Coal to Diamonds by Beth Ditto

Gossip’s guitarist Nathan Howdeshell and I were working late on a sad little somber song about secrets in the dark: “Holy Water.” From front to finish it was written and recorded in a matter of minutes. When I emerged from my vocal-booth time capsule it was very late. There was a message from my dad telling me Lee Roy had died.
Just thought you should know
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    I tried to look out for the other kids. I tried really hard to make sure my little cousins were taken care of. I saved pennies for the oldest one so she could watch them collect in a jar and then I’d slide them into wrappers when I had enough. I liked the weight of the rolls in my palm, the order of the change snug inside the paper. It felt like I was really giving her something she could use—giving her a little say. But what she really needed was the same thing her brother needed, and what I needed—help—and there was no one around who had any.

10
    Like I’ve told you, Arkansas is a good ten years behind the times, so basically the whole country was well aware of grunge when I started getting my first, excited understanding of the phenomenon. While the rest of the country was in head-to-toe flannel, I was wearing my hair higher than my Aunt Jannie’s blood sugar levels. Things take a while to get to places like Judsonia, and then they take a while to leave. It was hard for me to abandon my big hair, no matter how cool Alanis Morissette was, or how cozy flannel could be. I lived to rat my hair, and I was good at it. Really good at it.
    If I had a perm and bangs you can be sure I had the best curls, the tallest bangs. I knew how to do it. I was so good at doing hair that kids who wouldn’t look at me twice in the hall were risking major injury to their reputations by asking me to come to their houses and give them their prom updos. I could do anything with hair, so I had to find a way to fit my talents into my new grunge lifestyle. Out of all the friends I was making in high school—and there weren’t that many—I became the best at the Kool-Aid dyejob. I made up my own personal technique, which was to mix two packets of Kool-Aid with a creamy dollop of Noxzema—just about the size of a dime or a quarter—and let it sit on my head for hours, so my hair color was really bright. I still love the smell of Noxzema, how it sears your nose with that eucalyptus stink.
    My Kool-Aid pink hair and Converse weren’t fooling anyone, though; I was still anything but cool, but I didn’t mind. In my own grassroots movement at my high school I orchestrated a hostile nerd takeover. When it came time to vote for Accolades—the smarmy who’s who of the school: who’s cutest, funniest, smartest—I persuaded the entire school to vote for my friends, the nerds. I campaigned on behalf of dorks and skanks, teenage moms, sluts, and weirdos, and it worked. We won everything. I was a lucky weirdo at my school, blessed with a total obliviousness to whether people liked me. If you care what the right people—your friends—think of you, you’re free to do anything, and I didn’t give a shit how my classmates regarded me. If you weren’t my friend, I didn’t care. Not getting invited to a party is worth it; that missing invitation can say important things about who you are and what you value. I didn’t get beat up, and that gave me room to be outrageous without fear of serious consequence. I made people laugh. I was that fat kid who beat people to the punch, who survived by being funny. And everyone likes a funny person. Everyone likes to laugh.
    The crowning glory of the nerd takeover I’d orchestrated at school was successfully getting myself elected to represent my class at Fall Festival. Fall Festival is just a tiny little beauty pageant, but in Judsonia it’s a big deal, a time-honored tradition, a fund-raiser for the high school. Everyone wanted to be in Fall Festival, from the popular girls to regular ones.
    All the people nominated for Fall Festival had to