Love & Profanity: A Collection of True, Tortured, Wild, Hilarious, Concise, and Intense Tales of Teenage Life

By Rachael Hanel, Geoff Herbach, Kasandra Duthie and 40 more

Love & Profanity features more than forty brief, brilliant, and unforgettable true stories from writers both renowned and on the rise. Discover strange and surprising scenes of people coming of age amidst the everyday intensity of teenage life. Witness transformative moments arising from the mundane. Behold the young adult in full splendor and horror, bursting with love and profanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Capstone Young Readers
• Release date: Jan 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781630790288

Book preview

Part One: Love & Profanity

THREE STORIES ABOUT WATER AND VOMITING

BY ADAM REX

I couldn’t have been more than six and it was the Monsoon Season: a month or so in late summer when Phoenix received nearly all the rain it would get the whole year. That day it had rained for three hours in a neighborhood with no storm drains, and the streets ran like rivers.

What are you doing? my brother asked me. For a moment I considered the question, sitting on the edge of the curb, my pink hand submerged in the fast, filthy water, and wondered the same thing. Certainly my mom would wonder later, when she learned I’d spent the day with my hands and eventually feet in floodwaters thick with garbage and pulverized worms.

I’m fishing, I said finally. I’m going to catch a fish. I then turned my attention back to the river, cupping my hand in the current.

You’re not going to catch anything, said my brother. He was three years older, and knew things. Just ’cause the street looks like a river doesn’t mean there’s suddenly fish in it now.

I silently agreed that this was probably true, though the constant barrage of tiny objects (pebble, twig, something soft, pull-tab) against my hand in the cloudy water kept my hopes alive and then bump, my fingers closed suddenly around something big, the biggest thing yet, and I pulled it from the water.

It was a fish. A plastic fish—slimy, blue, a toy from something. I turned it over and over in my hand.

I told you, I said, holding the fish up for inspection. I said I would.

My brother leaned over and looked suddenly sick. His eyes were wide. His mouth opened and shut. I like to think he looked sick because I’d bested him, though it might have been just the garbage and pulverized worms. He was delicate like that.

That’s not a real fish, he said finally. It’s just a toy fish, not a real one. That’s just a toy.

I thought this was a fantastically stingy thing to say. I knew it wasn’t real. But I’d said I was fishing and not ten seconds later had a plastic fish and wasn’t that amazing? Didn’t that deserve something? My brother was petty, and I wanted to tell him so, but I didn’t know that word yet. So I said:

You’re a turd-boy. You smell like turds.

Then I left, feeling just like God, and looked for a bowl of water to put my fish in.

* * *

When I was maybe eight or nine my family took a summer trip to California, and one of the highlights of this trip was supposed to be a whale-watching tour on a boat. If we were lucky we’d see a whale breach, or spray water out its blowhole, or do somersaults maybe. I wasn’t really clear on what to expect. I think I was expecting a good time, though. I had the Gilligan’s Island theme song stuck in my head as we boated away from the dock.

The weather started getting rough. Not like a storm or anything, but the ocean was choppy and the tiny ship was tossed. And quickly I noticed that for each lurch of the boat there was something like a little vinegar wave inside of me, breaking in the opposite direction. It roiled and tumbled, dredging up the contents of my stomach and squeezing them up into my throat. It occurred to me that I was shortly to have a blowhole of my own.

I blame my parents. Carsickness was like a hobby of mine. I once managed to get carsick on a horse. Really the only good reason to put me on a boat was if I’d recently swallowed something valuable and you wanted it back.

My dad recognized the look on my face and suggested I run to the rear railing. I threw up over the stern for something like an hour and a half. I didn’t see any whales.

Later we made it back onto dry land, which I made some showy promise of never leaving again. My stomach settled, we went to dinner, and I had shrimp for the first time at an all-you-can-eat buffet. The shrimp were batter-dipped and fried, and I was at a point in my life when I would have eaten my own fingers if they were batter-dipped and fried. But there was something else going on at dinner that night—a personal grudge, a score I was settling between me and the sea—as I devoured a second plate, and a third.

* * *

High school is a flood, but I didn’t think of her as some miracle I pulled from the water; she was just the next thing to fall into my grasp. A teenage boy will ask out a girl he doesn’t particularly like, and I didn’t particularly like or dislike Rebecca. I thought she was pretty, and I thought she’d say yes because I was a senior. So I was right about that.

We dated for weeks, maybe a couple months. And what a hassle those weeks must have been for her: Once I got a kiss, I tried to get a feel. After I finally got that feel, I thought I was owed it every time. She’d try to come up for air, and I’d only pull her back under again.

I’m forcing the metaphors now. Shall I say a high school boyfriend is like a shark? Because he has to keep moving forward or die? Always on to the next thing, never backing up—can sharks back up? I should Google it.

Here’s the truth: Upon leaving a movie theater together (in which we saw Mermaids—this was 1990) we found that the far end of the parking lot was hosting a small carnival. Neither one of us had noticed it in the light of evening, but now at night it was impossible to miss. A kaleidoscope of light.

Rebecca wanted to go on a ride called the Whirlpool. A great metal octopus of a thing whirled you around while the love seat you were sitting in spun unpredictably on its hub. I said, "Let’s do it." Teenage optimism is often indistinguishable from stupidity.

By the second turn I was closing my eyes, hoping that would make it better. By the third I was sucking back big bellyfuls of parking lot air and shouting for the carny to stop the ride. By the fifth turn it was too late.

