Dear Teen Me: Authors Write Letters to Their Teen Selves (True Stories) Read Online Free PDF

You’d been fired after your first day as a caddy because you couldn’t lug a golf bag, but now you’re the right tackle on the football team, and a varsity heavyweight wrestler.
    However, I’m sad to say that despite the growth spurt that transformed you from a bullied brainiac into a major jock, you’re still not about to get the girl anytime soon. Partly, yes, because you lack smoothitude, but also because you’re not willing to settle for just anybody. Your grandmother taught you to respect women as actual human beings (and not to look at them as objects), and you learned that lesson well. Your grandmother was one of the first women to pass the bar in New York, and even though she never worked as an attorney, she definitely knew how to “lay down the law” on your behavior.
    In the eternal meantime, you’re on your own, and you are not getting it on.
    It’s senior year after a big game. You’re eating pizza at DeGregory’s Restaurant with your football buddies. Someone comes in and says in an excited whisper: “Linda S. is in a car out back. She’s drunk and willing to make out with anybody.”
    Linda S. is a pretty blonde girl two years younger than you, a shy country kid who lives only a mile from you. You don’t remember getting up or going through the door, but the next thing you know you’re in the alley beside that car. You push past two other guys, grab skinny Sammy Carson by his belt and toss him to the side. But then, instead of climbing into the back of that wide-seated ‘58 Buick, you take Linda S. by the arm and lead her, her on unsteady legs, to your car. Other guys step aside when they see that look in your eye.
    She’s crying now. You give her your handkerchief. As she leans against the car door you remember what she looked like five years ago when she was playing hopscotch, all skinny-legged and gangly, on the sidewalk outside School Two.You drive her home. The light outside the old farmhouse reveals the fact that her mother’s been waiting up for her. You walk her to her door, and she kisses your cheek and whispers, “Thank you,” before she goes in. It’s your first kiss—although you won’t realize that or even value what it means until a lot later.
    What I like about you in that memory is not just what you did, but the way you did it. You didn’t think of yourself as a hero. You didn’t do it to prove anything. In fact, for many years afterward you wonder what was really going on in your head back then: Did you have the urge to climb in that car with Louise yourself? (You didn’t.) Did you do the right thing? (You did.)
    If you had to define what you were feeling at that moment, it was probably sadness, more than anything else. Until this letter you’ve never mentioned what happened that night to anyone—not to the guys who avoided you as you walked down the hall on Monday morning, not to Linda S., not even to your grandmother (even though you know she’d have been proud of the way you followed the path she put you on). But you didn’t do it for her approval. You did it for the person you wanted to become.

    Joseph Bruchac lives in the same house in the Adirondack foothills town of Greenfield Center, New York, where he was raised by his grandparents. He’s the author of more than 120 books, ranging from picture books to plays, nonfiction, poetry, and novels for middle school, high school, and adult readers. His writing often reflects his Abenaki Indian heritage. That is even true of his new YA novel Wolf Mark (2011), a paranormal thriller with an American Indian take on shape-shifting.

TRUST IS AS IMPORTANT AS LOVE
    Jessica Burkhart
    Dear Teen Me,
    You’re eighteen, and you don’t trust anyone. Your father—an abusive con man—taught you that lesson. His fraudulent investment schemes, in which he used you and your family as bait, made you profoundly suspicious of other people’s motives. But hold on: An opportunity to escape is coming. The thing is, it depends on