They did It. 

If you are of a certain age, I’m sure someone in your 5th or 6th grade class, in a quiet whisper, excitedly reported that someone did It. Or wanted to do It. Maybe someone started a rumor that your principal and teacher were doing It. 

And in all these whispered voices, nobody knew exactly what It was. We all thought we had an idea, but at least in the ‘90s, few of us did. I remember once when we heard about a 6th grader from another school who had kissed a boy on a bed under sheets. That had to sort of be It, right? 

Today a 5th grader can just Google all their It questions and have their answers in a matter of seconds, but in the ‘90s, we were just fumbling around, relying on what some older kid in the back of the bus said and trying to make educated guesses on what might be happening after Brenda and Dylan shut the door and 90210 cut to commercial. 

If you wanted real info about It or even if you wanted to see a naked body in the ‘90s, you had to put in the work. You had to find an abandoned stack of Playboys in the woods (when I tell my high school students this, they just give me a look as if I’m Laura Ingalls Wilder incarnate) or just squint at a scrambled channel in a hotel when your parents were out of the room. I remember a high school trip where some guys got the idea to buy one of those hotel movies and went to the front desk with their parent’s credit card and cash, saying we have a credit card to get the movie, but could we pay for it in cash so it doesn’t show up on a credit card statement. If I had been working the front desk, I would’ve just respected all that trouble just to see some boobs and would’ve given them Debbie Does Dallas on the house. 

Remembering all of my misinterpretations of It, I’m sure I was super excited to read Freshman Nights, a book that by its very title has the promise of It. I mean, “nights.” That’s when It happens, right? Freshman Nights doesn’t deliver us a hot steamy sex scene though. Instead, the book takes place over the course of a Parents’ Weekend at Springfield U and kind of like It and all things sex, shows us that at least when it comes to college and growing up, the fantasy, all the things we see on the outside, sometimes do not match up to reality. 

Lauren, who by book four is now a main character, is working with Dash to break down the fantasy of the college Greek scene. By working on this story, Lauren hopes she can right some of the wrongs of the Greek scene, maybe get kicked out of her sorority, and she finds herself growing closer to fellow reporter Dash, culminating in their kiss after saving a student from a cruel hazing. Oh, and since she’s a reporter now and maybe because she’s our character the furthest on the road to self discovery, Lauren gets to be hot now? Her eyes are described as “an astonishing violet color.” I guess investigative journalism is the key to a YA novel makeover? 

KC has spent the entire book series trying to escape the reality of her humble hippie parent upbringing and put on the fantasy image of a rich business school student, on her way to Wall Street. Trying to live a fantasy has resulted in reality catching up and hurting people in the process. She’s hurt Steven, Lauren and she ends up hurting her father by telling him not to come to Parents’ Weekend. At one point, she says, “I’d settle for someone just thinking I’m a normal human with feelings instead of a monster with a heart of ice.” KC works to repair her wrongs throughout the novel, helping Lauren break the hazing story, warning Faith about Chrisopher, and eventually making amends with her father. 

Our wild child Winnie finally gets a little bit of a spicy story when her mother brings her letters from Travis, the guy she dated and lost her virginity to during her summer in Europe. Winnie thought Travis had ghosted her but it turns out the letters had been held up at the post office and he had been thinking about her the whole time. Travis is living in Seattle and playing with a band and seems the total opposite of Josh, the guy Winnie has been crushing on. So Winnie is set up with a dilemma for the next book: Travis, the fantasy, the passion, the adventure or Josh, the reliable, the responsible? 

Good girl gone bad Faith gives us the most possibility of It. While her upperclassman hook up Christopher has promised to break up with his fiancee, he still seems suspiciously reluctant to make things official with Faith. However, he does want her to come up to his friend’s cabin with him for an overnight … and It is definitely implied. 

Faith wants to go, but she also wants to make sure that Christopher is for real before she takes this step in their relationship. First though, she has to get through Parents’ Weekend, and we get to meet what has to be one of my favorite characters in the series, Faith’s younger sister Marlee. I like Marlee because she’s the closest we’ve seen the series get to an early ‘90s teenager. The book takes place in the Pacific Northwest, and by 1990, Seattle grunge was in full swing (maybe Travis and his band were trying to get a set at The Central Saloon, who knows?). This is the fourth book in the series though and not one of our main girls even has a flannel. Marlee, Faith’s high school age sister, brings us the angst of the 1990s. She has a great sarcastic Gen X line after watching  Faith working with a group of pre-schoolers, telling her sister “How perfectly wonderful and sweet … You and those kids. It’s enough to make me go into a diabetic coma.” 

Marlee’s grungy angst deepens over the weekend, culminating in her refusing to go home with her parents. She finally opens up to Faith, telling her how hard it is to live up to the perfect image of Faith and how their parents never really listen to what is actually going on with her. Marlee’s big confession is not only has she been cutting class but she has been hanging out with “some real loser types” and cut class to do “drugs” with them. This scene reads a little out of DARE because it’s just “drugs” and the other girls repeat “you did drugs?” Not ‘I smoked pot.’ Not even ‘we got high.’ Just the Scholastic-Book-Fair-friendly “we did drugs.” Faith tries to relate to Marlee by telling her she’s not the perfect sister that Marlee thinks she is. Marlee even finds out about the possible cabin tryst, and she’s there when KC reveals that Christopher was hooking up with another girl at the frat party. The sisters end with a better understanding of each other, not perfect, but better, and as a reader, I was left hoping we see more of Marlee. 

Near the beginning of the book, Winnie tells Faith, “You know, Faith, it’s okay to not be okay every once in a while” Surprisingly good mental health advice, especially for the 1990s, and especially good advice for all of our characters who end the book with a lot of questions, but a hope of eventually being okay. 

Faith also gets in a surprisingly insightful line when driving Marlee back home. She tells KC “I guess we did tell Marlee the truth about one thing … That college is about finding out about lots of things. And not everything you learn is going to be nice.”  Reading this in 5th grade, I clearly didn’t learn a lot about It. I probably read and thought that college was fun, exciting, and a little messy. But in 5th grade, I was already on the journey of learning that nobody has college, life or even the famous It figured out. Maybe that’s one of the things that made young adult series like this so special–they weren’t totally about sex or even an accurate representation of college, but about growing up, helping us piece by piece replace fantasy with reality. And I think I’m grateful for those innocent days where answers weren’t on a phone in our hands, and we could keep reading and being curious a little longer. 

• Fashion Moment-Winnie: “She was in day-glo tights, a crop top, and a fringed suede jacket that she’d borrowed from Faith. Winnie figured she looked like Daniel Boone at an athletic contest.” 
• That’s So ‘90s quote–the description of the start of the frat party “Party on, dudes!” “Yo!” “Brothers, we are having ourselves a foot-stomping extravaganza!”