One of the things that happens when you write a children’s book is you start spending more time with children. Until now, my strongest impression of children has been that they belong to other people. Some of my friends have kids, but they are all little kids, and they all come firmly attached to a parent. Even when the parents are gone, when I’m babysitting, for instance — and let me pause to say this is something I’ve done maybe four times, and at least one of those times the kid in question conked out before I even got there and I just hung around and drank wine and watched Buffy on DVD, which is exactly what I would have been doing at home — anyway, even when the parents are gone the parents are there, their shoes are lying around the house and the kid talks about them and the kid smells like the parents and the parents smell like the kid and it’s all pretty umbilical.
The children I’ve been meeting lately are older and they travel in packs. They still have soft skin and big eyes, sometimes outlined with eyeliner, which I could object to more if I hadn’t been and didn’t continue to be so totally into eyeliner, and they still chatter and worry, but they worry about different things. Little kids seem to bounce between, Let me do this by myself! And, Watch me! Applause they take for granted. Eleven and twelve year-olds are starting to figure out you can do something better or worse, and that applause is sort of contingent. They start checking around the room to see if what they’re saying is right, except sometimes they forget to check and just blurt, and then comes this agony-face of, Was that stupid? I wish I could tell them how much I envy the blurt, how great the blurt is, greater even in its way than the four year-old’s bandy-legged, absurdly confident pirouette, because it’s happening in spite of self-consciousness. It’s the flower on the weed.
The teenagers, on the other hand, occupy a post-blurt landscape, where what they want to say comes bundled with an idea of how they sound saying it, the kind of person it makes them, the shape their face takes when they speak, the moues, the hair-tosses, the leg with its flip-flopped foot dangling over the side of the chair. They’re more confident now of what right is, and, sure, they’re as mistaken in their confidence as the rest of us, but there’s an earnestness to it that seems, well, childlike. I think they still believe in a map — that with the map and a sidekick and a couple of cheese sandwiches they can follow the dashes to the X and dig up the treasure and hand it around to the people who were good to them and then, after a tense moment, hand it around to those who weren’t.
The treasure? I don’t know what that is for them. I don’t know what it was for me, except that I knew it was going to be spectacular. I have this image of myself as a tiny figure on a giant map, jumping from one dash to the next, each dash a solid resting place, a stone, and ahead of me lies the big X, very dark against the parchment. There it is, the treasure, the end, but the X is not another stone, it’s an opening in the earth, and so I start the long, slow fall and discovery of life underground.
