I first heard the word "Bellevue" on the Upper East Side, in my fifth-grade classroom. Our teacher was absent. In time-honored tradition, we were trying to crush the spirit of our substitute teacher. When she turned her back, we hooted like monkeys. One kid pelted a spitball. Another emptied his little cardboard carton of milk on the floor. An eraser sailed through the air, trailing white chalk dust. Suddenly, the classroom door opened. There stood a short, balding guy in full 70's regalia: tinted aviator glasses, mustache, sideburns, polyester shirt, protruding belly, low-slung pants. To a fifth grader, this man was worthier of respect than the President of the United States. His face was haggard because we worried him continually. He cared about us, and we knew this. He was the assistant principal of P.S. 6.

He spoke from the doorway with solemn authority. "Class," he said, "I'm very disappointed. I expected more from you."

We hated dashing his expectations. We hung our heads, ashamed.

Then he administered the coup de grâce . "Watching your behavior just now," he said, "I couldn't believe I was in a place of learning. Frankly, I thought I was in Bellevue."

A chill swept through the classroom. Whatever it was, Bellevue sounded bad. Later, in the cafeteria, we students debated and conferred. None of us had ever been to Bellevue, though one boy claimed that the patients there wore straitjackets. He drew a diagram: a coffin with a lid of nails. The image of confinement lingered. Bellevue gave me nightmares.

One night, my friend Vanessa pointed Bellevue out to me. We lay side by side in our sleeping bags in the back of a station wagon. Her brother and I had been telling ghost stories on the trip back from East Hampton.

"There's Bellevue, the lunatic asylum," she whispered. "See the bars on the windows? They keep the psychos in chains. When we drive by, you'll hear them scream."

In the light from the street lamp, a dark fortress loomed over Central Park West, radiating a sinister air. I could just make out the barred windows and detect faint screams. This wasn't Bellevue at all, as my mom clarified later that night. It was the Dakota. Not the stately co-op of today, but the Dakota in its youth, before its façade was cleaned up-the way Roman Polanski shot it for Rosemary's Baby . Crouched on the corner like a giant bat, black with layers of soot, it was easy to envision schizophrenic Satan worshippers lurking around in there.

I finally went to Bellevue a few weeks ago, 30 years after I dreamed about it. The trip to Bellevue began with a panicked phone call from a dear old friend whom I'll call Serge. Every New Yorker has a Serge, someone brilliant, crazy and beloved. Boyish though pushing 40, Serge is a charmer. A talented chef, he's a restless globetrotter, a former banker, model and Parisian gallery owner. He's also a manic-depressive who had run out of medication, resorting to an infusion of Absolut vodka.

"I can't stop drinking," he said. "I'm going through two quarts a day."

After a round of phone calls, a trusted doctor recommended Bellevue as the only hospital in town that would admit Serge for free. It provides treatment to the unstable, cross-addicted, alcoholic, felonious, uninsured and unemployed. Naturally, our glamorous bad boy fell into every category.

After we'd made arrangements to meet with a psychiatrist there, only one pressing question remained. What to wear? For our visit to Bellevue, my husband and I opted for sweaters and jeans. Serge, however, elected to dress up instead of down. When we picked him up at the studio apartment where he was poisoning himself, he sported Prada, head to toe. The only exception was his eyeglasses. "Chanel," he noted, dryly. ("Manic. Shopping spree," he explained.) He was certainly the most elegant of impoverished mental patients. He was also plastered. After he'd poured himself "one last martini" to celebrate his date with detox, we discovered that Serge no longer possessed the ability to walk. Bellevue was only four blocks away, but we arrived in style, hopping a cab. To my surprise, there was no dark tower. We drove up to a perfectly ordinary, modestly attractive modern hospital. What is remarkable about Bellevue is only that it turns no one away. Ask a cab driver, a laid-off dot-commer or an illegal alien from Haiti, and they'll agree: If you're sick or injured and short of cash, Bellevue is the place to be.

