“I'm at a camp with over 100 girls 11 to 13 years old, around my own age, and I feel like my parents are my only friends. -Mackenzie”

“I am 13 years old, I am 13 stone, I have no money, no friends, and boys throw gravel at me. It's my birthday, and I went to bed at 7.15pm.”

“I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas / but not afraid / to speak my lonesomeness in a car, / because not only my lonesomeness / it's Ours, all over America, / O tender fellows --/ & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy / in the moon 100 years ago or in / the middle of Kansas now.”

“The old-fashioned bravado started pissing me off. I pierced my lips together as my nostrils flared. Over 100 years old and boys will still be boys. I hoped for a little bit more maturity.”

“The three species of pine native to Wisconsin (white, red and jack) differ radically in their opinions about marriageable age. The precocious jackpine sometimes bloom and bears cones a year or two after leaving the nursery, and a few of my 13-year-old jacks already boast of grandchildren. My 13-year-old reds first bloomed this year, but my whites have not yet bloomed; they adhere closely to the Anglo-Saxon doctrine of free, white, and twenty-one.”

“I don't always think of myself as ethnic...my mom is Black, and my dad is White, and we like to call my race"Bi-racial". Everyone at camp is interesting because they just call me Black. -Mackenzie”