The Worst Years of Your Life: Stories for the Geeked-Out, Angst-Ridden, Lust-Addled, and Deeply Misunderstood Adolescent in All of Us

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At age twenty-six — broke, unpublished, and having recently finished a second master's degree of doubtful utility — I took a job at a private school in Phoenix, to teach eighth-grade English to fifty (mostly) rich kids. Developing the curriculum, grading stacks of papers, and lecturing on the use of semicolons was unpleasant in its own inimitable way, but it was nothing compared to the stress I felt being a part of the chaos of middle-school culture again — even at this tony little academy in the shadow of Camelback Mountain.

Most of the eighth-grade girls could have passed for college coeds: tall, already curvy, and dressed in the same clothes that women wore down the road at Arizona State. They were only slightly uncomfortable in their new bodies, and many already knew how to use them. They were evil girls. Really evil. They turned on each other like starving coyotes, and it was difficult to know from day to day who was leading the snarling pack.

The boys were all dorks. Most of them were short and baby-faced, and the few who were tall were gangly messes of raging hormones. Some had vague smudges of mustaches, and all of them were obsessed with sex. With no other publicly appropriate outlets for the sexual energy coursing through their bodies, the boys spent their free time shoving and hitting each other, or grunting along to gangster rap that seemed utterly irrelevant to their privileged lives of private school, tennis lessons, and backyard pool parties.

Couples would form and pubescent hearts would be broken, but for the most part, the girls failed to recognize their own value and continued to have crushes on their unwieldy male classmates — despite my advice to shop for dates across the arroyo in the upper school.

And there I was, in the swirling center of it all, with the same clenched feeling in my gut that I'd had when I was a skinny spaz in eighth grade. I actually worried once again about wearing the right clothes, if the students would laugh at my jokes, if I had offended the queen bees, if the students could tell I was gay — I was deep in the closet at the time. I found myself at the mall, making sure I bought the correct Doc Martens or low-top Converse One Stars — the shoes of choice for the middle school set in 1994. I knew who was "going with" whom, which liquor store in Scottsdale sold porno to the boys, and what had happened at Michael K's bar mitzvah. This was wrong. I was reliving the worst years of my life.

As an eighth-grade teacher, I was given a time-traveling mirror to look back at myself in middle school, and what I saw was gruesome. My actual pubescent years were full of mindless Atari video games, biweekly trips to Tucson Mall, skateboarding, then roller-skating, then skateboarding again, seething hatred toward my father for wearing poly-blend slacks, furtive reading of the sex scenes in my mother's Jackie Collins novels, headache-inducing afternoon reruns of M*A*S*H and Barney Miller, and masturbation, lots of masturbation — including a committed relationship with the water filter jets in our swimming pool. I spent whatever money I had on Donkey Kong and Ralph Lauren Polo shirts, and I went from being an avid reader, excellent student, and amateur herpetologist to a lazy, sarcastic asshole who did his homework right before class, if at all. I gauged my self-worth (and others') with high scores in the arcade and brand-name clothing.

My friend, whose oldest son just entered middle school, can barely stand to talk about her life at his age. She's embarrassed, but mainly frightened for her twelve-year-old son, who only recently stopped believing in Santa Claus. At age twelve, my friend had already learned why bongs were better than standard ceramic pipes, and had hitchhiked all over suburban Boston in a bikini top and cut-off Levi's that she rolled up to make shorter. Alcohol, shoplifting, lesbian experimentation...you name it, she was doing it. And now her basketball-obsessed son, who gets straight As and whose only vice is eavesdropping, is off to middle school, off to face legions of kids my friend can only pray are nothing like she was.

Most people agree that these years, somewhere between ages eleven and fifteen, are when people are at their worst physically, socially, morally. "That awkward age" is merely a euphemism for "the worst years of your life." "Growing pains" is a euphemism for "horrible behavior." So why is it that so many writers are drawn to this time for material? And why is it that so much good fiction sprouts from it?

Susan Sontag once said, "The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread,"* and I trust that notion. Our awkward years are full of anger and fear and dread. The only emotion missing from Sontag's list that applies to the years around middle school is lust. From ages eleven to fifteen, I know my predominant emotions were fear, anger, dread, and lust. At school I was afraid of being exposed as not as rich as my classmates, or gay, or studious, or smart, or stupid, or ignorant. For a while, I carried The Preppy Handbook around like a bible, consulting it for everything from what to wear to what to say. At age thirteen, The Preppy Handbook was my safety net — until I decided (or more likely someone else decided) that it was no longer cool, and I threw out my Lacoste shirts and bought a skateboard.

During the same interview, Sontag went on to say, "The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration." I certainly can't think of anyone I admired during my adolescence, except for maybe Tom Selleck (which was admiration wrapped deeply in unmitigated lust) and the regulars at Skate Country who could do elaborate tricks like "shoot the duck" or "drop the bomb." Using Sontag's guidelines, this time in life is the ripest time from which writers can draw.

The stories in this anthology don't stem from nostalgia for video games, fashion trends, or other pop culture detritus; they stem more likely, I believe, from nostalgia for the intense and sometimes confusing emotions that we all experienced at this time in our lives. It's this intensity of feeling that makes the worst years of your life the source of some great fiction.

The idea for this anthology came to me while I was preparing another anthology, one that focused on something I called "unsafe text" — fiction unlike the quiet, overly crafted, unassuming work that was lauded at the Iowa Writers' Workshop while I was a student there. Kevin Canty's collection, A Stranger in this World, as well as Jennifer Egan's Emerald City: Stories, were two books I turned to when I was being told my fiction was too dark, that I should try to write something "nice." The stories in Canty's and Egan's collections weren't nice. They weren't quiet and unassuming. They were provocative and evocative. The characters were faced with challenging, awkward, scary, and messy situations, and that's where the stories shined for me. As I looked over the list of stories for this unsafe-text anthology, I realized that many of them focused on protagonists in middle school, around the ages of eleven through fifteen. I dropped unsafe text, and the anthology idea evolved into something more uncomfortably entertaining: The Worst Years of Your Life.

I'm excited that it became more specific because it prompted me to dig a little deeper into my favorite collections of short fiction and solicit suggestions from friends. In the process, I discovered many amazing stories, stories that reminded me why I write fiction, stories I might never have read had I not decided to focus the anthology in this new way. On the suggestion of Amber Dermont, whose story "Lyndon" won me over on the first line and appears in this anthology, I picked up Rattawut Lapcharoensap's Sightseeing and Alicia Erian's The Brutal Language of Love. Not only did each of these books contain stories ideally suited for The Worst Years of Your Life, but each book reinforced my idea that fiction does not have to be quiet and unassuming to be good. These writers, and the other writers in this anthology, seem to understand Sontag's ideas about dread and anger, but they all also understand that sometimes, if you care to look hard enough, you can find beauty in ugliness.

Mark Jude Poirier

Copyright © 2007 by Mark Jude Poirier