The Life and Times of an American Tween
Every Wednesday, at exactly 2:15 P.M., the electronic bell at San Francisco’s A. P. Giannini Middle School sounds with a dull, droning buzz, and hundreds of students stream from the building. They wear big pants and bucket hats, cropped tanks and cargo jeans, Athleta sets and Air Force 1s. They carry ergonomically unsound backpacks dripping with bag charms and key chains: athletic affiliations, memorabilia, miniature stuffies. They pull thick socks up over their leggings; fix hydrocolloid stickers, star-shaped and cutesy, atop angry, interloping zits. Their lip tint is red and thickly applied. Their water bottles are status symbols. Their press-ons are shellacked and combat-ready. There are boys, too, small and gangly. They move in packs, magnifying their bulk like synchronized minnows. They look dressed by their mothers. On early-dismissal days, the afternoon yawns with possibility. The students dash to the bus or wander the nearby commercial drag, which has little going for it save the hardware store, where there is candy. They exchange their allowance for matcha ice cream at Polly Ann; gobble Domino’s to no intestinal detriment. They buy boba and punt each other with tapioca bullets. They flock to Starbucks for magenta Cannon Ball Drinks, creamy Pink Drinks, sludgy Dubai Chocolate Mochas. They chug the unchuggable. Twelve blocks to the west, the Pacific Ocean glitters and threatens, waves dragging out in the wind.
On a Wednesday afternoon, I was joined outside A.P.G. by Mira, a sixth grader with an open, angelic face and an ebullient presence. It is often chilly and overcast in the Outer Sunset, but this was a warm and clear day, and Mira, who is interested in matters of fashion, wore low-slung cargo sweatpants and a white tube top. Her hair, which is long, dark, and curly, had recently been treated to a bathroom Manic Panic job, and the front strands were dyed a light peach. She smoothed a strand as one might the tail of a cat. Mira is good company: frank, funny, and self-deprecating in a way that suggests confidence rather than its lack. At four feet eight, she is small for her age, but manages to occupy space laterally. She moves with a noodle elasticity, and is prone to breaking into dance moves while going about her business: a full-body wave from wrist to wrist, an entire sequence from a Katseye music video. The first time we met, we were mid-conversation when she inexplicably dropped into a side split, grabbed her ankles, and rolled backward, placing her toes on the floor behind her head. “At the beginning of the year, I couldn’t do an aerial”—a hands-free cartwheel—“and I can kind of do one now,” she told me, harrowingly assuming the starting position.
Mira is twelve years old and lives in the Avenues, San Francisco’s foggy western neighborhoods, with her mother, Michalle, who is a nurse practitioner, her father, Patrick, who is a full-time parent, and her sibling, Dylan, who is nine. (Last year, Dylan requested to use they/them pronouns, which the family mostly remembers to honor.) Like most kids her age, Mira exists in the murky, thrilling bardo between childhood and maturity. She is a gracious host—quick to offer guests a Spindrift—who totes a lunchbox adorned with a sticker of a unicorn. She is learning to cook, mostly quesadillas, but if she could she would live on Cheetos, boba, Trü Früs, and Coke. She razzes her parents in a way that makes them laugh, but no longer tells them everything. Mira’s first middle-school dance was coming up, and there was discussion among her friends about dresses and hair styles. I was excited to see which of her dance moves would make an appearance.
For years, Mira has been agitating for more independence. Last August, she began commuting to and from school alone, hurtling around the edge of the continent on the public bus. Since fifth grade, she has worn a silver Apple Watch, a glorified tracking device, which she pushes to the outer limits of usability. She is a member of several large group chats, including one called “4th Period Baddies,” and regularly consults Siri, summoning facts and images from the ether. (“Photos of hazel eyes.” “What does A.S.M.R. stand for?”) Still, the watch is no phone. A phone would be much cooler; would be, perhaps, the coolest thing. An Apple Watch was a bridge from childhood to adulthood. A phone would be a portal.
That Wednesday, Mira went to Polly Ann with her friends Kaitlyn and Sloane. At the counter, the girls realized no one had brought money. They began plumbing their wallets—pink, pleather, flat—for stray coins. Sloane called her mother on her Apple Watch and, in a mix of English and Mandarin, requested a transfusion of Apple Cash. She hung up just as Mira and Kaitlyn discovered, miraculously, that if they pooled their assets they could afford to split something. “Never mind we found money exclamation point,” Sloane said into her watch.
“Sloane, no!” Mira said. “We were going to get money!” Giggling, the girls ordered a pint of watermelon ice cream, requested three spoons, and dropped their last dime into the tip jar. They headed to a playground, a regular hangout spot for their peers, and settled onto a boulder. Smaller children from a nearby elementary school were availing themselves of climbers, slides, and beams. But by the boulder the real action was social and discursive. Two sixth-grade boys appeared, one tall and floppy-haired, the other wiry and blond. “Mira, I have a question for you,” the floppy-haired boy said. “Are you straight?” Mira looked at him, her face grave and blank. “No, no, not for me, for one of my friends,” he said, putting his hands out in front of his body, as if to distance himself from any association with crushing. Mira wanted to know who had dispatched him, but the boy wandered off to a playground structure, singing Jimmy Eat World to himself.
