Teenagers behave in ways that are incomprehensible to anyone but them. When I was a teenager, every move I made was calculated to get other people to like me and avoid getting in trouble. It’s so easy to tell a teenage girl, «Nobody remembers anything after high school» or «It doesn’t matter what anybody thinks of you,» but those ideas are borderline impossible to fully accept and live by when you’re in the full bloom of puberty. You can cognitively understand that «It Gets Better,» but if you have no tools for what to do in the years before it inevitably gets better by merely becoming an adult, you’re forced to go off your flawed, improvised guidebook that’s bound to illicit results with varying levels of success. 

If you’re an adult dealing with erratic teenage behavior, it’s easy to ask, «What are they thinking?» I have a pet theory for the teen in this story.