Small Peculiar

I love drawing Expressionless Teenage Eyeteeth. Of course, I was a girl, and probably even after Columbine people didn’t assume that stone-faced, greasy-haired girls were going to shoot up schoolyards. Also, my parents and the adults who ran my high school were on the whole sensible, though I did get sent to a guidance counselor once by a strange, unlikable math teacher who believed I was suicidal because she’d seen me write a quote from Catch-22 in my math notebook. That was OK because it makes a funny story, but I do feel sorry for depressed kids in our brave new century where “mass murderer” is firmly on the table. My poor nephew is already in the first throes of adolescence, smartphone and all, and I hope—well, of course primarily I hope he doesn’t suffer from a mood disorder, but I also hope that no one jumps to weird conclusions about him based on perfectly normal behavior like idly writing things in notebooks or doodling endless series of triangles or taking your pulse and seeing if you can speed it up by thinking about kissing. I also hope we can stay pals as he endures the next few years, but if we can’t I won’t take it personally, I’ll just wait for him on the other side.