Across the way, at a picnic table, two slightly older students, a boy and a girl, were entwined, snakelike, engaging in light frottage: not kissing, but hugging and caressing, petting each other’s cheeks, collapsing into each other’s laps. To the sixth graders, this behavior was repulsive and compelling. I asked Sloane what was up with them. “Girl, I know,” she said. “They told Mira they were cousins.” Some of the sixth graders began heckling. “I don’t think you should be doing that if you’re cousins!” Floppy Hair shouted. He turned to his friends. “I’ll give anyone twenty dollars to go over there and ask if they can join,” he said.
“I’ll do it!” a girl said.
“You two should touch asses!” Floppy Hair yelled. He turned to the blond boy. “We should start making out. And then, when they look, say, ‘Yeah, how do you like me now?’ ” He sat down near the older students. The blond boy followed, plopped down into Floppy Hair’s lap, then popped back up and pogoed away.
The wind was picking up, and the playground was starting to empty. On the edges of the park, middle schoolers could be seen raising their wrists to their mouths, requesting more time. Mira and two friends moved to a low wall and huddled around their own smartwatches, whispering and laughing. “We’re catfishing someone,” Mira explained. The girls had called a male classmate on Kaitlyn’s watch, but another girl had done all the talking. “We’re, like, ‘We know who you are,’ in an evil way,” Mira went on. “And it’s funny because he doesn’t know who we are.” I laughed: this sounded more like old-fashioned prank-calling than catfishing. But Mira gave a sombre little nod. “This is what we do with our time,” she said.
The literature on adolescence marks middle school as a turning point, a time when kids begin to pull away from their parents, discard childish pursuits, and pursue, full thrust, the exhausting project of individuation. It is a period of intense, hormonally driven emotional flux. Self-consciousness sets in. The adult world is studied and emulated in a manner that suggests praxis but no theory. There is an aspect of camp to it all: a kind of LARP or drag, as young people transition from play-acting adulthood to inhabiting it. Actual adults are ancillary. Tweens and teens look to each other for clarity and guidance on how to behave and how to feel, all the while gambling with each other’s social confidence and self-esteem. It is natural, and it is psychotic.
The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described the period between twelve and eighteen as one of essential identity formation: a time of trying on personas and roles. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Erikson was sensitive to the ways that society could shape personality, but no one could have anticipated the explosion of potential identities, interests, aesthetics, subcultures, and life styles that children would be exposed to by globalization and, later, the internet: now there are clean girls, tomato girls, vanilla girls, office sirens, femboys, e-boys, looksmaxxers; one can be avant basic, old money, new money, quiet luxury, cottagecore, goblincore, fairycore. Adolescent anxiety and depression have been on the rise for years, and there is abundant public debate about why: economic inequality, strained family ties, sleep deprivation, smartphones. Childhood has never been easy, but these days the on-ramp to adulthood seems somehow shorter and more perilous.
Mira’s parents, Michalle and Patrick, met as college students and have been together for almost twenty years. “My mom grew up pretty poor,” Mira told me one day, unprompted. And then, with learned dismissiveness: “My dad grew up as a rich white boy.” Michalle is petite, good-natured, and very pretty, with dark eyes and a radiant smile. She was raised in Marin County, the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants. Patrick was raised between the Pacific Northwest and the suburbs of Silicon Valley, and was on the University of Chicago debate team. He is sincere, analytical, and ripped—the kind of dad whose biceps come sheathed in a T-shirt reading “Find Yourself,” over a picture of Waldo meditating. (Mira picked it out.)
Mira was an amiable baby, a daredevil toddler, and, once Dylan arrived, a menace. When asked if she had memories of the transition from being an only child to having a sibling, she said, dryly, “I remember peace, and then awful screaming.” As a little kid, Mira was “spunky” (Michalle), “assertive, directorial” (Patrick), and “blunt, stubborn, annoying” (Mira). But her parents were wary of overdoing it on discipline, especially with a girl. “It’s easier to work with a fire than try to build one up later,” Patrick said.
During COVID, Mira’s elementary school moved to remote learning, but Michalle, an essential worker, was able to enroll her children in a series of camps. Mira received minimal educational instruction—“You can’t learn handwriting through a screen,” she said, witheringly—but thrived socially. She has earned straight A’s in middle school, including in P.E., which for a time she was “essentially failing.” (She had a B.) Her rowdiest class is English language arts, which operates on “mutual respect,” and where students regularly talk over the teacher, walk around, and flick paper darts into the ceiling tiles. Her favorite class is dance. “That one is amazing, because it’s all girls,” she said.
A few years ago, Mira’s family moved into a new apartment, in part to give her and Dylan separate bedrooms. The place, a rental, is furnished without pretension—cushy sectional, vintage Tabasco poster, board games. A whiteboard leans against the wall of the dining area, with a running list of movies for the family’s weekly movie night. “My dad does squat things down here,” Mira told me, prancing through the hall. “Before, he was just an average person. He would just be regular. And then he was, like, I’m going to be healthy, because this is not a good life style if I want to keep it for when I’m a hundred years old. So he stopped drinking, and drinking caffeine. Now he counts all his calories, every night—it’s kind of annoying.” For most of Mira’s life, Patrick worked in product management at a large tech company. In 2024, after a revealing sabbatical, he quit. “He’s more of a chauffeur now,” Mira told me. “He’s been jobless for two years.”
“Job-free,” Patrick, who was within earshot, corrected.
“Jobless,” she said.
