Roughly three-quarters through The Edge of Seventeen, I had a vivid flashback. I was standing in my basement, reliving the horrible moment I decided to tell my ninth-grade crush I liked him. He didn’t reciprocate, and I spent much of the Halloween party I had organized huddled in the half-renovated bathroom crying.Hailee Steinfeld’s Nadine Byrd has a similar moment in the coming-of-age dramedy directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, albeit updated for the social media age. In the middle of a major teenage meltdown, Nadine decides to pour her heart out to her bad-boy crush, Nick, whom she’s been mildly stalking on Facebook. She composes a pretty graphic message about all the things she’d like to do to him, all of which she means to delete — until she accidentally sends it instead. Miraculously, Nick responds with those four little words every teenage girl wants to hear: “You are so cute.” He then asks Nadine if she wants to hang out that night.Nadine is thrilled, and so was I. For a second, I was back in high school, wishing, hoping, that it would all be okay. Maybe he’ll actually like her, I thought. Maybe this stoner bad boy will actually turn out to be a Kafka-quoting genius with a heart of gold who will explain to this very sad teenage girl that it’s dangerous to go around sending explicit sexual messages to strange men on Facebook, before taking her out to a movie and holding her hand. Obviously, this isn’t what happens. In the real world, assholes who skip class to smoke up with their friends are just that — assholes. When Nick realizes he isn’t about to get the blow job he was promised, he makes it very clear to Nadine that he wants nothing to do with her.She’s crushed — and so was I. Not so much for her, but for me — for my teenage self. It’s easy to dismiss this rejection as a small setback, the kind everyone experiences in high school. But that’s not fair.