excerpt from "Juniper Tree Burning"

"It’s easier to find sympathy for a child, isn’t it? Teenagers are harder to pity. I hate the little shits myself, can’t stand them, with their hormonal poisoning, their know-it-all struts giving them a blind man’s road map, their clumsy bullheaded charge through the china-shop rooms of a heart. Underneath that oily, acne-treatment veneer lurks their desperate need, their whining, oozing, helpless sniveling: Tell me who I am, love me love me do, like the chorus to a bad song playing over and over until, singing it helplessly, you’d shoot yourself in the head just to get it out of your mind. True, some of them are slick, strutting their newest fashions and newer slang, but it’s an oil slick, a sebum-clogged skin-deep slick, and if you’re lucky, they put on a good act because worst of all is the kid whose case is so bad, whose oil so black and sludgy, that you take one look and get sucked into the tar pit of their desperation. These belly-slithering outcasts—they’re the worst, and if you see one, don’t walk. Run. Run as fast as you can, because they’ll get you. They are not harmless. They’ll lie; they’ll cheat and steal and scam their way into a little love, and then they’ll slide off into the dark, leaving you covered in their slime. Don’t pity them. Hold them completely responsible. Children, they know not what they do, but any kid old enough to get her period, to poke his willy into girls, to leave home, do drugs or any of a thousand decisions teenagers make, any kid that old should be held responsible for the damage done along the way. You can’t have it both ways, you teenage monsters. You don’t get to act like you know everything, and then cry, But I didn’t know!"

–Goldberry Long, Juniper Tree Burning