One afternoon, I found the kids hanging out in the dining area, banging around near a sideboard that held decorative ceramics. Dylan, who is dimpled and impish, with long eyelashes and a curtain of dark bangs, picked up a small container and examined it. Patrick, laughing, warned that the vessel held cremains. “This is Grandad,” he said. When Patrick’s father died, two years ago, Patrick and his siblings divided his ashes among themselves, and a portion rested in a columbarium; the urn was small.
“Do you think this is just, like, an eyeball?” Mira asked, holding up her paternal grandfather. “If he was a ghost, it would just be, like, his arm, floating?”
“It’s probably a small amount of lots of parts of him,” Patrick said.
“Like little bits of flesh,” Dylan said, chuckling.
Patrick, who is prone to gentle didacticism, tried to turn the conversation into a teachable moment. “In the early internet, the internet speed was pretty low, so when images would load, it would load rows interlaced, so you could tell roughly what it was while it was loading, as opposed to waiting for the whole asset to load the way it does now,” he said. “It’s like that. It’s like a low-resolution picture of Grandad.”
“Weird,” Dylan said.
For any adolescent, a private bedroom is both sanctuary and mood board. It’s a safe haven for experimental selfies, a shelter for incognito-mode Google searches, an internal switchboard for the exchange of secrets and dreams. Over the winter, Mira conducted a “room refresh” and parted with her childhood desk, some toys, and the bunk bed she and Dylan once shared. The room now held a gleaming white loft bed, with a small den of executive function underneath. “I don’t get homework yet, but if I did, this is where I would do it,” Mira said, gesturing at an under-bed desk. When I first visited, last fall, the room had been graced by a larger-than-life-size cardboard cutout of Taylor Swift, but it had since disappeared. “She died,” Mira said. “Dylan broke her. A few times.” Dylan, who shares a room with a leopard gecko, is still steeped in the unambiguous stuff of kid-world. (“I think mythical creatures can crossbreed with anything,” they mused one afternoon, apropos of nothing discernible, over a mayo-slathered bagel. Then, seconds later: “Never go near a dead whale. They can explode!”) Like many younger siblings, Dylan is both antagonist and accomplice: privy to everyday intimacies, but not allowed to hang out in Mira’s room. “If they do, I will shun them,” Mira told me. “I will go—HYAH!—get out.”
On the other side of Mira’s room was a proud vanity, replete with Hollywood mirror and leather-topped stool. It was covered in a tantalizing explosion of tubes and dupes, gloops and glops: setting sprays, concealer, eyeshadow palettes, Unicorn Snot body glitter. “This is the pink drawer,” she said, excavating a Trader Joe’s gummy-bear-flavored overnight lip mask. “It’s just whatever’s pink.” Over the vanity hung a neon sign in curlicue magenta script. “Mira,” it glowed.
I picked up the concealer. “What are you concealing?” I asked.
“I have bags under my eyes,” Mira said. I looked at her face, which had the interior illumination of a Renaissance portrait, and felt we were somehow both being gaslighted. “I like to read at night,” she said. “I’m supposed to get ten hours of sleep, but I get nine.”
During the week, Dylan and Mira are not allowed to have screen time, but when the iron curtain is lifted, on Friday nights, the children enjoy unlimited access to a shared laptop, or “the Dylan family computer,” as Mira calls it, because Dylan tends to hoard it to play a dizzying, headachy civilization simulator called WorldBox. (“I’m making monoliths to make humanoid versions of animals,” they explained one afternoon, incomprehensibly.) There is also a family iPhone, which connects to Wi-Fi but does not have a data plan. This is Mira’s—de facto, not de jure. “Mira doesn’t let me use the phone,” Dylan told me. “She kicks me out of her room before I can get to the phone.” Mira is not allowed to have TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, or other social media. “I’m allowed to officially have a phone when I’m fourteen,” she said. “Probably fifteen for social media.” (Patrick denied this, saying that it “hasn’t been litigated yet.”) Her activities of choice are perusing Pinterest and surfing YouTube Shorts—essentially a high-latency TikTok. “There’s this whole thing called BookTube,” Mira told me, singing the last word while arcing her arms in the shape of a rainbow. Recently, scanning BookTube—dupe BookTok—I found myself in the Venn diagram between nerdy and thirsty, where young women in matte makeup memed in front of bookcases stuffed with romantasy. Mira also enjoys content from the influencer Salish Matter, a sixteen-year-old with an intra-Target Starbucks habit who shares a channel with her father, also an influencer. I watched a bunch of the Matters’ videos (“Hiding from 24 BOYS in 24 HOURS”; “My Daughter Survives TEN BROTHERS”) and, feeling demented, decompressed by scrolling through Shorts and watching a woman eat her way out of a bathtub filled with popcorn.
Mira’s favorite narrative trope is “enemies to lovers,” in which hatred is transmogrified into passion. “Me and Mom read a lot of the same things,” she told me. “Well, when I can read them, because they’re all smut novels.” (“That’s not true!” Michalle said. “My favorite book is ‘Cutting for Stone.’ ”) Mira loves the “Once Upon a Broken Heart” books, which are twisty, whimsical, and wildly popular among young women. For romance novels, they’re also pretty tame: one chili pepper out of five, for chaste kissing and no action below the neck.
