Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship

by Kayleen Schaefer

I was spending all my time doing what the writer Claire Vaye Watkins calls “watching boys do stuff.” “Nearly all of my life has been arranged around this activity,” she wrote in an essay for the literary magazine Tin House. I’ve filled my days doing this, spent all my free time and a great amount of time that was not free doing it. I’ve watched boys play the drums, guitar, sing, watched them play football, baseball, soccer, pool, Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. I’ve watched them golf. Just the other day I watched them play a kind of sweaty, book-nerd version of basketball. I’ve watched them work on their trucks and work on their master’s theses. I’ve watched boys build things: half-pipes, bookshelves, screenplays, careers. I’ve watched boys skateboard, snowboard, act, bike, box, paint, fight, and drink. I could probably write my own series of six virtuosic autobiographical novels based solely on the years I spent watching boys play Resident Evil and Tony Hawk’s ProSkater.

But actually 😂