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Isis Blake’s Five Rules For Winning Wars Against Pretty Boys And Other Vital Protips For Surviving High School Never trust them: When girls turn 13, there’s this crazy phenomenon I like to call ‘the grownup syndrome’ that happens to them. All of a sudden, dudes think it’s okay to snap bras, call girls whores, and sexualize their bods without their consent. It’s a tragic product of the patriarchy! And idiocy. But mostly patriarchy. There’s only one way to deal with teenage boys, and that’s to never trust them ever. They’re programmed to see girls as objects for their gratification and that is kind of extremely gross! Teenage boys don’t know how to kiss: Sure, the movies like to pretend they do, but outside of sparkling not-real vampire stalkers, kissing is a foreign concept to most boys. Except Jack Hunter. Don’t ask me how I know that – I might die from embarrassment. Or punch his face all over again. Regardless, they’ll try to suck your face like a lemon and it’ll be a very wet, and very scarring, experience. Let them mack on some other girl and get a bit of experience before they worm their way over to you….

When I was in the 8th grade I had to do a project that covered the decade of The Great Depression which was, of course, depressing. Hoovervilles, Dust Bowls, The Grapes of Wrath. Gah. The details of this project are mostly forgotten except for one thing—my introduction to the movies of the Golden Era of Hollywood. I saw Gone With the Wind for the first time and was enthralled. I’m fairly certain I was the only 13 year old who had her mother take her to find an A-line, ankle-length skirt and practiced walking pigeon-toed to make it sway the way Scarlett made her hoops go side-to-side. After my Technicolor romance with the Old South, I moved on to the exotic, smoke-filled Rick’s Café of Casablanca, then screwball comedies, the epic battle of the sexes, and, of course, the sentimental romances. At the time I was probably more enamored with the debonair leading men of the 1940s than those I was paying to see at the theater with my friends. My grandmother and I had a running argument over who had been more handsome: she said Gary Cooper, I said Cary Grant. I think we both won. In my new…