We settled on the floor of her room so that she could show the books to me. Homemade fan art of Jacks, the series’s love interest, fluttered out of a collector’s-edition case. “A kiss worth dying for,” I read out loud. “If you kiss him, and you’re not his soulmate, you will die,” Mira explained. We did not dwell on the sexual politics of this conceit. “It’s very dark,” she said. “He doesn’t tell people that he kills people when he kisses them, but he also doesn’t not tell them. People want to because”—her voice rose to a high, fluttering falsetto, a falsetto that suggested a superior world of sophistication in which one did not deign to do kissing—“he’s so dreamy.” But Jacks was not without his flaws, promiscuity among them. “He has technically murdered thousands of people,” Mira said.
I asked Mira what drew her to the books. “I really like the writing style,” she said. “Also, he’s blond. That’s very unique.”
“It’s unique that he’s blond?” I asked.
“People like them dark,” she said, and sprang up to stand by the bookcase. “We shall go through.” She began tapping the spines of her books. “Brown hair, brown hair, brown hair, brown hair, brown hair,” she said, then paused, finger suspended in midair. “I don’t know what color hair he has. Brown hair, brown hair, brown hair. This doesn’t have a love interest. Brown hair, brown hair. Brown hair.”
In the winter, Mira told me that her celebrity crush is a waifish actor from “Stranger Things” named Finn Wolfhard (brown hair), who has high cheekbones, minimal facial hair, and looks a bit like Miranda July. Wolfhard is the ideal middle-school celebrity crush: sexually nonthreatening and pretty, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 1999. Civilian crushes were a different story. “I don’t really like anyone,” Mira told me. “All the guys in my school are, like, either jerks, ugly, or both. There’s not great variety.” I inquired about another sixth grader Mira had mentioned previously, but she waved the idea off. “We’re ninety-five per cent sure he’s gay,” she said, as if this had ever precluded the affections of a middle-school girl. “He’s really zesty.” She and her friends had been joking with him about this, but Mira reassured me, “I’m bi, so it’s O.K.” She was drinking a strawberry matcha, a slurry of fruit, milk, and L-theanine, and slurped the jammy dregs. I asked when she first understood that she was bisexual. “Because men are just annoying,” she said, shrugging. This spring, she said that her celebrity crush was Sabrina Carpenter.
In the weeks leading up to the spring dance, Mira had been experimenting with hair styles, including braiding her hair into tiny little hearts against her scalp. But to hear her tell it—at least, to me—Mira’s interest in romance was purely literary. She was masterly at deflecting: once, when I asked if she was excited about potentially dating in the future, she changed the subject to a specialty-pie bakery we were passing. I took her point. Maybe crushes were happening, maybe not; none of my business. Maybe widespread openness toward sexual identity and gender weren’t enough to offset the raw vulnerability of wanting to be special to someone. I asked Mira if she’d followed up with Floppy Hair, who had delivered news of a crush by proxy. He still wouldn’t tell Mira who it was, and she couldn’t be bothered to get it out of him. “It’s so much work,” she said. “I could be listening to an audiobook instead of doing that.”
One evening, I asked Mira if she ever felt anxious in social situations. What I had in mind was pedestrian: cliques, drama, new people. She was leaning in the doorframe of her kitchen, eating dessert, and took a moment to think. “When there are men,” she said. “Old men. Like Dad’s age and older.” Patrick and Michalle, who were sitting with me at the dining table, looked surprised.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I don’t like men, they’re weird,” she said. “We live in a world of pedophiles and rapists. And I don’t want that.” Recently, she explained, she’d been at Maple’s house, and they had put on the Netflix documentary series “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich.” “It was really disgusting,” Mira said. (“We haven’t talked about the Epstein files,” Patrick said.) Her distaste extended to American politics, and to the President. “I think he was mentioned more times in the Epstein files than Harry Potter was mentioned in all eight books,” she said. This statistic was somewhat inaccurate: there are not eight Harry Potter books; there are seven. After the first episode, the girls had switched to watching a rom-com.
From Mira I learned about Merit Beauty and “Pop Star Academy: Katseye.” I learned that the trick to a manicure is to wait for the first hand to dry before doing the second, though that’s hard if you’re impatient; that “KPop Demon Hunters” is good the first time but dulls by the fourth; and that, to do the wave, you have to go fingers, fist, down, elbow, shoulder, chest, shoulder, elbow, down. I learned that Taylor Swift spends, like, thirty-five million dollars a year on her cats. I learned that Lucky Charms cereal is, like, seventy-five per cent sugar, bananas are poisonous to monkeys, and you should rinse Popsicles before eating them to avoid losing taste buds. I learned that you can kind of just say “slay” whenever, as filler, that you can address both your girls and your dad as “bro,” and that, at least in Mira’s telling, her whole life doesn’t revolve around her mom, but her mom’s whole life revolves around her. (“As it should be,” Mira said.)
Every week, Mira receives an allowance of twelve dollars, a cute amount commensurate with her age. With Patrick’s help, she tracks and budgets her assets in an Excel spreadsheet. In fourth grade, shortly after discovering online shopping, Mira found a cheap, appealing dress on Shein. She showed it to Patrick, and asked him to buy it for her using her allowance. Instead, he offered a lesson in Xinjiang internment camps and the global supply chain. “Turns out there’s, like, lead in their things, and child labor, forced labor, thirty-two cents a day, not great,” Mira said. Patrick, who framed it as a moral choice, handed the decision to Mira. “Great thing to do for a fourth grader,” she told me, sarcastically. After wrestling with it, she decided to swear off Shein—but only once she’d bought the dress.
