Awareness

“Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful" by Joshua Marine. In the story, “The Secret Lion," written by Alberto Alvaro Rios, Alberto and his friend Sergio go through changes where their dreams are gone because of the new things they learn. The boys are starting to see that everything they love is taken away from them because they are becoming adults. In the story there is symbolism; each symbol represents the changes as the boys leave childhood and enter into adulthood, these changes reveal various aspects of adulthood.

The narrator reveals that when he and his friend turned twelve and started junior high, life changed and things were different. “What happened was there were teachers now, not just one teacher, teach-erz, and we felt personally abandoned somehow. When a person had all these teachers now, he didn't get taken care of the same way, even though six was more than one. Arithmetic went out the door when we walked in. And we saw girls now, but they weren't the same girls we used to know because we couldn't talk to them anymore” (2). They felt abandoned at school and lost their new surroundings. Having six teachers was not normal and essential to their education. Alberto and Sergio realize that they can’t talk to girls the same way they use to. They were experiencing hormonal changes; girls were attractive and conversing with females made the boys shy.
The boys went to the arroyo after school, a place they can say and do as they please. The author asserts, “At the very very top of our growing lungs, what we would do down there was shout every dirty word we could think of, in every combination we could come up with, and we would yell about girls, and all the things we wanted to do with them, as loud as we could-we didn't know what we wanted to do with them, just things-and we would yell about teachers, and how we loved some of them, like Miss Crevelone, and how we wanted to dissect some of them,