TO SEE Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine without braces, slumped shoulders, and their signature hairdos — bowl cut for Erskine, strategic strands rigidly framing her face for Konkle — is a bit disorienting. Their Pen15 characters, middle schoolers Anna Kone and Maya Ishii-Peters, are so comforting in their awkwardness, such perfect avatars for the 13-year-old that lives inside all of us, that meeting them as grown-ups, with their hair down, a little lip gloss on, wearing normal clothes, is kind of like finding out Batman is Bruce Wayne, or seeing a teacher at the mall. In real life, the masters of teen trauma are self-assured, engaging, quite beautiful, and, as of mid-January, both very pregnant. A coincidence, but somehow an unsurprising one.
“It’s so embarrassing, like, ‘Oh, yeah, we…