Mira’s politics are still primarily shaped by her parents, but the culture creeps in. She is nervous about the prospect of “World War III”—“Still got a few years, you never know,” she said—and she harbors some anxiety about global warming. (“We’re not gonna make it,” she told me, knowingly.) Once, we were on the light rail and passed a billboard advertisement for a software company, touting a new A.I. product. “Boooo, A.I.,” Mira said, as we rattled along. “Boooo. It’s killing the polar bears.” I asked if the ad hadn’t been for Patrick’s former employer. “Mm-hmm,” she said. “He did hard and/or _soft_ware.” She leaned forward in her seat. “They’re so similar. Why make them so different, but so similar?” At school, Mira is participating in a marine-science program called Ocean Ambassadors. Learning about seal malnutrition has been sobering. “I’m not helping,” she acknowledged. “I still buy from Amazon.”
One afternoon, I picked Mira up from school and we drove to Stonestown Galleria, a mall on the edge of San Francisco. She sat in the front seat, as she is wont to do, despite not clearing the recommended height. Whenever we spent time together, I experienced a kind of duality: relating to Mira, while being very much a middle-aged mom. As she climbed into my car, I had a brief moment of dissociation: how could we be driving, when we were only twelve? “I don’t like it here,” she said, as we passed through a neighborhood of detached, single-family homes. “Why is there so much space in between the houses? You could make it taller, and then you can have more people that live there.” Any doubts I might have had about Patrick’s YIMBY-ism vanished. We passed a Volkswagen Beetle, and for the second time in ten minutes, Mira punched me in the arm. “Sorry,” she murmured.
In the Stonestown parking lot we circled, looking for a spot, and found ourselves stuck behind a Waymo. “You can’t honk at it, because it won’t do anything,” Mira advised. Her friend Fiona sometimes took Waymos, but Mira had never experienced one firsthand. A Waymo was cool. There were no parents in a Waymo, no little siblings. A Waymo was the next best thing to having your own car. “I wanna go in a Waymo!” she cried, in a cartoonish voice of anguish.
We parked, entered the glossy, brightly lit tomb of the mall, and piloted to Sephora like two homing pigeons. Each new generation adopts the consumer tendencies of its time, and Generation Alpha has demonstrated an unquenchable desire for skin-care products: on TikTok, tiny influencers with Minnie Mouse voices and infinitesimal pores post “Get ready with me” videos in which they offer squeaky endorsements for products like retinol and eye cream. Mira has a multi-step skin-care routine, which she performs every night, using the materials at hand. First, face wash, procured by her parents from Costco. Then toner, usually Glow Recipe’s Watermelon Glow. Next, she conducts a targeted strike on the skin beneath her nostrils. “I had a really dry nose, around here,” she told me, touching her face, which betrayed no history of any aberration. “It was, like, crispy,” she said. “So I do that so it doesn’t come back, because it’s evil.” Her product of choice is Target-brand petroleum jelly—“dupe Vaseline,” she joked. Finally, she applies peppermint lip butter.
It would be easy, having made it safely past the shores of puberty, to make light of these rituals and ablutions. But the rituals are very important—in fact, they’re everything. They’re experiments with externalizing private self-perceptions, and dalliances with potential selves. They’re a way of projecting into the future: to imagine being noticed, maybe even seen.
That afternoon, Mira was in the market for a tinted sunscreen, but distractions abounded. At the display for Milk Makeup, a self-described “clean beauty” brand, she sampled a tube of Cooling Water Jelly Tint, a jiggly blush-slash-lip stain the color of rubies and the texture of aspic. As I tried to imagine the adult woman who would put this on her face, Mira poked the goo and smiled. “Jelly,” she said, in a weird voice. We entered the sunscreen section, and examined a product called Supergoop! Glowscreen. “Nineteen dollars for a mini,” she said remorsefully, and set it back down.
We made our way to Salt Tree, a Californian chain boutique. By this point, I had read enough prescriptive nonfiction about raising adolescent girls that I understood sexy clothing to be distinct from sexuality in practice; I had consulted parents of teen-agers, who explained that their daughters’ revealing clothing was not a capitulation to the male gaze but a refutation of its power. This did not prepare me for Salt Tree. The store was blazingly lit; metal racks overflowed with petroleum-based fabrics and shivered to the bass line of throbbing pop music. There were crop tops in fuchsia mesh, tube tops in cheetah print, chain-mail halters, and puff-sleeved sweaters. There were plaid miniskirts in multiple colorways, pleather shorts, and denim corsets. There were distressed jeans, and cargo jeans, and jeans studded with pearls and rhinestones. There were tiny shirts that said “Be Kind” and “Tequila Made Me Do It,” and nostalgic shirts with vintage lettering that read “ ’76” and, appallingly, “ ’93.” There were body chains. It felt like an A.I. hallucination of nineties fashion. I was immediately transported to my own preteen cabinet of horrors: Mystique Boutique, just off Canal Street in Manhattan, a wild cornucopia of stretchy basics and barely-there going-out clothes, everything slashed and shrunken. In a season of knockoff Kate Spade bags, bar-mitzvah pencil skirts, and gratuitous training bras, it had produced in me a sick, horny covetousness: not for the clothes themselves, but for the idea of womanhood—flirty, filled-out, smoochable—that they implied.
