If I wanted to be by myself, I would retreat to a river birch by the stream that fed our pond. It forked at ground level, and I'd wedge my back up against one trunk and my feet against the other. Then I would look at the sky or read or pretend. That summer I hadn't had much time for my tree. One evening as my father and I walked past it, he said, "I remember you scrunching into that tree when you were a little kid." "I don't," I said sullenly. He looked at me sharply. "What's got into you?" he said. Amazingly, I heard myself say, "What the hell do you care?" Then I ran off to the barn. Sitting in the tack room, I tried not to cry. My father opened the door and sat opposite me. Finally I met his gaze. "It's not a good idea to doctor your own family," he said. "But I guess I need to do that for you right now." He leaned forward. "Let's see. You feel strange in your own body, like it doesn't work the same way it always had. You think no one else is like you. And you think I’m too hard on you around here. You even wonder how you got into a family as dull as ours." I was astonished that he knew my most treacherous night thoughts. "The thing is, your body is changing," he continued. "And that changes your entire self. You've got a lot more male hormones in your blood. And, Son, there's not a man in this world who could handle what that does to you when you're fourteen." I didn't know what to say. I knew I didn't like whatever was happening to me. For months I'd felt out of touch with everything. I was irritable and restless and sad for no reason. And because I couldn't talk about it, I began to feel really isolated. "One of the things that'll help you," my dad said after a while, "is work. Hard work." (344 words)