We soon found ourselves in the belly of the beast-the admissions office of the psychiatric unit. Here, Bellevue began to live up to its scary old reputation. The 400-pound man sitting beside us, accompanied by an armed police escort, was handcuffed to a sturdy metal bar. (We didn't ask.)

After we'd filled out forms and met some friendly hospital personnel, a cute young doctor appeared and led Serge away. When they returned, several hours later, Prada was out. Serge was wearing standard-issue blue hospital pajamas, shuffling down the hallway in paper slippers. Without his designer threads, he seemed fragile and disheartened. He'd been hospitalized once before, in New England, after attempting suicide as a teenager. The memory pained him. "Before I go up to the mental ward," he said, now sober, "I need a cigarette." He looked imploringly from me to my husband to the doctor.

"You can't smoke inside Bellevue, Serge," the doctor said, pointing at the "No Smoking" sign.

"My God," Serge muttered. "Please give me a break. I mean, you took away my cell phone. You took away my clothes!"

I'm not sure what strings the doctor pulled, but the rules were overlooked somehow. Although Serge was a registered patient, confined to the grounds, he was allowed to slip past the security guards. Accompanied by the doctor, we stepped outside Bellevue's utterly normal, not-Gothic, not-creepy main entrance into the winter night. We stomped our feet in the cold-three pairs of sneakers and one pair of nerdy-chic Prada booties, which had temporarily been returned to Serge, together with his cell phone and his pack of Marlboros. He lit up. Three reformed smokers looked on as smoke encircled his shaved head.

"So, honey, are you going to put me in a straitjacket now?" Serge asked gamely.

The young psychiatrist grinned. The mood lifted. He patted our pal, fondly, on the shoulder. For a moment, we weren't outside Bellevue, but at a party, laughing and flirting. Crazy or not, Serge's presence can do that. He passed around his cigarette and, one by one, we took a drag.

I went to see Thirteen the other day, and it's tough stuff. Like most people, I was shaken up by that scene where the girls punch each other in the face for laughs, and by the sequence where Tracy slices up her arm with a razor blade. The movie has, in fact, set off an alarm. In a string of recent articles, teenage girls have been criticized for everything from their social lives to their trashy taste in clothes.

You'd think, from all the attention the topic has received, that girls have never misbehaved before. Haven't they? Twenty-five years ago, I did similar things while growing up in Manhattan. Lately, I've been catapulted back in time, to the 1970's, because reporters have been interviewing me about Alice Duncan, the 11-year-old protagonist of my novel, One Pill Makes You Smaller . Alice is cared for, and eventually corrupted, by a promiscuous teenage cokehead. Readers are under the impression that the novel is autobiographical. But the shy, timid Alice is far more polite than I. My friends and I were bold and reckless at age 11. By the time we'd reached the ripe old age of 13, we were wild, nihilistic little hellions.

Substance abuse, shoplifting, underage sex: standard operating procedure in the 70's. Even the clothing was the same. Like Evie, we favored tube tops-those tiny snippets of strapless elasticized fabric that hug your bosom. My mom wouldn't have liked that outfit, so I carried a change of clothes in my school bag, and a stolen pair of high heels. Eyes ringed with black eyeliner, lips smeared with Vaseline, I teetered down Fifth Avenue in four-inch platforms. Dressing like a hooker got me a lot of male attention. I told guys I met that I was 16, and they believed me (or pretended to). Then as now, a girl's pubescent body was a source of hidden, forbidden, half-acknowledged power. In school, I was a social reject-taller than most of the kids, freakishly voluptuous. I was happier while parading around in my hooker gear. My clothes and makeup had a transformative effect, changing me into the person that, like it or not, I was becoming-no longer a mere child, but a young woman. The mask and costume reassured me. I wanted desperately to be in control of my body, my feelings and my image.

