NEW YORK – The wall says, “Invent the future,” and despite the striking letters, gray shot through with swirls of orange and yellow, demanding respect and attention, the petulant teenager inside me answered, “You got a manual?”

I calmed down once I noticed the girl in the blue shirt with her hands formed into a heart shape over her friend, both girls starting fiercely ahead, as if daring me to drop the act, and embrace their message.

The 28-by-57-foot wall beckons passerby on the corner of Troutman and Wyckoff in Bushwick. Longtime collaborators Chris Stain and Billy Mode created the mural for the Bushwick Collective.

According to a 2013 interview with the artists in Time Out New York, Stain and Mode based it on a photo they took of two girls in front of another mural the two artists collaborated on in Albany, N.Y. In this mural the girls are a small field of green and purple flowers, outlined in black, like the plant version of the girls above them, color emerging from the concrete below.

To the left of the words is a boy on a bicycle, staring at, and, I’d like to think, drawing inspiration from the girls, inventing his own future.

The girls are smiling too; maybe because they’ve already gotten started.

Take the L Train to Jefferson Street if you want to catch up with them.