Young, wild, and fictional

Does young adult fiction reflect our real lives or would that be far too much to hope for?

I’ve only been set up as someone’s grad ball date once. My friend was going to the Xavier ball with her boyfriend, and she said that one of his classmates didn’t have a date. This conversation was done exclusively on Yahoo! Messenger, and I furiously typed back while trying not to seem too eager, “What does he look like?”

You have to understand that in the early 2000s, everyone my age seemed to be into the chinito boy. I’m no longer 16 so I can’t say if this is still true, but back in my day, dating an Xavier boy was kind of like winning the lottery. (Gross, I know.) So you could only imagine how fast my heart was beating as I waited for her to send me the photo: it was of a boy who was sitting on a football pitch with a few of his classmates. It was an artsy shot, the depth of field shallow so his companions were blurred out. Short hair, oriental eyes, an athlete’s tan, right on the edge of 17. And because this boy is definitely no longer 17 today, I can honestly say that he was hotter than Metro Manila. Which is to say he was super hot.

I figured saying “YES!!!!!!” would be a misconstrued as a mixed signal, so I said it again just to make sure she got it right. I was walking on a cloud for the rest of the week, trying to come up with ways I could bring it up in conversations. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear about your Algebra grade. You know who’s good at Algebra? My date to the Xavier grad ball, bitch.”

But because this is my life, and my life is always so wonderfully messed up, I found out that the boy I had been mooning over for weeks was not the boy who was taking me to the grad ball. My friend, in her cheeky deception, had catfished me: she was actually pertaining to one of the guys in the blurred background, who I can certainly attest did not have the short hair, oriental eyes and athlete’s tan that I thought I could pass onto my children. I couldn’t back out, so I went to the ball completely uncomfortable, thinking the whole time that I could’ve been with someone else. He was a really nice guy, to be honest, but he wasn’t how my young adult fantasy should have ended.

That was always my thing, this deep attachment to young adult fiction. For a really long time I was deeply and utterly convinced that I was living in the first five chapters of a YA novel. I was a certifiable teenage dweeb whose high school experiences were the stuff of endless teenage clichés. Not being particularly beautiful by most metrics, I developed this strange affliction called A Personality with a side of sassiness that has gotten me in trouble at least once. I snuck into R-18 films like Sweeney Todd instead of going to First Friday Masses or Marian youth camps (I know, right? So badass). I got suspended from class for comparing my English teacher’s grammar to “Paris Hilton starring in a Fellini movie.”

Not knowing what a special snowflake was or how lame the concept was, I thought that all the horrid things I’d done and that had happened to me were simply part of the rising action: I just had to wait for the climax worthy of a Meg Cabot-penned trilogy that inspires thousands of fan fiction copies, at least one parody Twitter account, and a Sofia Coppola-directed biopic. All I needed was Miles Teller to play the American exchange student who also happened to be my painfully friendzoned sidekick and I’d be set.

I don’t know if I’m alone on this, but it’s hard not to have thought that way, having encountered countless fictional girls who were just as weird and maladjusted as I was. They had similar problems, the same weird families, and (sometimes) ate as much as I did. Girls like Mia Thermopolis from The Princess Diaries, Cather Avery from Fangirl, and even Hermione Granger were “painfully” ordinary, yet somehow ended up having pretty awesome lives. To me, they weren’t my idea of “escape”: I thought, like an idiot, that if I just tried and believed hard enough, I would also emerge with the same extraordinary — or at least, noteworthy — story.

None of that happened, of course. But that doesn’t mean all that angst and passion you’ve read in John Green novels can’t have just popped out of thin air. In some ways, elements of those fictional lives are as real as the streets. Young adult may not really be real life, but it’s what we’d like real life to be. There’s nothing wrong with that, I think. There’s still so much to pick up from YA, from learning how to stand up for yourself to realizing that there will always be someone prettier and smarter than you (and that’s okay). It’s nice to think that there’s someone close by to aspire to be while you’re young.

 I’d hate to disillusion anyone with a dream, but I’ve already transitioned from a young adult into an actual adult, with problems that go beyond, “How can I really tell if he likes me back?” (But okay, that’s still my problem.) The truth is that I don’t feel like my story is quite as magical as my favorite YA heroines. I may have felt like I lived the intro of YA, but you know what? I actually waited for the rest of the chapters to roll out till I finally admitted that it’ll never happen.

Life — my life — is actually quite matte, with the occasional bursts of glamour and glitter just to keep me on my toes. It’s a hard pill to swallow, realizing this, but I guess it’s not so bad. I may not have ended up with a Xavier boy, but now that I’m older and infinitely more mature, I’m going to settle for One Direction.