Days of Discovery

Colin Mulvany

The Spokesman-Review

Seventh grade is childhoood’s Big Bang. Kid’s home-centered lives explode outward, through the chaotic halls of middle school into constellations of new friends and colliding worlds of expanding freedom and responsibility. Booze and drugs are black holes. Romance looms suddenly like a mysterious moon. For Ashley Muzatko, age 13, the challenges of middle school were met head on. By the end of the school year, Ashley was no longer the same girl who had blasted off in a cloud of hair spray in September. Ashley Muzatko, 13, second from left, shield herself with friends to face the thrills and trauma of seventh grade. The changes and challenges kids like Ashley face in the first year of middle school just might determine the course of their lives.

Colin Mulvany, "Days of Discovery," in POYi Archive, Item #30911, http://archive.poy.org/items/show/30911 (accessed June 23, 2025).