After Cathy and I moved into our home almost nine years ago, I couldn’t find my junior high school yearbooks. I’d saved them since the late 1960s, and suddenly they were gone. I’d thought of them often after they’d disappeared, puzzled over where they might be. I assumed they must have been lost in the flurry of packing and moving and unpacking. Maybe I’d accidentally thrown them out with a cardboard box or some packing paper.

Then yesterday, in preparation for some painting Cathy and I are having done, I lifted a stack of books off the top of a bookcase, and I found that which I’d assumed was lost—my seventh and eighth grade yearbooks. They’d been at the bottom of that stack all along. It was good to have them back, although looking at their pages required me to revisit that time in my life. I imagine all pre-teens go through the awkward phase of trying to figure out who they are. In my case, that phase was complicated by the fact that I’d been displaced when I was in the third grade. That’s when my mother accepted a teaching position in Oak Forest, Illinois, and we moved from our farm downstate to an apartment in a land that felt strange to me. I went from a two-room country school in southern Illinois to a large suburban school just south of Chicago. My parents and I stayed in Oak Forest for six years. When I was ready to start high school, my mother retired from teaching, and we moved back downstate.

During those six years in Oak Forest, I always felt like I was caught between two places. My parents and I didn’t fit neatly into the suburban lifestyle. We were used to having the space our eighty-acre farm supplied. When we came back to that farm every summer, I now felt like a stranger because I’d had a taste of suburban life and that somehow made me suspect in our agricultural area. Each autumn, my parents and I would make our way back to Oak Forest. I never knew exactly who I was or where I fit.

Because I wanted to feel at home no matter where I was, I became practiced at observing. I came to know the values of each place just as I caught onto the fashions, the tastes in music, and the language. Because I wanted to feel like a native—wanted to be accepted—I became, in the words Henry James used to describe a writer, “one of the people upon whom nothing is lost.”

One thing that I couldn’t help but know was how unkind people—especially pre-teens—could be to those they considered beneath them. I’d come from a place that was very different than the suburbs. My parents were much older than those of my peers. I had a southern Illinois twang. We said “warsh” instead of “wash.” We ate our dinner at noon and our supper at five. My father, who’d lost his hands in a farming accident, wore prostheses. If anyone saw us out and about, they couldn’t help but notice. I heard a classmate refer to my father as “Captain Hook.” Another called my mother, “Old Lady Martin.” I noted how quick my peers were to judge anyone who was different, even those like me who were quiet and shy.

Some of the autographs in my eighth-grade yearbook came from people I didn’t ask to sign. Somehow in the process of yearbooks getting passed around for inscriptions, one of the upper-crust girls had hijacked it and made notice of how they’d never seen me smile. “If you ever smile at me,” one girl wrote, “I’ll faint.” To be fair, there was probably a grain of truth in their observations. I could be shy, but beyond that, I was wary, afraid to reveal too much about me in case I didn’t match what people like these girls wanted me to be. It wasn’t like I lived a hermit’s life. I had my friends. I played in the band. I did well in my classes. I was a decent basketball player. But I wasn’t as outgoing as this group was. I didn’t belong in the ranks of the social climbers.

Looking back on those days now, I give all of us a good deal of grace. When it comes to the ones like those girls who signed my yearbook, I imagine they had their own insecurities. I’m sure I didn’t fully know them as they didn’t try to know me. Still, I found my way, enjoying the company of people who seemed genuine, people whose values I shared. The boy I was then survived and found numerous ways to thrive. I’ve lived a rich life. To be honest, though, revisiting these memories can still make me ache as I remember what it felt like to be outside the golden circle, to be reminded of that fact by the thoughtless comments written in ballpoint at the back of a yearbook. Someone, in the middle of the page, wrote, “Lee, all your friends—huh—see you next year.” Of course, I knew what that “huh” meant. We know you’ll never be our friend.

I’ve gone on to find truly good friends, beautiful people who’ve lost enough in their lives to have empathy for others. It’s what made me the writer I am, one who’s interested in the people on the periphery, the ones, misunderstood, who go unnoticed. Maybe that was the problem with those girls. They hadn’t lived long enough. They hadn’t lost enough. To them, I’d say, “Back then, I smiled often enough. I just didn’t do it for you.”