Real People

The first couple years or so of young adulthood, to put it simply, is a weird time, especially when old classmates and neighbors creep all over the globe like a spilled drink spreading on the surface of a table, and getting them see to each other again willingly is, as the old saying goes, “like herding cats.” These days, the only thing that brought Nairi Ohanian’s small Rhode Island town together was a funeral. Not for the old-timers; most of them were 85 or older thanks to a strict regimen of steamed vegetables and weekly trips to the senior center for aerobics classes. Nope, these funerals were for the “kids,” a term that Nairi hated when it was used to describe twenty-somethings like her. Kids rolled in the mud. They laughed at knock-knock jokes. They cried for two minutes about not getting to play with the blue Hot Wheels car and then got distracted by another toy two minutes later. Nairi’s parents – Mom, a social worker, and Dad, a psychology professor at Brown who served as a camp counselor during many summers as a young adult – had always told her that kids were like fairies, capable of holding only one emotion at a time in their tiny selves. By that logic, to call young adults “kids” implied that people her age were incapable of experiencing anything beyond what one could touch, anything that could make them want to throw themselves away.