In the early eighties, Neil Postman, the media theorist and critic, argued that the boundary between childhood and adulthood had long been one of information asymmetry—adults had secrets, whereas children had only their natural instincts and limited experience—and it was eroding, which he largely blamed on television. Children were exposed early to death, sex, violence, and money; one consequence, Postman claimed, was an undifferentiated culture in which children acted like adults and adults acted like children. (Postman died in 2003, too early for family dance challenges on TikTok to kill him.) At Salt Tree, I wondered about the vision of adulthood the clothes conveyed, and the women I had imagined when I was small. Did they exist, or were they always just twenty, only ever twelve? I hadn’t grown up and spent my life knocking back Diet Cokes, voluptuously, at the club. But kids didn’t aspire to dress like work-from-home moms in machine-washables. This was one of the raw edges of adolescents: in their eager imitation of maturity, they conveyed an incomplete but inevitably uncomplimentary reflection of adult life.
Mira had recently been to Salt Tree with her friends to shop for the dance. Initially, she had wanted a dress there with a tulip hem and an off-the-shoulder neckline—like Aurora’s dress, from Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty,” she told me—but she ultimately rejected it, because it shed glitter. That dress, which cost thirty-eight ninety-nine, still hung limply in the store, twinkling. Instead, she had chosen a dress that was blush pink, with three tiers of ruffles, a strappy back, and a ruched bodice. It was coquettish for a woman, and perfect for a girl.
In the sale section, we appraised a bustier with a photo of a Yorkshire terrier on it. “No,” Mira said, shoving it back into the rack. Also “No” were neon-green tank tops (“Too eighties”), a long denim dress patterned with embroidered flowers (“A mother dress”—whose mother?), and a ruffled white polka-dotted situation (“Not O.K.”). Mira pulled out a fifties-style blue frock. “This has Sabrina Carpenter vibes,” she said, flipping, perusing.
A few moments later, I lifted a high-necked, long-sleeved, ribbed skater dress from the rack, and said, horribly, “This feels a little bit like ‘Taylor Swift in the winter’ vibes.” Mira looked at it, then at me, and chose grace.
“Maybe,” she said.
For a while, Mira thought she might want to be a backup dancer, probably for someone like Sabrina Carpenter. “I don’t want to be famous, but I want to be friends with famous people,” she explained. Her ambitions changed after she consulted Siri and learned that background dancers aren’t particularly well remunerated. “Then I wanted to be a physical therapist, but I figured out they get paid the same amount as background dancers,” she said. “So, a dermatologist could be cool.” In the future, she pictures herself living like Patrick’s mother, JJ, a retired marketing executive who travels often and has two cats. But, unlike JJ, Mira will not live in the suburbs—especially not the suburbs of Sacramento, where her parents may move someday, because they would like to own a home—and she will not get married. “More hassle,” she said. Children were also not in the picture. “They’re annoying, and they steal your money,” she said. She was seated at a toddler-scale table by the living-room window, making a valentine in the shape of a notebook, which she planned to keep for herself.
“Maybe it’s worth it,” I suggested sentimentally.
“Not for me,” she said, cutting, gluing. “I want a low-responsibility life.”
That week, San Francisco public-school teachers were on strike, and Patrick’s “Daddy day care” was in session. Mira and Dylan had gone to support their teachers on the picket line; a cardboard sign decorated with hearts and the words “Teachers Deserve Better,” written in careful script, leaned against the living-room wall. The school dance had been postponed. It was a rainy afternoon, and Mira was waiting on a delivery from Amazon: a nail kit with a salon-style U.V.-light dryer. At fifty-nine dollars, the purchase had drained about half of her savings, but she planned to leverage it. “I’m starting a nail business,” she told me. “It’s fifteen dollars for gel, and then twenty-five dollars for Gel-X.”
Patrick turned on the Winter Olympics, and Europe’s fernlike male figure skaters took turns gliding across the ice. Mira began absent-mindedly rolling and unrolling a fine-tooth comb through her curls. After a few minutes, she said, “It’s stuck.” The comb dangled mid-forehead.
“Oh, Mira,” Patrick said. He crossed the room and tugged gently on the comb, which did not budge. “This is just who you are now,” he said, shaking his head.
“This is just who I am now,” Mira agreed.
Michalle arrived home from work, appraised the situation, and burst out laughing. “Mira, you’re not allowed to use combs without supervision,” she said. She sat down next to Mira, who bowed her head. “I’m sorry, Mira, we’re gonna just have to cut some of this,” Michalle said. She retrieved a pair of small scissors, and the room fell quiet.
“No!” Mira shouted. “No, NO!”
Slowly, Michalle began to snip. Patrick said, “You’re gonna be somewhat limited—or, potentially have new opportunities for how you do your little . . . What do you call the little front styling that you do?”
“It’s called a front strand!” Mira said, annoyed. The comb came free, and she examined herself in the mirror. The damage was minor, but not invisible. She smoothed and tucked, shaking her head. “You know, another reason I don’t want kids is this,” Mira said. “I’m a great example of why I don’t want kids.”
Mira is not exactly overscheduled, like many children of her generation; rather, she is locked in. Five days a week, she travels to the San Francisco Circus Center, where she performs feats of unfathomable abdominal strength. (A bi circus performer: San Francisco’s not dead.) Mira’s specialty is the aerial hoop, in which she executes tricks and contortions on a suspended metal circle, and she recently joined the center’s in-house performance troupe. Most of the other troupe members are already in high school. When I asked what was different about hanging out with older kids, she replied, thoughtfully, “They’re usually the base.”
