Study the stage, young women
Because the day will come when you fall in love with a boy
                                                             ­  who's in love with you
                                                   but your friend loves him, too.
And let's face it. She deserves him.
So do it for her - channel Dorothy's excitement at the Land of Oz,
                             Hello Dolly's kindly matchmaking.
                             Be the Nurse to her Juliet; keep her secrets.
Only at night allow yourself to lose character.
You can then become Eponine in the rain,
                                       Christine in the depths of the opera house,
                                       Maria watching her world torn apart.
Avoid the boy's gaze if you can, ladies,
Because he knows you're no Dorothy,
                                              no Dolly,
                                              no Nurse.
He knows and you know, but you do it for her.

We smoke at a house within stumbling distance of fast food.
                                                                            [Such a bad idea.]
I couldn't tell you how long we stay or what we talk about,
          ["Who's downstairs?"]
But I usually laugh so hard I run out of sound and air.
                   ["I want to say it's Matt, but he's right here."]
My eyelids gradually drift together until they're completely closed.
         ["Is she okay?"]
It takes me a while to notice, sometimes.
                  ["Of course she is. Look at that smile."]
I can't light a lighter.
       ["Seriously? Aren't you like a genius? Just watch-"]
I won't let them teach me either.
                ["Okay, fine. You're lucky we like you."]
It's the quietest I can ever manage to be.
       ["Look at that smile."]
I'm just sinking and floating.
                                                                           [Such a good idea.]

if you KNEW yourself*
you'd be too simple *to exist.

Guys with long hair have agendas. And if they don't, they're stoners and 'agenda' a really long word, man.

Guys with long hair are the poetic types with acoustic guitars and incense in their dorm room and they hold their hair back with a pen behind their ear and they use it to write in a leather-bound journal about girls who smoke too much and have soft ***** so they can pick up more girls who smoke too much and have soft *****.

Guys with long hair are the metalheads who sit in the back of class and use their hair to distract from the fact that they're wearing poor-quality ironic headphones that project Alice in Chains to everyone within a four-desk radius but no one's going to say anything because hey, that guy's a creep.

Guys with long hair are the classical types that play expensive instruments and have beautiful eyes that you can't see very often and have to keep ponytail elastics on their wrists, their wrists that never stop moving, conducting, tapping, curling, because Chopin slows for no man, no matter how long his locks.

And if you poured all these guys with long hair in a test tube and melted them until the agendas broke and forged and changed colors, you'd have him.

I found him in a smoky sweet basement in a house where everyone belongs but no one should actually live. I braided his shoulder-brushing hair without asking and saw his smile like a chunk of snow the size of your high school falling off a mountain, fast and white, huge and more important than anything else around.

I found him again in a different basement where only musicians belong. He invited me into the closet with the piano and it's like he asked me to crawl inside his head and hang out for a while. He casually mentioned his favorite angry bands while his fingers brushed keys in an order they seemed to know on their own, tendons and strings.

He says things that deserve to be handwritten in leather-bound journals. He holds your wrist with one hand when you shake the other because people have become desensitized to handshakes and don't feel the human contact of it anymore. He hugs to the right because you're supposed to hug heart-to-heart.

*"People are going to judge based on what they see anyway. Might as well make sure they're right, sort of."

I want to fight
                          - literally -
like the kind where I step in a ring of some kind
   and beat the crap out of a stranger.
I want to use this muscle I've done nothing to earn.
I want a mouthguard with my name on it
  and gloves with 'your name' on them.
The expert says they'll call me Mayhem -
  the dancer who fights, the cheerleader who fights.
I've never fought before, but a part of me knows
I was made for it.