Rewind

In middle school, I remember eagerly anticipating the start of S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders. The story, my teacher and friends told me, was electrifying and involved boys fighting, drinking, smoking, and chasing girls. “I am going to love this book,” I thought to myself as I lay on my bed getting ready to start the first assigned reading. “It is my life story.”

“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had…” suddenly my eyes stopped scanning the page and my mind stopped reading-a gruesome vision of my spine, severed in multiple places, flashed repeatedly through my…