It was hard to know where to aim; my vomit drew spirographic curves in the air. I managed not to get any on me. When the ride stopped, Rebecca found a single spatter on her lapel, like America’s worst corsage.

She wasn’t mad. But something tipped between us that night. She came alive—chatty, vivacious. I could have fallen in love with the girl that came out of the Whirlpool.

I was still woozy so I asked her to drive home. After a couple lights she grinned and said, "All this time I thought you were just a really careful driver. But you were mashing the pedal—this is as fast as your little car can go."

That would be a better last line if my car had been a boat. Pretend it’s a boat.

Adam Rex lives in Tucson. He’s the author and/or illustrator of a lot of things, including The True Meaning of Smekday, which is being adapted by DreamWorks into the film Home. He didn’t write his YA novel, Fat Vampire, to cash in on the vampire craze; and that’s fine, because it didn’t.

BREATHLESS

BY HEATHER SELLERS

I was eleven almost twelve but I looked thirteen when I walked across Orlando toward my father’s apartment on Orange Avenue. (I told him telepathically I was on my way. I can’t stand living with her anymore!) I was thinking: French toast, snuggling with the funnies. I tried different ways of walking: fugitive style, fancy-bra-wearer walk, and a walk that always provoked my mother. Why are you sticking out your bottom like that? There were no sidewalks. Parking lots and sandy yards, sandspurs, sandspurs, sandspurs—on my tennies like jacks. I placed one sandspur on my tongue, green, tiny pricks, not yet ripened to a constellation of swords. To balance that sharp star in my mouth and walk well, I had to keep the pressure inside of my mouth even, and this super-hard task made me feel all the difficulty of my life was both manageable and behind me.

I held my tongue to the spur, and I walked and pretended. Pretended I was walking to church. I pretended I’d saved orphans. Now aren’t you sorry, Mother, aren’t you ashamed? I walked for miles. Men honked. I waved back politely, but what I meant was, Rescue this girl! I waved with both hands, quick. Honk honk, wave wave. I meant Take me to your house and let’s eat. I did not know the significance of she was found with no panties. I didn’t know what no panties implied other than forgetfulness, some kind of personal dirty. Hey baby. I waved Thank you. I was not used to feeling powerfully pretty, traffic-affecting pretty. At school, I was dark, mute, attractive as a hairball.

This was my second arrival at my father’s apartment complex. First time on foot. Holley Apartments. Why an e? Why holes in the sign? Gunshot holes? There were bullet holes in my house. They’re the opposite of eyes. I spat my spur, galloped up the outdoor cement stairs, ran down the corridor, dodging around the puddles on the lanai. At his door, I knocked and knocked and knocked. It’s your daughter! I pressed my ear to the peeling blue door. Television, voices. The smell of cigarette smoke. Not that again.

That’s when I remembered. In the woods behind my father’s apartment complex, in the pine scrub, a girl’s body was found. When? I didn’t know time well. A girl from my school. Trisha. I loved that name, Trisha. Like tissue and winning, tish and ta-da! Trisha. Tisha? I loved her but I didn’t know her. Everyone kind of knew her after she was found dead behind Holley Apartments. Her dress pulled up. No panties. What? This was 1976. Standing outside my father’s apartment that Saturday afternoon in July, I saw a swath of my not-knowing disappear in a bright flash.

I watched myself from outside myself so as to not be so tiny and so hopeful, and when I turned the doorknob, I fell in. Couch, table, kitchen, all one room. It didn’t take much time to see in the dark. I tiptoed through the smoke, opened the little half-fridge. Six pack of beer. Liquefying head of lettuce. I pressed my hand on the card table—stacks of mail, ashtrays overflowing, tumblers of liquid. Sticky. Slowly, I walked down the hall. Was this my father’s apartment? The hall took longer than the entire walk across Orlando.

In the back room, an air conditioner up high in the window shuddering, banging. Blue-black light. My father, asleep on a bed that was half-folded, an L. My father, in the midst of being swallowed. I put my hand on his sock foot. I wagged the foot back and forth. Hey there honey. So good to see you. I watched the soft pink forms on the television screen. Surging synthesizer. Uh uh. Parts of people: a man’s leg, a woman’s breasts, a purse of skin. Soundtrack: urgent, dull, like pain. Was this like a murder everyone wanted to be in?

I survived, she says to herself sometimes. Not all of you survived.

Walking down Orange, pretending I was beautiful, pretending I was dead. Motorcycle guy, no helmet, at the light on Holden. Wanna ride? Close to home. Not that close to home. I hopped on the back and put my hands on the sides of him. He said, Where to? I did not know because I knew he knew, and the light turned green and I held on.

Heather Sellers is a professor of English. Her books include the memoir You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, the short story collection Georgia Under Water, a children’s book Spike and Cubby’s Ice Cream Island Adventure, three volumes of poetry, and three books on the craft of writing. She loves to ride her Bianchi bicycle, preferably in the rain. Heather was born and raised in Florida.

GIRL FIGHT

BY JOEY FRANKLIN

Marty Manzoni’s mother was fat. We all knew it, and we all knew better than to ever mention it, but that day in the school hall before basketball practice we were waiting for Coach to show up, and we got to talking about girls, as boys do, and someone mentioned Heather, a girl with sandy blond hair who carried her bulk around on ballerina tiptoes and told me just yesterday, above the noise of the bus, that she liked me—a girl with whom, against my better sixth-grade judgment, I had secretly agreed to go out.

Marty Manzoni, whose mother we all knew was fat, had been bouncing a ball in the hallway when he turned to me, smiling.

She’s a fat girl, he said. "Why do