What's the cause of girls growing up too fast? The real culprit, of course, is not consumerism or MTV, but puberty. Girls today develop secondary sex characteristics earlier than they did a century ago. I'd had breasts since I was 9, and it had taken me a few years to decide that they were attractive assets, like glittering diamond earrings, rather than a pair of unwelcome moles. When men start staring at your tits, you may think you have only two choices: You can cower, or you can vamp. Girls test the waters, weigh their options. In the 1970's, the choice-as reinforced by the sultry, libidinous culture all around us-was obvious.

When I was 13, we, too, wore our low-rider jeans so tight we had to lie down on our backs and suck in our stomachs to zip them closed. It was with a sense of pride and duty that we wore those painfully small clothes. "Beauty hurts," my best friend's mom used to sigh whenever I complained that my trendy new boots gave me blisters.

Being permissive was the height of chic parenting. She was a stunning woman with bleached-blond hair and a walk-in wardrobe. Sitting in her elegant Park Avenue home, we'd have girl-to-girl chats. She told us what to do if a guy asked us to sleep with him. We should respond with enthusiasm, while being sure to insist upon birth control. We were 12 years old. It never occurred to any of us that, if pressed for sex, we could say no. Sex was in the very air we breathed, floating in the ether of the Zeitgeist . It was hopelessly unhip to regard intimate encounters as unwelcome or-perish the thought-potentially harmful. Thus, that same year (seventh grade), another friend's dad photographed his daughter and me lying on his rumpled bed, wearing only our underwear, handcuffed together at the ankle.

Though Britney Spears hadn't been born, it was much easier to get away with dressing like a tramp in the 70's than it is now. Our parents let us wander around without monitoring our every move, or packing us off to oboe lessons or soccer practice. The entire nation was becalmed, bewitched. In our quiet, affluent neighborhood, a drug dealer roamed the streets, dressed in suede-a Pied Piper offering free samples with a friendly smile and heavy eyelids. Some local parents were shooting up; some were popping Valium. The atmosphere was decadent. Yet the city felt safe to me, then, like a giant playground.

Many American parents became distressed by the thought of good girls going bad. Their panic was symbolized, in 1973, by another film, The Exorcist . Linda Blair played Regan, the daughter who came, literally, from hell. She grunted obscene propositions to her mother, masturbated with a crucifix and urinated on the expensive carpeting. With her baby face and foul mouth, Regan was the archetypal teenage girl. Unbalanced by raging hormones, seized with longing and revulsion for everything around her, she was a pint-sized Jack Nicholson in drag, snarling in the face of niceness. Following on the heels of "flower power" and free love, The Exorcist ushered in the jaded, spitting mood of punk. It tapped into prevailing cultural anxieties. What if America's children slip beyond control, disappearing into a dark, tarnished underworld? What if no parent can preserve a child's innocence? What if, one morning, your daughter metamorphosed into someone unrecognizable?

It's a fair question. About 15 percent of Caucasian girls and almost half of African-American girls are now beginning to develop sexually at the age of 8. Parents would like to help kids navigate adolescence, but the change is unavoidable. While I grew up fast, external cues were operating. I'd watched Brooke Shields, age 15, panty-free in her Calvins. In 1978, in Pretty Baby , she'd been a 12-year-old prostitute who married a disturbingly attractive pedophile played by Keith Carradine. Bad was good, it seemed to me. The counterculture had become a seductive presence that set mainstream morality spinning on its head. Girls barely out of grade school stalked rock stars. Iggy Pop, in a published interview, spoke wistfully of the 13-year-old who became his girlfriend with her parents' blessing. Girls routinely slept with three of the most popular teachers at my high school.

What a 13-year-old girl does battle with is desire-her own, and that of the individuals around her. She's at war with her physicality, her extreme makeover, by nature and society's design, into an erotic being. Young teenagers pose on billboards in Times Square, wearing very little besides their mascara, their come-hither expressions and their handbags. It's a confusing world, full of mixed signals, and I think girls of all ages understand it.

Lisa Dierbeck's first novel, One Pill Makes You Smaller , was published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.