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I am 16 and he is fumbling and we are coming of age.

His insistent fingers work the hooks, but he fails. Frustrated, he moves slowly around from my back to my front. He cups the material, urgently pushing it up. The band scrapes my skin as my tender young body fills his hands, and thereafter, I hear his sharp inhale of hot satisfaction. This is heavy. I want him to win. I want to feel him feel me, in the moment. I am immature, but I’ve been here before. For him, though, it’s a first.

Tomorrow, he’ll tell his friends he got to second. I like this moment, and I learn how lovely it is to be desired, but this moment is his. It’s one for his memory bank, his rambling life storybook. But in it, I have a face and a name. He will remember both.

In chemistry, I cheat. I write the formulas on my paper-covered chemistry book. My teacher catches me, and I almost fail, but she believes in second chances so I take the test again without a scribbled safety net resting on my desk. Unexpectedly, I do just fine and the lesson I learn is to trust myself as long as I am prepared. In a way, this prepares me for some life things that don’t involve formulas.

A droopy teacher ogles me. He stands in the hallway when classes change and waits for me to pass. His eyes bore holes in my backside and my front side and my all sides, but I am safe among my peers. I am not safe, however, from his lewd, whispered comments.

I learn to take a different way to class and I tally a long list of unexcused tardies. Scarlet “xs” next to my name coupled with incessant scolding from a teacher who can’t understand why I’m late all the time. “Less mirror time, Kimberly,” she says, eyeing my lip gloss and feathered hair. Each unexcused tardy carves off a piece of my self esteem. It’s—whatever. I do not correct her. I learn that powerlessness can be the result of a double-edged sword because it cuts both ways.

My new boyfriend is older. He is no longer in high school and therefore I am cool. I date an older boy, which makes me unattainable and somewhat exotic to the rookie boys my own age. My older boyfriend is a loser-jerk off-douchebag, but nobody knows this yet, not even me, and oh how I love him. He has JFK Jr. hair and a Tom Cruise grin and a pair of wandering Mick Jagger eyes that look elsewhere every time they’re required to focus.

He will find his way in the world in his late 20s, he will finish college after a series of starts and stops, and he will settle down after brushing himself off a million times, after starting over a million more, but I will not know him then. I learn about sexy charm and exactly why I don’t trust it.

I’m on the phone. My mother sighs her mothering sighs. It is my third phone call in 45 minutes. First, I gossip with my best friend and then I talk to a tennis-playing boy from study hall. After that, it’s my rebel-coolio boyfriend who grunts a lot and asks me what I’m wearing.

My mom says, “Enough is enough, Kimmy,” and so I hang up to study for my finals, but instead pull on my suit to go for a swim because I live on a lake and the water is glistening, and there’s simply not a single way to concentrate in June with shiny water like that calling my name. I am carefree, not a bill in sight, not a problem worth mentioning, not even a summer job yet. What a way to live. Within a few years, I will learn that this type of summer only happens once.

I’m in a car with seven other teenagers, and we are driving to Sherman Beach to drink Blackberry Schnapps from a flask and Keystone from a tall can. There are five of us in the backseat, one lying across four other laps. I don’t like it. The car is small, built for four, but we somehow manage to cram in seven. I’m squished and vulnerable and my father would throw up outside in his Pachysandra if he knew.

The driver takes a corner too wide, and we sideswipe a guard rail because he is only 16 and has had his license for exactly four weeks. We are okay, but I learn that if something scares the sh*t out of me from the beginning, I say no and no is just fine. I will learn this in college too.

The boy I go to junior prom with attends a private prep school in New York. I will break his heart. I will break his heart after my own heart is broken, after I make the wrong choice. His heart will break, and he will be angry, and he will know I am just not that into him, and haven’t been for a while, which is a tough pill to swallow, and I never really wanted to go to the prom with him in the first place, because I am selfish and unkind, but not to his face. He will forgive me, but not quickly. I learn what it’s like to inflict hurt and be hurt.

My girlfriends are my whole freakin’ life. They are the best friends a girl could ever have. We fight and make up and fight some more and make up again and do the wrong thing and do the right thing and do lots of like totally silly dumb things together, and our bond grows stronger through all the patching and resetting, laughs and whispered secrets. We fortify and feed each others’ roots, and through the years our friendship will grow ever stronger, ever wider, ever more alive and ever willing to thrive, despite climate change. It helps me fall asleep at night. I eventually learn that female friendships survive brutal winters and dry spell summers and like trees, remain sturdy and timeless when tended, when memories are endlessly stored and recorded on a protected historical registry.

We are 16, and fumbling. Restless, but learning. Growing, despite rapid change.

Again and again, I learn what it means to really feel life, how important it is to stay open, and how hiding is never an option, how like it or not, “being human” is everyone’s plight, especially teenagers on a Friday night.

The formative years inform us. Hard, true lessons hold our hands and guide us, though comprehension often comes much later.

“Coming of age” is more like “leaving a cage” because page after blessed life page, the lessons we learn (really do) set us free.

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