For twelve years, the whole school called her "Trash Girl" because her mother collected cans for a living — until graduation night, when she said one sentence into the microphone and four hundred people rose to their feet in tears.

Because for twelve years I had been keeping something, too.

Something I'd found by accident, three years earlier, in a black notebook under our kitchen sink.

Something not a single person in that gym knew.

I gripped the podium.

And I said the one sentence I had rehearsed every night since.

Chapter 2: The Black Notebook

My mother's alarm went off at 3:40 every morning for twelve years.

It was a cheap plastic clock that buzzed like an angry wasp.

She would sit on the edge of her bed for exactly one minute, rubbing her hands together, as if she were warming them for a day's work.

Then she'd pull on her boots.

Rhonda Walker was forty-nine years old and had been collecting recyclables since she was twenty-nine.

She had lost her laundry job at a motel the same month my father left.

She had a two-year-old, a rent bill, and a rusty Ford pickup with plywood sides that her cousin sold her for four hundred dollars.