisconsinites ate the same instant oatmeal as us.

The employees at our home Walmart must have noticed our repeated presence, our slouchy pace, but we didn’t rearrange shelves, or cause commotion, and we bought at least one item per trip, even if that item cost three dollars, so they left us alone. I say that we bought. Really, it was always her, for the same reasons that we drove in her car and used her card for gas and sat on her marble kitchen countertop. She bought the same thing every time, a small flimsy cardboard box, which contained a chocolate egg, a scrap of paper, and, inside the egg, a plastic Peppa Pig, dressed in one of sixteen fun thematic outfits.

In late July, my parents were divorced. They sat me down to give me the talk, but I had known what was coming, the dining table crusted over, the kitchen walls sweating, and our lawn wouldn’t stop dying, even though my mother paid a nice college boy to treat it with an emerald-green solution. We love you very much, said my father. This doesn’t change that. I nodded back at him. Ran my thumb over Princess Peppa in my pocket. Texted her with my other thumb. Come pick me up.

You’re being quiet and weird, she said in the Audi, her foot heavy on the gas. Stop it.

I apologized. Thought of Chef Peppa and Pirate Peppa standing two inches tall on my windowsill. That summer I picked them up and shuffled them every night before bed, as if they cared about movement. I thought of Nurse Peppa. You have to turn bedbound patients every hour, she might say. Or else they’ll develop sores. My head started to hurt. I imagined Pirate Peppa’s eyepatch, brimmed hat, raggedy striped shirt. Eye on the horizon. Everything shifting under.

It’s been an autumn and a winter since that summer, so the details of each of the sixteen figures escape me, although there was a time when I knew them, could spot a Peppa from a mile away. Actually, much of that summer escapes me. I turn to my camera roll and find nothing, because I never thought to reach for it, in those days, perhaps deemed nothing worth keeping, at least not with a third party. She gave me approximately one of every six figurines, keeping the rest, although she must have had doubles and triples of some characters. I lined every one of mine up on my windowsill, plastic cartoons smiling towards my bed. Although she came to my room at least twice during the summer, she never noticed.

In her kitchen she pulled out another cardboard box, unopened, sealed with a dab of tape. My mom got it for me, she said. I didn’t go without you. Although I could. Another bolt of pain ripped through my head. She noticed me wince. You need to stop drinking Polar, she says. That’s what gives you those headaches. It’s the bubbles. Straight through your bloodstream.

Stop drinking my Polar, I heard. I paused in my path towards her fridge. Sat back on the floor. Turned my parents over in my head, like a wind-up doll, tried to turn the key, familiarize her with the contours of their juddering movements. I need a divorced Peppa to explain, I thought to myself. A Peppa with a removable ring-piece. Immediately I dismissed this as ridiculous. There are no interactive Peppas.

She bit carefully into the egg, split it down the seam. It cracked into two neat pieces. Inside: the familiar curl of paper. Sixteen printed Peppas, side by side. She dropped the paper onto the floor, where later the housekeeper swept it up, where later I fidgeted uncomfortably, unsure whether to move to make space for her broom. Do you think, I said, and then stopped. She didn’t look at me, but she stopped disassembling the egg. This was how I knew she was listening. Why, I said to the back of her head, do you think you buy stuff like this?

An awful pause. Then her fingertips resumed. Look, she said, look, forget that. It’s Knight Peppa!

I celebrated appropriately. The moment slipped past. The housekeeper came and went like I knew she would. Through her kitchen windows I could see the lush greenness of her backyard, the spiraling hedges, the bursting gardenias, the morning glories winding up trellises sturdier than most city buses.

You have chocolate on your teeth, I told her.

Do I? she responded, swiping her tongue over her upper lip. Did I get it?

No.

Yes, I told her. Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, you have it.

Anne (she/hers) is a high school senior from Chicago, Illinois. She can occasionally be found on Twitter at @anneechen1 and has never eaten a radish.