Somewhere Out There: Anna, Laura, Thu

I would have been an excellent teenage girl. I’m confident about this in a way I’m not confident about much else. I’d have had three best friends—call them Anna, Laura, and Thu—and we’d have spent Friday nights putting on too much makeup, eating ice cream straight from the tub, laughing at boys in our underwear, talking about nothing that would matter in ten years. That life exists in some parallel timeline and I think about it more than I probably should.

Being born with a dick has its advantages—social, professional, practical. I’m not pretending otherwise. But there’s a specific texture to teenage girl friendship, that particular intensity and ease running at the same time, that I’ve always been slightly envious of in a way I can’t fully articulate and have given up trying to. It’s not about gender. It’s about that version of closeness. Inviting Janos, Ming-Lee, and Paulchen over to giggle through a bottle of wine and stick glitter to each other’s chests—it wouldn’t be the same thing, and we all know it.

The girls in Rebekah Campbell’s short film Teenage Girl, written up here, do all of that—everything young people without anything to prove do when left to themselves. Anna, Laura, Thu: wherever you are, we would have been the best of friends. I swear.