It all started upside down. Then everything went down hill. There I was, hanging upside down on the monkey bars. What else could a fourth grader be doing during recess?

The sun was exceptionally bright that afternoon, and everyone was hot a grumpy. With only one more year until middle school all the fifth graders were anxious to leave and were taking their waiting time out on the fourth graders, like me.

One of the larger, tougher fifth graders came over and blocked the sunlight out of my face. “And then,” I told the school nurse, who was cleaning me up from when the larger kid pushed me off of my hanging area, “I was facedown in the mud.”