10 Signs You Might Be a Precocious 16-Year-Old Named Annabelle.

1. You like tennis, but you wish the entire game were just hitting the ball as hard as you could so that it made that wonderful PUNG sound.

2. Once, you invited a girl you didn’t know well over for a sleepover and you made her put her head under a blanket with you so you could tell secrets, and you told her that over the summer you spied on your father in his home office and he was just sitting there with a gun in his mouth. This did not happen. You do not know why you lie, but it gives you energy, it is exciting, this glittery wind of what might be evil that courses through you.

3. It interests you that when people see flowers they think: Let’s cut off their heads!

4. If anything, your mother is the one more likely to off herself. You hate your mother. Even just watching her crack her knuckles as she drinks tea makes you want to vomit.

5. You have recently discovered Verdi. Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! If only everything could be as pure as music. If aliens came, you would offer them cats and Verdi and porno and say: “It is your call. Perhaps this should be destroyed, but it is awful interesting.”

6. You have never kissed a boy, but you absolutely would. You imagine it happening in some kind of damp, frightening grotto.

7. You spend a lot of time on Snapchat, not posting about your life, but following other people, mostly drag queens, but also Paris Hilton, who, it turns out, has pet FERRETS.

8. When your mother and father insisted you get a summer job, you complied, and to their horror, you got a job at a factory packaging model airplane parts. Because they simply can’t have it both ways.

9. You are looking forward to college but you are also afraid. You are worried you will be just like a bird that breaks its neck flying into a window. Your desire to discard your innocence is its own form of naivety, and you will probably get date raped or try to commit suicide or develop an eating disorder. You can sense this, but you also desire it. INTENSITY!!!

10. Your mother is a photographer and her most famous photograph is a picture of you, naked, at four years old, playing with a toy gun. So edgy. Your mother is just a Diane Arbus hack. Last Christmas you told her so and she just stared at you for a moment and then raised her eyebrows. Your mother is on so many antidepressents that she can’t feel anything, and nothing you can do will make her feel, nothing you ever do will get through to her, she is just a huge wall that you fling yourself against. But no wall can stand forever.