Introduction
A strange little girl. A strange little girl with blonde, cork-screw curls and sky-blue eyes. A strange little girl with skinned knees and fresh bruises on her legs. In the record-hot summer before fourth grade, the strange little girl spent her days alone, walking barefoot down the train tracks near her house in rural, south Mississippi - a place more Cajun than Dixie, and unkind to strange little girls like her. She missed Pennsylvania, where she was born and raised until her family moved from the Alleghenies, past Appalachia, and to a coast that felt like another country. At home, her mom and dad, two sisters, and little brother always seemed to be yelling at her. At the tracks, all that surrounded her were cicadas and solace.
She practiced balancing on the hot, metal parallels for hours at a time, slipping as her feat burned, hitting the pine ties hard on her landing. In gymnastics class, she never could master the balancing beam, and the train tracks provided the perf…
