In the entwined history of the teenager and the disabled person, both are trapped in uncertain temporalities, framed as figures of rehabilitation: sighs of relief come only when the disabled person “becomes normal” or when the teenager “grows up.” This history is present in the popularity of the young adult as conceived by young adult (YA) literature. The discomfort around the liminal figures of the teen and the disabled person manifests in the self-contradictory concept of the “young” “adult” which has expanded beyond the teenager alone, appearing across many genres of literature, film, TV, social media, and Internet culture. Much like the disabled person, the young adult is a figure simultaneously born of the market and resistant to it. Since the 1990 signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the millennial young adult represents a cultural shift from the linear rhetoric of child-to-adult growth to a complex superimposition of time, body, and space in reaction to the failures of twenty-first century neoliberalism. This form of the “young adult” reorients us from the traditional teleologies of reproduction and productivity interrogated by queer theorists to a new fixation on the present, most simply exemplified by the present tense narration popularly used by YA novels. The formulations of the present that the young adult brings into focus are not only queer, but also versions of “crip time.” Crip time originates in the nonlinear unpredictability and “unproductivity” of chronic pain. It has since been generalized to describe the times through which disabled people’s bodies move. The common act of “bending the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds” is disavowed in mainstream culture, even as crip time exemplifies how people’s bodies are incommensurable with the temporal demands of neoliberal capitalism. I identify and historicize four crip modes of “bending the clock” that the narrative form of the “young adult” brings to light—procrastinating, confounding, swapping, and dwelling. Using a narratological and historicist approach, Cripping Time names those temporal strategies that demonstrate the struggle between the entertaining, engrossing figure of the young adult and the ways in which they move through the often bleak realities they inhabit. In turn, I illustrate how disability or cripness, has become the predominant lens for the popular literature and culture of the new millennium.