In the Importance of Being Betty, Jamie Passaro profiled a middle-class, 15-year-old girl who reinvented herself as a punk rocker named Betty. In this essay, Passaro writes about her sometimes-awkward relationship with Betty during and after the story.

Now and then, there were things that reminded me of Betty—things I saw or heard and immediately thought of her and her mixed up punk rock ways. I saw her on the streets of Portland with a skateboard and a blue-haired boy, in Bettie Page bangs, in Chevron bathrooms, in fliers for punk bands playing in the garages of broken-down rental houses and in The Tower of Babel. I thought of her as someone from my past, part of my own fumbling mid-twenties.

And then the phone rang one otherwise uneventful Thursday night, and it was Betty. Or whatever it was she was calling herself. It was almost eleven, and it had been more than a year since I’d last heard from her. I was so startled, I spilled half a glass of wine on the couch.

Once, before I knew Betty, we played an icebreaker activity at the alternative night school where she attended and I taught. We were supposed to partner up with someone we didn’t know and list things we had in common. Betty picked me. We listed:

We are pale.
We like loud music.
We like the Pixies.
We like coffee.
We are both growing out our hair.
We are not morning people.
We are not really people-people.
We like to read.
We are writers.

When it was our turn to share with the 30 or so kids and teachers sitting around in a circle, Betty volunteered to read our list. She was wearing her uniform of black Converse low tops, black jeans, a studded belt, a black hooded sweatshirt and a white tank top, the kind she and her friends called “wifebeaters.” Her hair was short, dyed black from blond. She’d given herself straight-across bangs styled after Bettie Page, that 1950’s sex kitten famous for her seductive poses, strong thighs and jet-black hair. At 14, Betty had changed her name from Nicole for Bettie Page. Betty stood up and read our list in the smug way she had of talking to her peers.

After that, she took my writing classes and sat near the front. She was the only kid interested in reading Joan Didion, the only one, it seemed, paying any attention to me. School didn’t challenge her, so she spent her days reading Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade, or studying the lyrics of punk bands like Bad Religion and reading up on the Tower of Babel. She said she was a misanthrope, a word I had to look up in the dictionary before I disagreed. She showed me her journal and the essays she wrote for no reason. In “The Anti-Thesis,” she wrote, “I am a child of the eighties, a child of movements long dead, of wars fought and forgotten, of glamorous junkies passing themselves off as musicians, and corporations seeking things to popularize and corrupt . . . Listening to Korn does not make you hard core. So go ahead and judge me, you obese, counterfeit typical, average American consumer. I’m glad because your judgments keep my society intact.” She was 15 then. I was 25.

I liked Betty because she was gutsy and smart and different in all of the ways I wasn’t when I was her age. When I was 15, I went to school every day and then to my job at my parent’s appliance store, where I rushed through my homework so I could go cruising or watch TV later. Betty skipped school so she could stay home and read. I studied only what was going to be on the test, and I always passed. Betty studied whatever the hell she wanted whenever she wanted and didn’t care if she passed the tests, or at least she pretended she didn’t. I watched videos on MTV and bought the music from the top twenty countdown. Betty found music through friends and concerts and record stores. I tried to please everyone. Betty was in trouble all the time.
I saw that Betty was making what teachers referred to as “poor choices.” But I also thought she was one cool kid—full of herself and full of ideas that were all her own. She was the kind of kid I wished I would have been more like.