The Overall Reading Journal of The Body

    Every boy has an experience with his friends of doing something that exceeds the limits of everyday lives. Usually, Boys start talking about something stupid or shocking that originally came up just for entertainment, but sooner or later, they start to realize that they are actually planning for such thing to happen. This is a quintessential element that makes the boys to do something crazy, which is very similar how the protagonists in the 'The Body' were put up to a situation of actually finding the body. And after this journey, they start to feel that they have become more of a man than a child.
    There were many things the story told us, but the most outstanding scene was when Chris tells Gordie about a teacher who took the milk money. Even though he gave the money back, he was betrayed by an adult and got all the blame for it. This is an impressive scene of Chris's coming-of-age that makes him form distrust against adults, including the repected ones. At this scene, I had a thought that one of the categories that differenciates children from adults could be whether or not he or she has 'trust' toward the society.
    Somebody asked me recently, "There must be something you did in your middle school that went over the limits, right?", which was kind of an odd question to give an answer to. The things I thought unbelievable at the time could be expressed as something that doesn't have much value inside it, just as Gordie said in the book, 'The most important things are the hardest things to say'.
    Well, as I thought about it carefully, I had such experiences all right, but it really didn't start with my friends. But it did influence my thoughts which became: 'If there is a will, there is a way'. If you want to do something against the rules, it is easy for you to work alone rather than hanging out with your friends from the first place. After having some know-hows, you can start telling your closest friends about the crazy things you did. In retrospect, I shouldn't have told them those things because I figured out that right after I graduated, I became a legend in the school.
    Of course, the insaneness of a plan was so insignificant compared to the incident that the protagonists go through in 'The Body'. However, for guys who are stuck in the dormitory everyday can start their adventure with small steps.

(Adding : One thing I managed to do after three years of experience was being able to crack inside the dormitory anytime I wanted, including the times when we were not supposed to enter. Second thing I managed to do was to skip almost every evening self-study times. From seven to nine, we were obliged to stay in the school for self-studying, which I rarely attended especially in my last year of middle school.)