And in high school, people are always watching so there's always a reason to pose.

Normally when a person has a stellar image another person's waiting in the wings to tear them apart. They're waiting for that one fatal flaw to expose itself.

I tried getting my dad to buy me a beeper for my birthday,” he says, “but he thinks only doctors and drug dealers need them.

I sat. And I thought. And the more I thought, connecting the events in my life, the more my heart collapsed.

That is all that happened. Why did you hear something else?

The young adult literature is relatively new - it just kind of exploded in the 2000s. When I grew up, there weren't bookstores with sections dedicated to teen lit, nor was my generation raised reading books written specifically for us. Because of that, today we still think of books for teens as children's books and so when you write a book that includes sensitive topics, it just seems even more controversial. What's troubling to me about that is these are issues adults know that teens deal with. Not writing about them makes them something we don't, or can't talk about.

You can't stop the future You can't rewind the past The only way to learn the secret ...is to press play.