The Secret Lion

“The Secret Lion” centers on the loss of childhood innocence, but the disillusionment that the narrator and his friend undergo is multilayered and occurs in stages. The story opens with a fairly typical coming-of-age storyline: The narrator describes the difficult transition from elementary school to junior high, focusing on his relationships to both adults and his peers. Without the focused attention of one teacher throughout the school day, he feels “personally abandoned somehow” (98). This feeling is part of growing up and having more responsibilities, as junior high students are expected to attend to various subjects without the oversight of a single authority figure. In addition, his relationships with girls change. He is confused by the fact that the girls he has known all of his life, his next-door neighbors, are suddenly different to him, and he struggles to understand his own budding attraction to them.

The narrator is at best ambivalent about the approach of adolescence. His trips to the arroyo with Sergio include shouted statements “about girls, and all the things [they] wanted to do with them” (99), but the action itself is boyish, and the friends seem aware that these visits are the last gasp of childhood: “We went back to the arroyo for the rest of the summer, and tried to have fun the best that we could.