“I learned that Lucky Charms cereal is, like, seventy-five percent sugar, bananas are poisonous to monkeys, and you should rinse Popsicles before eating them to avoid losing taste buds. I learned that you can kind of just say ‘slay’ whenever, as filler, that you can address both your girls and your dad as ‘bro,’” writes Anna Wiener in “The Life and Times of an American Tween,” a recent New Yorker piece about a San Francisco twelve-year-old and her friends that expands into larger ideas around being a twenty-first century tween. Write a short story in which one of your main characters is a teenager. Draw from your own experiences as a teen, as well as your knowledge of Gen Alpha, to round this character out with age-specific habits, emotional turmoil, energy, and outlook. Consider how the character’s use of slang conveys a phase of in-betweenness, intense observation, and playacting in this preadult window of their life.
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