Nights at the boardwalk were a summertime tradition for teenagers in my hometown. We’d throw darts at balloons, eat huge slices of pizza, and brag about the bars we’d visit once we were old enough. Secretly, I dreaded when that day would come. I found the bars seedy and quite frightening. Yet as I grew older, I fought yawns for hours past my bedtime, then suffered through the interminable after-parties that followed. I thought it was a rite of passage, or that it would make me more interesting. But most of the time, I was just counting the minutes until it would be socially acceptable for me to leave. It was embarrassing not to be able to have fun like I was supposed to. I desperately wanted to belong… but, I wanted just as desperately to be home in bed, comfortable, with my mis-adventures behind me.

I watched life after dark with a bit of an anthropologist’s detachment - I remember seeing the scene as a person from a different culture might. But actually I was watching my own peers, my own culture. While other people were wrapped up in socializing, I noticed how differently teenagers acted and dressed when they gathered at night on the boardwalk, out of the watchful eyes of adults - the posturing, the roughhousing, the extroversion so extreme it almost seemed forced. (They look like they are having fun, behaving as young people ought - should I be behaving that way, too?) I looked at the frank uninhibitedness of drunken behavior, dancing bodies looking disjointed under the pulsating strobe, the exaggerated conversational gestures made necessary by music far too loud for normal conversation. I wondered what made the others so different from me. I wondered if I should (or could) join the rest of the world. I never did decide.