In most junior and senior high schools, students are dieting even though, on average, they are not overweight. "I always wanted to be the good girl. Good girls are skinny and happy. The bad girls are the fat ones," answered an eleven-year-old when asked why she starved herself to the point of hospitalization.
At the base of the mountain, teens pour from the cars as the first slivers of dawn creep over the mountains to the east. The youth drag a wooden cross from the bed of a truck. One of the teens shoulders the cross, and we begin to climb.
I have something you probably don't—a picture of my own brain. My wife won't let me hang it in the living room (too creepy, she says); and while people ask to see pictures of my kids, they've yet to be impressed when I pull a picture of my brain from my wallet.