An Ounce Of Cure

As the old saying goes, “an ounce of cure is worth a pound of prevention”. I believe that this is what the author thought of when choosing the title for this story. There is a lot of wisdom found in these words that is usually only realized after the fact. This reminds me of another old saying that I think also applies to this story – “Hindsight is twenty-twenty”. How many times have we thought, “if only I knew then what I know now”? Would we have made the same choices? This question is difficult to answer since we cannot change the past.

This story is about a teenage girl, whose first heartbreak leads to some rather unfortunate events. She tells us about her first love and her first kiss. “Two months, and a few amatory stages later, he dropped” her for a girl who was performing opposite him in a school play. Watching him with the other girl was more than she could bear and the night she went to see the play was “the beginning of months of real, if more or less self-inflicted, misery” for her. While baby-sitting one night, she made the fatal mistake of getting drunk. She then calls her best friend, who shows up with another girl and several boys, to help her with her situation. Before she was able to cover up the ill-fated events, the couple returned home unexpectedly. She then had to explain what happened to her mother. Her mother then buys a bottle of Scotch and goes to see the couple to discuss her daughter’s actions. She was forbidden to date again until she turned sixteen and she had to pay for the bottle out of her baby-sitting money. Her reputation suffered greatly until the fall, when another girl did something even more scandalous and people forgot about her. In the end, she discovered that she was completely over the boy and she learned a valuable lesson about how actions have consequences.

I found this story very enjoyable to read. I felt that the story was well written and conveyed a realistic insight into what some teenage girls experience. I, having once been a teenager, can relate to the girl in the story. Although I didn’t get drunk, I still recall my first love and the crushing heartache I felt when he broke up with me. People deal with rejection and disappointment in different ways, and sometimes we can use poor judgment.