Seventh grade can be oppressive and exhausting. Grown-ups are a welcome relief because it doesn’t matter that they’re not cool; actually, that is precisely the relief. When I hung out with Aunt Rebecca, she was deliciously different from the eleven-year-olds I was with all day long. And that in and of itself was a reality check. What I felt during school wasn’t the only thing that was real. There was a whole big world outside of that.
