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I’m sixteen years old. I live with my mom and my stepdad, my stepsister, my half-sister, and I have a brother that doesn’t live with me. I’m the oldest. My mom had me when she was seventeen. In some ways it made her life better and in other ways it made it worse. When I was three months old, she went back and finished high school. I think that’s really cool, ’cause a lot of teen mothers don’t.

We live in the biggest county in West Virginia, but it has the least amount of people. We don’t even have a Wal-Mart here. We just have the one high school and the middle school and two elementary schools. In my sophomore class there’s fifty-six. The nearest city, with like actual shopping stores where you can buy clothes and stuff, is an hour away.

Here, it’s not like you get to choose what kind of people you want to hang out with. You can either hang out with cool people or you can hang out with not cool people, it’s not like there’s a lot of different groups of people that are well-liked and that get along. If you have a disagreement with one group of people, it’s like a bunch of them might gossip. You can say Susie got her hair cut and three hours later you get a phone call that Susie got her hair cut and it turned purple and now she’s dyeing it magenta.

I think my mom understands, because it’s kind of the same way for her, too. We used to live in the city, and a lot of people that go to school here they don’t know how much better it is there. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of good things about the country, but my mom went through it too and she knows what the differences are, and a lot of people here don’t really know.

Once a week after school, we go to what they call Girls Night at High Rocks [an enrichment program for girls], and we can take art and photography classes and stuff that we don’t get the opportunity to take in school, because of our school being so small. Sometimes we do community service with elderly people in the nursing home. Every time we go in there, I come out in tears, because it makes me so sad. People should take time to get to know people, and try to make their lives as good as possible.

Sarah, from High Rocks, is a really good listener. A few months ago I found out that my best friend was pregnant, and she’s only fifteen. I told my mom about it, but then I talked to Sarah about what I should do, and how I should try to help her. I didn’t want my mom to make a judgment about her, so I didn’t tell her all the details. I don’t want somebody always to be there to solve my problems for me, you know. I want to be able to think about them myself.

Every summer I usually spend a month with my godmother in California. I’ve been doing it since I was real little. Every time I go out there we take a little road trip to the place we call the cabin, and we go up there and go swimming, and it’s all special. I’m her navigator, and every time we go a different way. I learned how to do the maps and stuff. And she taught me how to do watercolors and take professional-looking photography.

Some day I want to have a magazine about teenagers, but I don’t want it to be like the magazines that we have now—I want it to be different. Like on the fashion pages, it’s actually going to be clothes that people can afford, and it’s going to be real people modeling the clothes, average looking people, not supermodels.

And in the advice columns, it’s not going to be the same stuff over and over again, it’s going to be different things that people really do wonder about. I think the main focus will be girls, but the boys could pick it up and read it and they could like some stuff in it.

I want to encourage people to help out other people and do community service, and I want to tell stories about people that did that, or what people have overcome.

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