You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession

by Piper Weiss

my own memory, which occupies the same organ responsible for emotional responses and invention.

THERE ARE MEN IN THE KITCHEN breaking down a wall. I never saw the old lady who lived on the other side of it. Now she is dead, and we own her apartment, too.

If you were to count the number of couches throughout the apartment, we’d have enough to sleep ten homeless people. That’s including the love seats and two sofas that open up into queen-sized beds. Eleven if someone uses the bed in my sister’s room, since she’s away at college anyway. It seems such a waste. So many people without beds. So many beds without people.

If I had her hair, I’d be closer to beautiful.

Everything is a “disaster”; she is always “the most” embarrassed, “the biggest” fuckup, or the “ugliest person alive.” The opposite is true, but sometimes I’m fooled into thinking we’re the same. I try to remember that when she says she failed the history test, she means she got a B. When she says a boy doesn’t like her, she means he hasn’t called yet, but he will. When she says a boy likes me, she means she’s not interested in him.

There are two kinds of perpetrators: those strangers on the street and those you already know. All of them are men.

The three of us—my mother, my father, and I—are a revised unit now that my sister has moved upstate for college.

always memorizing his poetry, each unscripted moan in his songs;

rifling through cabinets for old prescriptions, jewelry boxes for stale weed, bureaus for packaged tights, and desk drawers—that same drawer—for the manila folder where she kept photographs of two men she almost married who weren’t my father.

There is that wink. So intimate and fleeting, it almost feels imagined. It deserves to be accompanied by the ping of a triangle, or some other sitcom device that suggests magic is happening.

a break from trying so hard.

I remember one night in my own apartment, in bed with a different boyfriend, while two friends from out of town slept in the living room. There was a feeling of fullness, like the apartment would burst with the affection I felt for all the people inside it.

at a Halloween party where he dressed like the Mad Hatter, but with his neck-length dyed-blond hair and his skeletal paleness, he just looked like Beck,

maybe it’s like being good at finding a vein, or sleeping in, or holding your liquor, or not letting other people’s feelings affect your decisions—things that are only good in the moment and ultimately harmful.

Body of Evidence. It had the sound of a grown-up movie, like Final Analysis. Double Impact. Basic Instinct. Fatal Attraction. Always a combination of words that imply both legal proceedings and shadowy bedroom scenes.

This is the secret adults don’t want us to know: They are just children with sex.

A boy who liked Bianca was living there temporarily, though we didn’t ask why. A renovation, a divorce, something to do with money and sadness.

Bianca says I smoke too loud. Maybe so. I wish I was an easier person to love.

replace it with something younger, harder, more guarded, less earnest.

with each new moment, two new versions of us shed two older versions.

For a decade I’ve been writing and editing women’s lifestyle content for major news outlets. Reporting was an aspect of the job, but what constitutes women’s lifestyle hovers between news and entertainment. At each publication, the criteria for women’s content have been carved into categories: food, fashion and beauty, relationships (though limited sex), health and diet, and parenting. Politics were filtered through the lens of fashion (what [insert first lady’s name] wore to the state dinner), entertainment through relationships (what we can learn about love from [insert celebrity divorce/romantic comedy/Oscar speech]), news through parenting (how to talk to your children about [insert headline-grabbing tragedy]). Service, I learned, was key to any women’s story. What she can take away from this story on [insert interview with cookbook author], how she can improve from reading about [insert hair trend/diet trend/fashion trend]. We can always be better.

Someone taps my shoulder, hands me the blunt. It makes me cough, which makes other people laugh. I can’t control the coughing. I will cough like this forever.

teenagers are human oddities. Everyone is watching them, or it feels that way, because of the flood of oxytocin, but also because everyone is watching them.

THE UPPER SCHOOL PLAY THIS YEAR is called A Voice of My Own. It’s an ensemble, which means everyone gets the same number of lines, which is boring.

She wears her usually pinned-back hair down for the occasion. It billows around her face, all oily, black, and luscious. There is something obscene about it.

She is looking at George Sand with the same fiercely warm intensity she shines on everyone she meets. I wonder how it doesn’t exhaust her.

fell for him when he was sitting at the end of a bar, showing off the hole where his front tooth should be.

It didn’t matter that he didn’t want kids, or that he was considering moving into his van, or that he was always in the hole with money, or that he spent so much of it on beer and malt liquor. It didn’t even matter that he shit in a bucket in his backyard and left it there for the winter. It mattered a little, but not as much as it should have. I should have wanted more from a partner by my thirties—I have been told this plenty. But Alex was the boy I’d wanted as a teenager—the one I’d wanted to want me and sometimes just wanted to be. The adult me was powerless to resist the teenager’s stubborn urges, or she claimed to be.

I want to go to Urban Outfitters, but she won’t go there because they make her check her purse and she doesn’t trust strangers with her purse. She’s not crazy, she says.

“I love you,” says my mother before we hang up the phone, which means be careful and good night and I’m sorry.