One afternoon, I joined Mira to watch her aerial-hoop class, taught by a Russian master. She dashed into the large, brightly lit gymnasium, and I settled onto the wooden bleachers, which were painted cerulean and speckled with yellow stars. After half an hour of mat stretches, Mira and two other students climbed onto Swedish ladders, hung with their backs to the wall, and did a set of leg lifts, tapping their feet against their heads. Finally, Mira chalked her hands, boosted herself onto a dangling metal hoop, flipped upside down, and hung from a single knee, arms spread out like a rotor. She twirled slowly, her face fixed in an expression of focus and resolve. Alone in the bleachers, I watched as her childlike elasticity was transmuted into something I knew she would draw on for the rest of her life: a determined, hushed discipline.
Middle school is, famously, a time of petty cruelty and small-scale social Darwinism. Mira has seen “Mean Girls” the movie and “Mean Girls” the movie musical, but her own social experience does not reflect them. She has known most of her friends for years, and has an easy social grace. Still, hanging out with sixth-grade girls, I recalled the time as one of great sensitivity, in which carelessness could feel like a slight. Around Mira and her friends, my own insecurities were heightened. Did they think I was cool, because I had a phone? One evening, Patrick drove me and Mira to the middle-school musical; I sat in the back seat, regressing. When we got to the lobby, she raced into the theatre, leaving me loitering by the concession table. I found her close to the front, sitting with her friends Fiona and Evie. They had not saved me a place, and did not seem concerned about finding me one. (“You’re still getting interviewed?” Fiona asked.) I sat down several rows behind them, watching their backs as they huddled together, laughing. I wondered what they were talking about, and hoped it was not me.
One night this winter, Mira hosted a “movie party” for some friends. When I arrived at the apartment, she and two other girls were curled on the couch in fluffy socks and athleisure, talking. The doorbell rang, and two more girls arrived, piling onto the couch. Sloane was missing, however, and no one knew where she was. “Where are you?” Mira growled into her watch, excitedly. “We’re all waiting for youuuuu-uh!”
“Oh, my God, Ellis ate ice out of a girl’s mouth the other day,” someone said. The couch erupted in “whoa”s and “ew”s. “He was, like, can I have some ice, and then she spit it out, and then he took it. She meant it as a joke, but he took it!”
That evening, through a confusing hybrid of democratic voting and random selection, the girls were watching “The Devil Wears Prada,” a morality tale about a frumpy aspiring journalist, Andy (Anne Hathaway), who wishes to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, but instead lands a job at a fashion magazine modelled after Vogue, working as an assistant to its editor-in-chief, the domineering, mercurial Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep). The film is ostensibly about the hazards of sacrificing one’s values for professional ambition, but it is actually a movie about outfits. As soon as it began, so did the running commentary, a Greek chorus of reheated Gen Z slang. “O.K., slay,” Bayla said, as Andy embarked on the first of several makeovers. “Girl, she’s eating.”
“I mean, she did have kind of a chopped look,” Mira noted.
The doorbell rang; it was Sloane. All five girls jumped off the couch, stampeded toward the apartment door, and tumbled into the building’s stairwell, stepping on each other’s heels. “O.K., here’s a summary,” Mira said, excitedly. “So she’s working for, like, a billion-dollar company. She does not like her job, and she’s so ugly. But then she got a glow-up, and she kind of likes her job.”
When I first saw the movie, twenty years ago, it seemed obvious that Andy’s live-in boyfriend, Nate (Adrian Grenier), who primarily serves to call Andy out for betraying her own values, was meant to be the film’s moral compass. In 2026, however, the gender politics hit different. “Clock the tea, girl!” Mira cried, when Andy criticized Nate for being unsupportive. “He is just, like, not giving. I feel like he wants to be first, but she likes her job.”
On the chaise side of the sectional, Fiona and Izzy were giggling under a blanket, playing a makeover game on Fiona’s phone. Onscreen, Andy was being seduced by a heavily jawed man with blond hair. “Would you rather have him with her, or the other guy with her?” a girl asked.
“I’d rather not have any of them with her,” Maple, whose parents are divorced, said. “Single baddies forever,” she cried, flopping back on the couch.
“Yaasss,” Bayla slurred.
Onscreen, the seduction was working. “Go get some Botox plastic surgery,” Mira heckled at the blond jaw. “He is so chopped. Get away, you crusty, dusty man!” The blond kissed Andy on the cheek, and the “ew”s kicked up again. “Her outfit is eating,” Bayla said.
The children munched on pizza and Caesar salad. After a montage in Paris, Miranda, eyes full of tears and face stripped of makeup, confessed to Andy that her marriage was over. “She got divorced?” Fiona said, looking up from her phone.
“Now she’s free. Baddie,” someone else said.
“Single baddies forever,” Maple said quickly.
“I feel bad for her,” Mira said. “She’s just a cool baddie that focusses on her fashion.”
By the time the movie finished, half the room was still watching, while the other half was on Fiona’s phone. “I like that she’s with nobody in the end,” Maple said, but the rest of the group had already moved on, comparing notes on cheaper alternatives to the Dyson Airwrap, imagining their hair being somehow more volumized, beautiful, tamed. The girls, buzzed on miniature cans of soda, lingered in the liminal space between rolling credits and parental pickup. “We could go to my room,” Mira suggested, and the group leaped from the couch and chased each other like puppies, a flurry of hair and limbs and cotton-poly blend. They piled in and closed the door.
