Free 13 Is the New 18 by Beth J. Harpaz

he had no problem dismissing us with “Whatever.” I wonder sometimes if he hasn't been secretly reading a book called
A Teenager's Guide to Blowing Off Parents.
    One question that I didn't find the answer to in the guide to raising teens is why, once my child turned thirteen,did he decide that he could not spend more than five minutes in his own house? For years, my living room was the default location for entire gangs of neighborhood boys. They would play video games, have Stephen King movie marathons, and pig out on junk food for hours while camping out on my sofa and floor. From the time Taz was eleven to the time he officially became a teenager, it seemed like no weekend went by without my hosting at least a half- dozen boys for a meal or two.
    Sport loved having all these big boys around. He made a pest of himself most of the time, but they were, for the most part, very good- natured about including him in their football games, their video games, and even their movie watching, though we had to drag him out of the room when the Jim Carrey or Eddie Murphy videos gave way to
Pet Sematary.
(Sport was so enamored of the big guys that I finally had to institute a rule: You can't invite anyone to your birthday party who is more than twice your age.)
    For a while there, it felt like I was running the Harpaz Hilton, or an overnight camp for middle schoolers. They were big enough so that they didn't mind sleeping in their clothes, and they were too old to wake up in the middle of the night and demand to be taken home, the way they sometimes do when they're little. But they were also small enough that two or three of them could sleep on the pullout sofa bed, another one could curl up in the big armchair, and another two could manage on a blow- up mattress on the floor.
    Every now and then one of my neighbors would peek her head in the apartment and be horrified by the large number of boys she saw there.
    “I don't know how you can stand it,” she'd say.
    But I was thrilled that Taz had such nice friends. They even berated Taz if he was fresh to me. “Don't talk to your mother like that!” one of them would inevitably say. In fact, in many ways, they were utterly unlike what I had expected adolescent boys to be. They made eye contact, they said hello, they brought their dirty dishes into the kitchen. Some of them— but by no means all— even put the seat down after using the toilet.
    When I was in second grade, my teacher had us write down our dreams for when we grew up, and I remember writing that I wanted to have twelve children. Well, I only had two of my own, but some days it felt like I was the den mother for the whole dozen.
    But something changed when Taz turned thirteen. My living room was suddenly empty. No more movie marathons. Saturday night no longer included a moment around 3 a.m. when I would have to go out and tell them to shut up and go to sleep for God's sake, before I called their parents. Sunday mornings no longer involved making bacon and eggs for a crowd.
    Instead, Taz was just never home. Here is a typical exchange between the two of us if he was kind enough to stop by and drop off his book bag before heading out again five minutes later.
    ME: Where are you going?
    HIM: Places.
    ME: But who are you going with?
    HIM: Oh you know— peeps.
    (Presumably, dear reader, you are sufficiently in the know to realize that this refers not to a type of marsh-mallowy Easter candy shaped like baby chickens, but is thug- talk for the word
people,
as in “my peeps.”)
    ME: And what exactly are you planning to do with these … peeps?
    HIM: I don't know. Like, chill, prolly?
    (Note: “Prolly” is not a girl's name. It is teenage mum-blespeak for “probably.” You will find it on page 34 of the book I intend to write for Berlitz one day called
Useful Phrases for Touring the Adolescent Countryside.)
    Later, if I would I call him on his cell and ask what he was doing, he would tell me: “Jus’ chillin’.”
    Well.