What is it with thirteen-year-old girls? After the whole three-year-old princess thing, it has got to be the most obnoxious and/or socially awkward stage. Here’s the thing – thirteen-year-old girls have just started to come to grips with the whole puberty, adolescence, and hormonal shebang, and it’s like a Revelation! Wow! Boys, lipgloss and eyeliner all the way! Something snaps and the Saddle Club books and teddy bears get shoved in the back of a cupboard and they feel so much older, like some kind of accelerated self-awareness making them way more mature than mere twelve-year-olds. They’ve (thankfully) moved on from glittery Lip Smackers, the makeup essential of every teenybopper from the ages of eight to eleven, and they’re considering fake tan but haven’t yet got the nerve to try it. Suddenly, shopping at Target just doesn’t do it for them anymore – they HAVE to have those gorgeous sass&bide (if they have that kind of cash) or Supré (if they’ve just been obsessively reading their older sister’s Dolly magazines) jeans EVERYONE’S wearing, and it’s so not cool anymore to get up at five-thirty in the morning to watch cartoons. As for going to the movies to see a Disney confection with mum? Forget it! Someone they know might actually SEE them! No, thirteen is all about going shopping with the girls and grabbing a latte, and dancing self-consciously with the earphones on in Sanity to the latest Missy Elliot single (even if they’ve always been more Hilary Duff than Fiddy Cent). Old reruns of Sex and the City are now hilarious because not only does everyone think it’s the best show, but they can so totally relate to what those thirty-something single New York women are going through! Ah yes, thirteen-year-old girls are so excruciating to watch precisely because they just don’t know how typically thirteen-year-old-like they really are.

I was on the midmorning, territory-of-senior-citizens bus to go meet my friends and see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. (Overheard from a ten-year-old girl while walking out of the cinema: “Johnny Depp is soooo hot in that movie!” EWWWWW! Sleek feminine bob and pasty white skin, mmm… I think not. But let’s not even start talking about ten-year-old girls…) Anyway, I’m sitting on the bus and these two so obviously thirteen-year-old girls strut on. They’re wearing almost identical but differently coloured lacy gypsy-style tops with skinny jeans, and their newly layered and highlighted fringes are painstakingly fixed in matching mini-quiffs. As they stumble up the aisle when the bus takes off, their extraordinarily loud conversation projects all the way to the back of the bus. Why is it that they all feel compelled to adopt the nasal Strine twang favoured by posh inner-suburban housewives and ageing socialites (“You look absolutely gorrrgeous, darling, mwa, mwa…”)? And why do they always have to talk so damn loudly about the most inane, long-exhausted subjects? “I’d like, so wouldn’t want to go to like, Gen from like, kinder to Year 12… and like, she said she wouldn’t turn up if they were going to be there…” Maybe it’s just something that starts at thirteen, because it’s definitely not just thirteen-year-old girls who have deliberately loud, inane conversations on public transport, but it’s as if they think that if everyone knows exactly what parties they went to on the weekend and which boys they’re hanging out with, they’d gain recognition and acceptance – that people will think they’re so much cooler and more interesting and want to know them if they have really full-on social lives and so many acquaintances that they can hold entire vapid conversations about them.

Thirteen-year-old boys are just as bad. It’s that age when their voices have broken but the growth spurts have yet to kick in, so they’re still pretty much weedy little dropkicks with deep voices and hormones, dressed head to toe in either full on skate gear or full on surfie clothes. They’re starting to really pay attention to the way they wear their hair, with handfuls of gel run inexpertly through their purposely messy locks (the precocious ones discovered hair gel at age eleven). Like their female counterparts, thirteen-year-old boys also think they’re really hot stuff – which is probably why they will give anything female and under the age of thirty that crosses their path a thorough, not-so-subtle once-over. (Dream on, sweetheart.) But thirteen is also the age of the attitude: the male pout and the practiced boredom. It fades by about sixteen, when the realisation dawns that being articulate is just as fun as being sullen, and scores you more chicks while you’re at it no patronizing tone meant, but at thirteen, guys are virtually unapproachable.

I can’t visualise, and I don’t think I really want to know, whether I was that kind of girl at thirteen (or perhaps worse, but I REALLY don’t want to think about that), but I’m pretty sure I’ve passed that stage by now. (Right?) It’s nothing to be ashamed of, I guess, just another one of those awkward rites of passage.

But by god, it sure is fun for anyone past the age of thirteen to observe...

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