I loved to laugh. I was in so many ways always laughing. It was another way to feel. I loved choir and all of the different personalities that choir class was made up of. So much of life was always so hilarious.

There is no way to escape the presence of drugs. I was a very small kid when I started high school and this among so many other things wore on me in ways I didn't realize at the time. Drugs were becoming something inevitable as the high school years progressed.

Skateboarding went in an instant from being an amazing way to express myself into a dangerous pursuit on many fronts This often happens when one is truly passionate, the need to fight for it.

Skateboarding was an important sub-cultural phenomenon and back in the 1980s in the suburbs of Chicago, it truly was a subculture unto itself and existed as the last bastion of innocence before drugs made their way onto the scenes of adolescence.

I was in love with the character known as Elizabeth. There was pressure to make out and I was terrified. Jared had become more and more of a bully and as a result, I finally made the big move!

Soon thereafter, Elizabeth began abusing me, and our trauma bond was solidified. All of this built up inside me.

I was maybe four-foot-four in junior high. It was in the first few days of my experience here that I witnessed my first act of violence which deeply impacted my soul in ways I could not anticipate. I had nowhere to turn with all these new feelings and had no one to talk to regarding the fear I now had. This could be what is described by Pink Floyd as "Another Brick in the Wall."

There is no way to explain to a child the extent tho which their life will immediately change upon boarding and then exiting the bus on the first day of junior high. I'd been bullied before, particularly by my friends Jared and Jeremiah, and it certainly continued as soon as I entered the foyer at Hadley Junior High.

This chapter deals with the Character Jeremiah and how he got sick. This was a time in my life when I began noticing my empathic nature but had no one to process it with. Children feel so much more than they realize and in a perfect world, the adults around them would guide them effectively through their complex emotional landscapes. There is no one to blame here, especially considering how things were back then in the 80s.

A talk on the chapter 'One on One' deals with the nature of sidekicks and how they can be turned on immediately and become victims.

I became trauma-bonded with a couple of my friends on my eleventh birthday after I had gotten my first real skateboard in fifth grade.