The book I'm currently reading while waiting for advice on my grad school letters has shot me down memory lane at 167 miles per hour, back to the days of middle school and early high school. The Center of Everything is a coming-of-age tale about a girl growing up in small town Kansas. I can imagine Laura Moriarty digging out all her old diaries to write this one, because she mentions things I had forgotten -- I mean, I thought I was the only one who had ever watched Voyager (the time-travelling tale, not an installment in the Star Trek saga). Herione Evelyn mentions nearly everything we went through in the early to mid 1980s, from pictures of C. Thomas Howell and Ralph Macchio in Tiger Beat magazine to the Contras in Nicaragua. Evelyn was forbidden by her mother to watch The Day After, but I was allowed to watch it, and it scared the bejeezus out of me. I remember raising money in my eighth grade history class to send to Ethiopia. But the history takes a back seat to the everyday occurrences in the book, and some of Evelyn's experiences are funny reminders while others are painful. I too was a free lunch kid and didn't realize that that meant my parents were poor. I nearly cried as Evelyn watched her first crush's eyes turn to her best friend. I watched her cope in the same way I always did -- in homework, the only area of my life in which I seemed to have any control.

The story so far has done a lot to remind me of who I was and how far I have come. I've often said that you couldn't pay me to go back and live over those early days of adolescence, but I'm sort of doing just that by reading this book. I'm reliving the envy of not being able to afford the hip clothes, the pain of unrequited love, the embarrassment of being different. I'm also reliving the satisfaction of occasionally being told that being smart is a good thing, the realization that the pretty girls had their own sets of problems, and the joy of knowing that this too shall pass. Growing pains, they called them. That was an understatement if I ever heard one.