Free Dear Teen Me: Authors Write Letters to Their Teen Selves (True Stories) by Unknown Page B

rocker, same edge.
    You are firmly convinced you have no edge. Though it’s hard to believe here in the future, you’re still very shy right now. You don’t tell anyone how deeply that song moves you, especially since you’re not totally sure what it’s all about. But when you listen to it, you feel as if there’s a world living and breathing inside the music. It seems like, in a way, the Stones live there, and that if you get the dancers to feel as much as you’re feeling through the movements you give them, the Jaggerverse will shimmer into existence, and you’ll suddenly find yourself living a Bohemian existence downtown.
    Grossmont is your third high school. No one there knows that less than a year ago, you dropped out of your second high school and moved to Europe to become a classical ballet dancer—and that you came home six weeks later because your father died of a heart attack. When it happened your stepmother got you a ticket home—for the funeral, you thought. You fully expected to return to Europe to keep dancing, but your stepmother talked you into staying in California and finishing high school. Which seemed like the sensible thing to do at the time. But later on you find out that Mrs. Newman, your stateside ballet teacher, didn’t thinkit was such a good idea. She felt like you’d lose your chance to become really good. But she never got the chance to speak to you before you got on the plane.
    So after your dad died you stayed in America, but like Mrs. Newman, you worried that you had just killed your dancing career—because dancers start young, and they also stop young. Most dancing careers end by the time the dancers reach their mid-thirties.
    Your stepmother moved your family to La Mesa, where you went to Grossmont, and that’s where you are when this picture is taken. You’ve found a great studio, where you take every class you can, starting with the baby class and ending at nine at night. You come home from hours of practice so exhausted that you step into the shower in your leotard and tights, lean against the tile, and fall asleep. You stretch your legs over your head and hook your toes under the lip of your headboard and lie like that for hours.
    And you keep listening, endlessly, to “Lady Jane,” choreographing it in your head. And one day, your stepmother sees tears streaming down your face, and asks you why you’re crying.
    “It’s the music. It’s so beautiful,” you say.
    She gives you a classic what the hell? stare. What you have said is not computing in her mind.
    “If it makes you cry,” she asks, “why do you listen to it?”
    She’s genuinely bewildered, and you wonder if it’s weird to cry when listening to beautiful music. You try to remember if anyone in ballet school in Germany cried like that. But in Germany, you guys were completely focused on your training, and afterward, those crazy kids spoke to each other in a language that was not English. You, being a Californian, opted for Spanish as your World Language (that is, before you dropped out of school). So as far as you know, no one in your Balletthochschule ever sobbed along to Brian Jones’s dulcimer track.
    In this time of uncertainty, your stepmother adds that dancers never make any money and they get injured all the time. She says that when the injuries are bad enough they end up teaching classes at the YMCA.
    And so, in this picture of you at the gym, you are, frankly, falling apart. You’re worried about getting injured and winding up at the YMCA (whereyou already have a job for the summer). You’re stressing that you and your dancers won’t be able to dance the Jaggerverse into reality, and you’re worried that worrying about it means you’re psycho. Because that is weird, right?
    Then the coolest thing happens: a big, tall, muscular guy starts taking classes at your studio. He’s a dance major in college and even though he’s a modern dancer (not a ballet dancer, which you think is clearly