Nevada Über Alles

[Dr Adjective]

In a nondescript room, sat a not-so-nondescript girl. Not long into puberty, already over six feet in height. The girl didn’t belong here, in this anodyne Nevadan middle school; she could ignore everyone else telling her so, but she couldn’t ignore herself.

Black of hair, steely of glare, she sat through the taunts. They weren’t unearned, she began the conflict with her vocal, visceral distaste for “this desert hellhole”. Heather didn’t see it that way of course, why should she be required to play nice with the hick children of idiot gamblers and the repulsive parasites that prey on them? Why hold her tongue when she was never there by choice? Didn’t everyone keep saying that honesty was the best policy?

Why don’t you go back to California?

As if she wanted to leave it to begin with.

Go home if you hate it here so much!

Didn’t she just wish she could?

Doesn’t your dad want you?

That was when the lanky goth-thing saw red, rather than black.



Dear fucking diary,

That was the guidance counsellor’s advice. Write a journal. Get the poison out. She’d lashed out because she had so much bottled up, and no healthy outlets. Her dad had suggested boxing instead. Heather elected to give both a try, twice as many chances at catharsis.

I’m not the sort of basic white bitch the locals picture when they hear the word “California”, so I don’t know what you write in a diary. Maybe I’ll figure it out next time. I’m trying. Extremely sincerely. Can you tell?

Heather
xoxo



The pandemic didn’t make attending a gym easy, of course. In fact it made it downright impossible. So Heather made do. Her mother wasn’t using the basement for anything anyway, so that’s where her dumb bells went. Her guitar came down soon after, apparently inexpert punk riffs weren’t appreciated via Zoom calls. Other equipment followed in time, meanwhile ultimately she moved her entire bedroom down there in the space of a few months, with the makeshift gym/recording studio a work well in progress. Most days she barely even needed to interact. Wake up, sort out her own food, argue with liberals on the internet, work up a sweat, get in some practice, argue some more, shower, sleep.

By the time she’d grown out and cut the last of the black dye from her hair, Heather was ready to attend high school a natural blonde with some natural gains.

She’d be a different girl there.

Everything would be different.