Love and War Are the Same Things in Our Digital Age
It was the first time I realized playing hard to get existed outside of Katherine Heigl romcoms and the pages of Gossip Girl. Summer vacation had dawned in the tenth grade and I elected to spend mine on a student exchange in small-town Australia. My host was Mackenzie, one year my junior but leaps and bounds more experienced in everything that made up our late night conversations. Coming from a tiny, private, all-female school, I found this girl astounding; she seemed so effortless, but all at once had command of her closely-knit group of friends and boys as far as two towns over. To me, still a never-been-kissed kind of innocent, she was the messiah of all things love, sex, and bearing two X chromosomes.