There's a scene in Hopelessly Devoted where Mary is sitting in the house seats with her drama teacher, trying to explain who Rizzo is. She talks about the black dress and the heels and the shiny pink jacket, the sunglasses she hides behind, the way she strikes first so nobody can get close to her. And then Mary says the thing that unlocked the whole book for me: a part of her still wants to be pink, but she's not. I've watched that girl walk into my classroom every September for thirty years.
She isn't always angry. Sometimes she's the funny one, the one who gets there first with the joke so the joke can't be about her. Sometimes she's the girl who says she doesn't care about the grade, loudly, before the paper comes back. Sometimes she's the boy who won't read out loud. The costume changes. The reason doesn't.
Here's what I want to say about masks, and it's the thing adults get wrong when we talk to teenagers about being themselves: the mask is not a character flaw. It's engineering. Nobody builds one for fun. You build one because something got through once, and you decided it wasn't going to happen twice.
So when we tell a kid to just be authentic, we're asking them to walk into a building of eleven hundred people and take off the only armor they've got. Of course they won't. I wouldn't. You wouldn't either — and be honest, you still don't. Yours just has a job title on it now.
What changes it isn't a speech. It's one person who sees underneath and doesn't use it against you. That's the entire plot of my book, really. Mary and Jalese don't become friends because someone tells them to. They become friends because they catch each other at a bad moment and neither of them swings.
Rizzo goes deeper than Sandy. That's what Ms. Janis tells Mary, and she's right. Innocence is easy to play. Fitting in is on every single face in that hallway. But the girl in the pink jacket who won't let anyone close — she's the harder part, and she's the truer one.
Find the kid in your life who's wearing the best mask in the building. Sit next to them. Don't ask them to take it off. Just don't flinch when it slips.