Coal to Diamonds by Beth Ditto

me for being such a dork, cracking up hysterically at their weirdo quips and observations. Nathan scoffed at my enthusiasm, and Kathy just regarded me silently. I was one of them.
    Kathy was the first feminist I had ever met. Whatever I’d gleaned about feminism via Riot Grrrl now came into sharp focus in the form of the girl standing in front of me. I remember hearing the word “feminist” when I was just a kid—eleven years old—and identifying with it even then, though in a Feminism 101/Gloria Steinem/Girl Power way, too young to comprehend anything deeper. Kathy seemed to understand the detailed picture of feminism, though it was hard to get her to talk about what she knew because she was so crazy quiet. In a gang of loudmouths, all of us hollering and laughing all the time, Kathy was remarkable for her silence. She didn’t feel like she had to talk to anyone. She just hung around with all her hair in her face, projecting cool, radical wisdom. When she did speak, you could hear how she spoke without a Southern accent.
You’re so quiet!
I’d exclaim, and she’d sink deeper into her long, glossy bangs. I didn’t know she hated that I did that, the way shy people always hate it when you make a fuss out of their shyness. I just wanted to interact with her so badly and she was so aloof.
    Kathy was the first girl I ever knew I had a crush on. I had a crush. On a girl. I was delighted by it, really. I just hung around, waiting for her to speak, enchanted by her quiet, so different from me. She shrugged.
If I don’t have anything to say, I don’t say it
. Well, I’m just the opposite. If I don’t have anything to say, I’m going tosay everything. Kathy was such a mystery to me. I thought she was the best thing I’d ever seen, and I still feel that way about her. She was always wearing leopard-print tights. We had to work so hard for what we had. If you were lucky you could find something good to wear at the Goodwill or Wal-Mart, but that was it. God knows how many paychecks it took Kathy to save up and order her cool leopard leggings through the mail. Those tights were her trademark. So was her voice, the way she talked like a Riot Grrrl, or like a Valley Girl, like she came from a faraway state that had an ocean and a lot of people having all sorts of conversations in their super-cool voices.
    Jeri and Nathan sort of talked like that too, like they were torn, wanting to ditch their native accents but scared of sounding phony. I thought my own voice sounded dumb, lumbering, beside Kathy’s. I tried to copy her, but it didn’t work out for me. My accent is seared onto my voice same as my fingerprints are grooved into my thumbs.
    Kathy lived with her mother, who was a good, sweet Christian lady who had psychological problems that had put her through hell in the ’70s. Her inappropriateness was sporadic and jarring, like how she taught Kathy to call her vagina her pussy, not her privates like other little girls. It must have been a shock to hear the P-word coming out of the innocent mouth of a tiny girl. No wonder Kathy didn’t talk much.
    Nathan’s band, Mrs. Garrett, was named after the shrill, bouffanted den mother from the ’80s TV show
The Facts of Life
. He had a second band, with Jeri, first called Space Kadet, then Boy Pussy USA—Boy Pussy for short. Their flyers were hand-drawn cartoons of the band members in dresses with pieces of food flying out of their mouths. They drew big bouffant hairdos onto their cartoon heads. God, I wanted them to like me so bad! I had never been so on edge.
    Under their influence, my fashion slowly improved. We were so far removed from everything—punk, Riot Grrrl—that our expressionof the culture had its own special Arkansas spin. We weren’t exactly punk rock, though we tried. I had a new Mr. Potato Head ringer T, replacing the Pearl Jam T-shirt I’d been living in. I wore wacky shoes and purple fingernail polish and baby barrettes in my hair.
    I wanted to get my