In late March, A.P.G. finally held its spring dance, with the theme “Under the Cherry Moon.” After school, I bumped into Mira and her friends, who were on their way to get ready at Bayla’s house. They were loitering giddily on the sidewalk, shouting at Sloane, who was tearing across the parking lot—barefoot, for some reason—back into school, to retrieve her high heels from her first-period classroom. The dance had been called for three in the afternoon, but the group planned to arrive fashionably late, at three-thirty. It had been hard to gauge Mira’s expectations. “I might just stand in a corner,” she told me. Most of her friends didn’t have dates, though Maple was going with a girl named Sasha, and Sloane was going with Leo, a boy from their grade. “He’s liked her since, like, third grade,” Mira said.
I was unfashionably early, and toured the sixth-grade wing of the school. A pedestalled bust of A. P. Giannini, the founder of Bank of America and the school’s namesake, was stashed behind a recycling bin. I tried to imagine what he saw, down in the atrium where the children slayed. Early adolescence was a sustained state of cognitive dissonance. It was a time of learning to take yourself seriously while wearing Unicorn Snot; of being clothed and transported by your parents while seeing them as critically as anyone ever would. It was a period when you could be aware of violent, sexual, criminal abuses of power; immediately identify the sexism of a “vintage” workplace dramedy; and mostly find the boys in your own life annoying. It was exhilarating, exhausting, and fleeting. Young people changed quickly and not on any predetermined schedule. From the relatively static vantage of adulthood, it could feel like any given day with a kid was your last day with that version of them. Along one wall ran hundreds of gray, two-tier lockers. The locker was both ballast and canvas. Inside, magnets and passed notes and Instax Mini prints marked the passage of time, breadcrumbs on the trail taking each child further and further from home. One of the most salient features of twelve, after all, is that it comes right before thirteen.
Inside the cafeteria, which was painted with cheerful murals of paper cranes and various translations of the word “together,” the linoleum floor was strewn with plastic cherry-blossom petals and white balloons. Pink streamers looped haphazardly from the ceiling. Two girls from the “Mixerz” lunch club, which meets twice a week and is devoted to the art of d.j.’ing, stood behind a folding table labelled “DANCE FLOOR,” cuing up Kendrick Lamar and PinkPantheress. The overhead lights were off, for ambience, but midafternoon daylight streamed through the windows. The air smelled faintly of lunch and feet. Outside, on the patio, boxes of Jenga had been set out for the wallflowers.
The cafeteria began to fill with students: girls in miniskirts and chunky sneakers; mididresses with ribbed ankle socks; summer dresses over jeans; strappy sandals and florals. Their bra straps showed; their hair and faces were glossy. Most of the boys, it seemed, hadn’t bothered to change, though a number wore bright Hawaiian shirts. Some of them matched, whether by intention or by e-commerce algorithm. They batted the balloons into the air, kicking them and bopping each other on the head until a chaperon, tooting on a whistle, intervened.
Mira arrived with her friends, wearing the pink dress and a pair of Air Force 1s. Sloane, who was dressed elegantly in a brown sheath, carried a little purple flower in a plastic cone proffered by Leo, who wore tuxedo pants and kept a restraining-order distance. The group quickly availed themselves of the refreshments—pizza, lemonade, lunchbox-size bags of chips. There was the sense that nobody quite knew what to do next. It was a far cry from the middle-school dances I remembered from the late nineties, where classmates ground against each other to R. Kelly and otherwise performed a fetid, M.T.V. sexuality they did not quite inhabit in ordinary, lights-on life. (“It should have started at five,” Mira said.) Then the d.j.s put on “Golden,” from the “KPop Demon Hunters” soundtrack, and suddenly the floor was swarmed with children hopping up and down, chanting the lyrics, shaking the linoleum. They formed a circle, holding hands, pulling each other around as if they were doing the hora.
The d.j.s announced a best-dressed contest, and Mira and her friends lined up for judgment. The idea struck me as cruel, but then “Single Ladies” came on, and one by one the kids ran to the front, stunted, and were received by a roar of positivity. When it was Mira’s turn, she did three theatrical twirls, ruffles swirling, and her classmates screamed in appreciation. Sloane won, and was mobbed. Mira and her friends began shoving Sloane toward Leo, with no success. The dance floor split into two groups: the girls danced in a circle, while the boys formed a conga line, looping nervously around them. Mira entered the middle of the circle, pirouetting and curtsying, kicking her leg above her head. When Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby” came on, she dropped to the floor and, in a display that was oddly moving, did the literal worm.
Watching Mira and her chatty, cheerful gaggle, it was strange to know, with no necessary qualifications other than having once been a preteen girl myself, that within the next year, or two, or three, they would be pulled into all manner of minor dramas and major insecurities, make transformative cultural discoveries, experience lifelong personal revelations. They’d have crushes, keep secrets, be teased, or be cruel. They’d be tempted to betray themselves or others. They’d outgrow their own taste, pull away from their siblings, stop laughing so hard and so freely at their parents’ jokes. They’d toss the heavily flavored balms and bottles of candy-scented spritz in the subsequent room refresh, time capsules from the final season of childhood.
Around four-thirty, someone initiated a game of limbo. The speakers were blasting Zara Larsson, and the vibe was high. Mira leaned back, shimmied under the limbo ribbon, then popped up, grinning, and shot her arms out triumphantly. She rejoined her friends, looking radiant and exhilarated, and did an exaggerated sprinkler at the end of the limbo line. Her smile was wide; her outfit was eating. She wouldn’t win, but it didn’t matter. She’d gone under, and made it safely to the other side. ♦