My favorite photo from Saturday’s Halloween parade in Callicoon is of a teenager making a face.

You know the face. She’s got her hand on her hip, she’s smiling halfway, and her eyebrows are doing all the work. The look says, “I’m doing this. I’m having fun, but I won’t admit just how much fun I’m having.”

Beside her, a grown woman is flinging her arm in the air. She’s got a smile a mile wide, and her raised eyebrows match her wide-open eyes. She’s having a ball, and she’s not afraid to let the whole world know.

If that were the only photo you saw from the parade, you’d probably think the teenager got dragged along. Maybe she did. Her little brother is somewhere behind her in the crowd, dressed up and ready to collect his candy. Her mom is walking beside him.

Meanwhile, she’s at the very front, leading the parade.

The grown woman beside her is a volunteer with the Delaware Youth Center, which has run this parade for decades with volunteers doing all the work. When the parade reaches the end of the route, it spills onto the Youth Center grounds, where more teenagers are already waiting behind monster hockey games and pumpkin bowling lanes, ready to hand out spider rings and skeleton fidgets to kids in costume.

On this picture-perfect Saturday afternoon in the middle of fall, with the sun shining, and plenty of shenanigans to get up to, teenagers were everywhere.

We spend a lot of energy worrying about teenagers. We worry they spend too much time on their phones and scrolling TikTok. We worry about drinking and vaping and substances we desperately hope they’ll never touch. We worry they’re letting chatbots do their homework and allowing AI too much access to their personal lives.

We worry they’ll leave the minute they graduate and never look back. Too many of them will.

We don’t spend nearly as much energy noticing when our teenagers show up. On Saturday, they did. They handed out pop bubble toys and directed ghosts and goblins to the next game.

Looking at that photo again and again, I’m not so sure that half-smile is reluctance. I think it’s the look of someone who knows she’s needed and isn’t about to make a big deal about it.

She showed up. The grown-ups can handle the arm-flinging for her.