Coal to Diamonds by Beth Ditto Page B

it was again. I was way too broken to work; I couldn’t get it together. I was a senior, and school was ending soon. I would need to get my shit in order. But the more I thought about life, the more overwhelmed I felt. I was hauntedby my time at Aunt Jannie’s. With my friends gone, and so much time by myself, I felt trapped in my own head, I felt the echoes of everything I’d stuffed away. Without my friends I was shunted back to the old Arkansas, the scary, stifling, trapping place. I had a nervous breakdown.
    It started at school. What would have been a sleepy morning for any teenager was—that particular morning—unusually hazy. My eyes couldn’t adjust. Light seemed brighter and my body felt like a ton of bricks. During the ride to school my head was a balloon and I still can’t remember making my way to class that day. I was sitting at my desk directly behind my best friend at school when the first bell rang and the teacher began to speak, but I couldn’t react. It was almost as if I were in a walking coma. My brain was aware and sending messages, but my limbs and mouth couldn’t receive them. I tried to reach out and get my friend’s attention, but I was paralyzed. Finally my hand made a heavy swipe and came into contact with her. Then my tunnel of vision got smaller and smaller until everything was black. The next thing I knew I was on a gurney gasping for air because I was crying so hard. Of course, because I liked music, had black hair, and was pro-choice everyone assumed I was on drugs. That assumption only fueled my anxiety. I went from school that day to the hospital, where I stayed for five days. My condition worsened and the doctors started running scans on my brain. I lost my ability to speak clearly and developed a stutter that stuck around for three months. The tests all came back negative. The doctors didn’t know what to do with me, so I was eventually prescribed antidepressants and sent home.
    Some of the physical symptoms lifted over time, though the panic, the clawing fear, remained. I could speak again. Against all odds, I came to and graduated.
    It was Kathy, everyone’s savior, who got me my one-way ticket to Washington State. I didn’t belong in Arkansas, none of us did, and Kathy was a worker, a doer. She’d gotten work at the A&W. Kathy said she could get me a job there too, and if I didn’t likeOlympia, if I hated it and wanted to come home to Arkansas, I could just pocket my money and buy a return ticket, which sounded like a foolproof plan. I won either way. It was a deal, so Kathy maxed out her credit card and my three best friends started the search for some hole-in-the-wall we could all afford.
    It would be good to get some space between myself and Arkansas. I felt relief just imagining it. My friends’ exodus had left a hole in my heart, and I needed to fill it.
    I wasn’t planning on staying in Olympia for long. I was just coming for a visit, just going to sell some hot dogs, turn around, and come right back to Arkansas, have that baby once and for all, and stay put in what I knew. I didn’t break up with Anthony because it wasn’t like I was leaving. I was just going on a little vacation to see the friends I missed so much. It was my mother, witchy and psychic, who felt my future the strongest.
You’re never coming back
, she said to me flatly. The tone of her voice wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad. It was just flat, totally neutral. It was the facts. My mother knew how this was going to play out.
Be prepared, because you’re not coming home
. I couldn’t argue. Something in me was rising up, pulling me to another part of the country. It felt powerful and it ran through my system like a Red Bull. I was going out into my life.

16
    High school graduation is a huge racket—both for the company selling caps and gowns and for young entrepreneurs like me. You have to buy invitations to your own goddamn graduation. Then, the idea is that you send graduation envelopes to